Alistair Young @cerebrate@schelling.pt

So, I've finally got around to going through the spare hard drives the Feds returned to us after their raid last year, only to discover that the first one I picked up isn't actually one of ours.

It's one of theirs, filled with their "crime scene" photos and analyses of our suspicious computers.

Should I have that? Probably not, even now, but hey, free hard drive and they owe me a damn sight more than that.

(Our nation's finest, ladies and gentlemen.)

@coyoty Nice.

In the 'verse, I postulate storing data in memory diamond using ¹²C/¹³C bit representation, which lasers can then read out based on the slight difference in electron energy levels between the isotopes.

Sometimes I catch myself thinking how convenient it would be if my ethics had exemptions for dealing with terrible people, before I remember that having those exemptions themselves is _why_ they're terrible people.

@zarpaulus none of the apps in question has any connection with Amazon

One day I will learn that sitting down to write my own version (with blackjack! and hookers!) is not a viable response to _every_ instance of "Christ, I could eat a handful of iron filings and _puke_ a better solution than this!"

I'm kinda hoping it's this day.

It perhaps says something about the declining state of literacy that there are multiple excellent media library apps, while every e-book library app is absurdly horrible in its own unique way.

@chakatfirepaw @squeakyears @maxissakitsune @nyrath

Those too young to have used it might want to look up uucp.

Or FidoNet.

@synlogic I believe that’s called an oligarchy.

“It would be terrible if humans ever conquered death, or even lived a few decades longer! Society couldn’t cope!”

“THEN PERISH.”

- me, carefully avoiding political arguments over Thanksgiving

@nyrath Yeah. But that’s only because we can’t make and etch super-pure semiconductor crystals well enough to make a bazillion-core massively-parallel processor block.

But in THE FUTURE, with SCIENCE! and ENGINEERING!

(Still not quartz, though.)

Lots of amateur worldbuilders complain about crystals being used to make the technomagic or sci-fi tech work.

My brothers in creativity, what do you think makes all our modern real-life technology work?

(He said, torturing the cultural translators some more.)

At one point in the development of organic/biotech computing devices, it was necessary to provide indicators of their internal state for their operators.

The resulting bioluminescent demi-fungus was named, inevitably, "blinkenlichen".

#eldraeverse

Look, just because you're fighting a nightmare _in_ the Solomons doesn't mean that you're fighting the Nightmare _of_ the Solomons.