cstross

@V0ldek @techtakes Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd's/_of/_London

@pikesley @Soyweiser @fullsquare IIRC the coordination problem afflicts all engineering disciplines: with large tech projects like the LHC and ITER, costs scale as something like the fourth power of the energies they're working with, and a large part of the reason is that managing the project is insanely difficult. I'd love to see some numbers for how the management complexity of large software projects (eg. operating systems, LLMs) compares to this.

@nightsky @techtakes Back when I was in software dev I had the privilege of working with a couple of superprogrammers (not at the same company, many years apart). They probably wrote *less* code: it was just qualitatively far, far more elegant and effective. And they were fast, too.

@gerikson I'd like to see him automating bed-turning a frail 90 year old in a nursing home so she doesn't get bed sores (ulcers—open wounds from lying on a creased sheet or just in the same position for too long). A 90yo with cognitive impairment who's scared of robots.

@Mubelotix @techtakes You know what else would solve the Nicole problem? Old-skool USENET style client-side killfiles circa 1990, applied to DMs—your inbox-equivalent.

@o7___o7 @sneerclub Yep, but hopefully my next space opera will take it to the next level (once I finish it—I've been working on it since 2015) …

@rook @sneerclub No; back in the early 1990s he was an amusing usenet troll with a sideline in ice-cold sarcasm, but the libertarianism hadn't eaten his brain yet (although it had already gotten to his elder brother, the cypherpunk).

@HedyL One twist: I imagine google devotes CONSIDERABLE effort to aggressively caching LLM-generated answers (probably parsing queries and merging similar ones before checking the cache for previous replies). That'd reduce their costs substantially compared to just throwing every question at an LLM directly. And it keeps eyeballs on Google's own content and own served ads rather than wandering off into the wildernessd of the non-google public web.

@TinyTimmyTokyo alt.peeves, alt.tasteless, probably most of the comp.* hierarchy, not sure where else.

@YourNetworkIsHaunted It's probably a mixture: some of them understand the relationship between beliefs and reality, a whole bunch of others are LARPing away (and we'd all be better off if they signed up to play EVE Online instead), there are probably some today who look at Yarvin and see a ladder to power and wealth, and everything in between.

You can't ascribe unity of understanding and intention to any group of n > 1 humans.

@blakestacey I believe there was rapid turnover. (PIHKAL was cited as the cookbook being used. This was in 1993, so it was pretty new …)

@gerikson I mean, I *literally* fondled his lizard: it was about two feet long, green, and quite bad-tempered. (He and his student house had a room full of iguanas and snakes and suchlike. And a kitchen fridge door full of designer phenylethylamine hallucinogens. Or at least test tubes with labels identifying them as such. It was an eye-opening experience …