Alistair Young @cerebrate@schelling.pt
- Fiction
- https://eldraeverse.com/
- Tech Blog
- https://randombytes.substack.com/
- Random Stuff Blog
- https://noiseinmysignal.substack.com/
- avatar@arkane-systems.net
Science fiction writer. Speaker to minerals. Consensualist. Illeist. Pony and kanmusu stan. Can call spirits from the vasty deep!
Joined Jun 2023
The thing that strikes me as funny about this, technical-background-wise, is that the lessons learned have basically been common software dev knowledge since, good gods, the early sixties _at least_ .
The whole story reads like the familiar story of everyone who's ever had to work with vertical software in general, in which due to limited markets, low budgets, and lack of alternatives it - well, it's all cheaped-out pure shit, in a nutshell.
I really need to get my brother-in-law on here so that I can confuse people by talking about "Philip of Mastodon".
In the end, you will always kneel.
Be real, people: the cost of aristocratic extravagance that gave us Versailles and Neuchwanstein is as nothing compared to what we spend shampooing the idols of democracy.
And we don't even get a cool-ass castle out of it.
Looking at the breathless fundraising posts, and man, it's quite depressing when you think of all the billions of dollars we spend on holding a rolling popularity contest for vacuous thugs.
I mean, think of all the more socially useful things we could spend that money on, like chroming the moon, building weed-fueled cars, or sewing quilts out of $100 bills.
Alistair Young
boosted
@isaackuo @dashdsrdash @nyrath
(At least, it's okay as long as it remains a challengeable monopoly.
But since the usual path to becoming an unchallengeable monopoly is buying regulation to that effect and Elon Musk seems determined to piss off the government as much as possible at every opportunity, I don't think we need to worry too much about that one any time soon.)
@isaackuo @dashdsrdash @nyrath
I'm going to advance the position here that it doesn't really matter. Sometimes you have the combination of a small market and someone who's really good at supplying it, and you have a natural monopoly (not to be confused with a natural monopoly), and _that's okay_.
@dashdsrdash @isaackuo @nyrath
Yeah, but look at what happened subsequently. Just as soon as they could, they progressively reunited into what are now, hrm, three companies? The biggest of which is, by a considerable margin...
AT&T.
Alistair Young
boosted
EVERY TIME YOU TACK-WELD A BATTERY INTO AN ELECTRONIC DEVICE, THE GOD OF REPAIRABILITY AND HARDWARE MAINTAINABILITY COMES INTO YOUR HOUSE AND PISSES IN YOUR SOCK DRAWER
@jcschue @capnthommo @Catvalente
What you're looking at is a variation on that.
We _know_ we're gonna get fucked either way.
But we can at least spare ourselves the ritual humiliation of _asking_ for it.
@jcschue @capnthommo @Catvalente
To offer a perspective from the non-voter, neither I nor anyone else I know in the principled non-voting community is unaware of the way the electoral process works.
But there's a concept talked about during the Cold War concerning how one of the particular indignities of authoritarianism was being forced to participate in your own degradation. Repeat the propaganda. Believe the Official Truth. Engage in the ritual mechanisms of the regime. Etc.
@alan @maxthefox @FredKiesche @nyrath
Heh. I've been calling mine "firm SF" for years.
As a cave-dwelling American, fuck this guy.
uspol
Among the depressing parts of uspol is that people keep coming up with meme reasons to oppose Kamala Harris, whereas in any halfway civilized society, her record of prolonging sentences to make use of prison labor, hiding exculpatory evidence, and covering up prosecutorial abuse should be more than sufficient to disqualify her from holding any office of public or private trust or authority for the rest of her natural.
TIL that in Korean as it is spoken in North Korea, there are two different honorifics meaning “comrade”, depending on whether the comrade you are addressing is of higher social status.
That’s a fundamental truth about communism right there.
Also, etymologically speaking, it's believed to have come straight from the French _petit_ without touching on the English "petty", meaning essentially "officer in charge of a little (specific) area" vis-a-vis "officer in charge of all that".
The corresponding distinction in Eldraeic is probably "executive officer" rather than "policy officer", but no-one except English civil servants would understand that without extensive footnotes.
Translation artifact. (Inasmuch as there were more important places for me to use up my budget of exotic terms for readers to learn.)
- Fiction
- https://eldraeverse.com/
- Tech Blog
- https://randombytes.substack.com/
- Random Stuff Blog
- https://noiseinmysignal.substack.com/
- avatar@arkane-systems.net
Science fiction writer. Speaker to minerals. Consensualist. Illeist. Pony and kanmusu stan. Can call spirits from the vasty deep!
Joined Jun 2023
