Alistair Young @cerebrate@schelling.pt

Fictional event of the day: On this day, at 2:14 am, Skynet becomes self-aware. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

Real moral of the day: Trying to murder sufficiently smart children gets you all nuked, hunted down, and killed.

#ai

Favorite German word of the day: Maulwurf.

Which means "mole".

See, to me, moles are associated with weak vision, and good housekeeping, and nice cups of tea, and at this point I must admit that everything I learned about moles came from _The Wind in the Willows_.

"Maulwurf", on the other hand, sounds ridiculously badass.

Like, if someone told me they'd seen a maulwurf in the garden, I'd be all "Get my shotgun. And maybe the flammenwerfer."

This disconnect is entirely too amusing.

Everyone talks about election interference, but no-one talks about proposed policies so self-evidently self-destructive that they should be presumed evidence of working for a hostile power.

I am very tempted to record the presidential debate, whenever it happens, so I can pause after each question, type it into ChatGPT, and see if the LLM can give a more coherent answer than either candidate.

My money's on the stochastic parrot.

(No, not Trump, the other stochastic parrot.)

When your species has telekinesis, you can spin a generator with your brain.

I call this "will to power".

Normalize sending each other large blocks of random numbers.

So, today it occurred to me to wonder what a unit of blood is, in volume.

The internet said "approximately a pint", so I said, "oh, those bloody medics again, too special to call it a pint like everyone else".

Except it's not. It's around 525 ml, which is 43 ml smaller than a proper Imperial pint and 52 ml bigger than a colonial pint, and 40-odd ml may not be much blood but is frankly more than I care to lose track of.

So, again, what the hell, medics?

Real: a flammenwerfer that werfs flammen.

Plausible: a nebelwerfer that werfs nebel.

Too much: a panzerwerfer that werfs panzers.

As a writer of relatively firm SF, it should be established that even in the magical ignorance of deep history, the spell components for "fireball" can't be bat guano.

They're naphtha and white phosphorus.

#eldraeverse #writing

(Sadly, unlike many state constitutions, the US Constitution does not include a clause banning madmen and idiots from public office. Perhaps it was less clear at the time just how often that would come up.)

Now, maybe I'm just being terribly elitist, but I do think that if you are in favor of either price controls or tariffs at this point in human history, you probably shouldn't be allowed to hold office or even vote on the grounds that you have demonstrated a complete and utter lack of capacity to learn a goddamn thing from the roll of history.

Today in #drwho universe concepts:

The particularly extravagant greatcoat that is a _wearable_ TARDIS.

It is the cloak beneath which literally everything can be hidden.

And is.

Seen headline: _Trump Falsely Claims That 'Homicides Are Skyrocketing,' an Imaginary Trend He Blames on Kamala Harris_

...I have to admit, the image of Harris going around shivving people personally to make this particular trend sparked a moment of joy.