Victator
Some personal thoughts broadcast for friends. (he)
SF, space, travel, software, capybaras, queer, cycling, urbanism, anti-fascist.
Migrated 2026-04 from mastodon.cloud account of nine years (since 2017-04) because that server was dying.
sidb
- 103 Followers
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- 97 Posts
GlyphIf Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and his business partner Dario Amodei want to change this law, they are in a significantly more efficacious social position to do so than I am. I hope they will devote their considerable personal resources to its fair reform. They should go do that. Until then, though, regrettably, they must all go to federal prison.
@inthehands You actually can kinda enforce noindex / robots.txt!
If you set a page as no index, consider adding somewhere in it a random, non-displayed, non-screenreadable link titled something human-obvious like “ban-me-382972.html”. Add a human readable warning in the HTML comments. Then a little quick HAProxy config can IP-ban anyone who nonetheless tries to load it. It worked like magic on my server to reduce AI bot load. And all they had to do to avoid a ban was respect my robots.txt!
Kris
Charlie Stross#WritersCoffeeClub #WritingCommunity
20th May 2026. If not your current genre, what genre would you write?
This is your daily scheduled reminder that genres are just marketing labels.
I write SF/F, and I had a breakout success in 2007 with a novel about crime inside MMOs. In the UK, it hit its fourth hardcover reprint within 2 weeks of publication and my subsequent book advances quadrupled!
Turns out it went gold because Waterstones systematically misfiled it under "crime", not SF/F …
Greg Egan“I’d created 2000 free-text responses and labelled them ‘UK’. Then I copied and pasted the exact same 2000 responses but labelled these ‘US’. Finally, I combined them to create a dataset of 4000 total responses, and jumbled them up.
Despite the responses being identical for the UK and US, Copilot produced a rich, detailed summary of how US and UK respondents differed.”
https://kucharski.substack.com/p/real-signals-or-artificial-stereotypes
Nowhere GirlOne of the hardest parts of politics is explaining to people how fascists think because it's so stupid and disconnected from reality people have trouble believing it.
And since the fascists are mostly white, they receive endless benefit of the doubt and the belief that some evil pied piper like Trump must have misled them somehow.
"They're not bad people."
They're bad people.
dragonfrog@cwebber In my email to my MP, I looked up his longstanding email address on haveibeenpwned.com, listed all the times the companies entrusted with his data had failed to keep it confidential, and all his data that had been breached - then argued how much worse those breaches would have been if C-22 had been in effect and the companies had been required to retain even more data.
@adavid @ColesStreetPothole It sounds like your friend was approaching giving correct change as a math problem. But if the worker was trained to give change how I was, way back when, they may have been deeply habituated to approach it as a “counting up” process, not a math problem, that starts with coins to make the next even dollar above the price, then bills to make the total tendered. The latter system was taught for ages, largely because it’s foolproof and everyone’s a fool sometimes.
AssertionError("Joe Groff")We welcome your feedback on our Torment Nexus policy. To keep discussion productive, we ask that you refrain from the following topics:
- The book, _Don't Build the Torment Nexus_
- The literary use of the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale