@barsquid Ahem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Rise_(novel)

(I did NOT expect to learn that Roko is ripping off J. G. Ballard for ideas.)

@gerikson Veppers was *totally* a vicious parody of Elon Musk. (Iain despised billionaires—in American political terms he was an unabashed communist.)

@hirvox @mountainriver @froztbyte Like a lot of other things that were funny in the late 80s and early 90s, the NPC meme has lost its shine …

@skillissuer The younger generation in the US is secularizing rapidly, though—increased radicalization of the evangelicals (and association with white supremacism/neo-nazis) is driving an exodus from churches.

@YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM It goes back to the mid 19th century. In an era where battlefields were controlled by massed infantry with rifles, railways revolutionised the process of mobilizing for war—they who ran the tightest timetables got to the battlefields first. But as a result, frontiers moved around and the networks fractured. And shit like the Russian Empire deliberately choosing a different track gauge to stop German and Austrian troop trains running on their tracks during an invasion.

@carlitoscohones @techtakes See also Frank Tipler, "The Physics of Immortality" (or: Astrophysicist goes cray-cray, tries to prove TESCREAL bullshit only takes a left turn into evangelical Christianity by way of the fine structure constant)

@self He hasn't even caught up with what Vernor Vinge was talking about in his 1993 paper on the Singularity, which the current crop of starry-eyed singularitarians seem not to have read: https://accelerating.org/articles/comingtechsingularity

@gnomicutterance The basilisk is just an AI rip-off of Dispensationalist Satan. So it's not surprising that Roko's position on women echoes that of the most reactionary strains of Christian thought.

@gerikson Heh. Am waiting for the next Apple ads—"It's a bit like Microsoft's ARM laptops, only better and there's no spyware."

@gerikson The name predates the white nationalist band by *several centuries*. Per wiki: "In classical and medieval literature, ultima Thule (Latin "farthest Thule") acquired a metaphorical meaning of any distant place located beyond the "borders of the known world"."

I suspect they renamed the KBO Arrokoth precisely to avoid the unfortunate recent connotations of the name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule

@MalachaiConstant Or they're a Perl or bash programmer.

@V0ldek NoNoNo, Excel is *sometimes* useful. For ultimate uselessness, try PowerPoint.

@dgerard We need to yank Dilbert Stark's driving license and chauffeur and force him to travel everywhere on an e-bike or sailboat for a year or two before he's allowed to have anything to do with Tesla again. (Or to use his private jet.)

Actually, Dilbert getting e-bike religion might be the best thing he could possibly do for the climate …

@dgerard @techtakes I don't read PG (life's too short, and so is my sanity) but doesn't this merely suggest the folks he exchanges email with have paltry, stunted vocabularies?

@froztbyte Have you tried Jennifer Warnes' cover album of Cohen songs, "Famous Blue Raincoat"? (Asking because her voice is *very* different from his, but she totally owns his songs.)

I've met Pinker and it is my considered opinion that he is an elitist dick. (Sticks tongue out.) Srsly, not surprising that an eminent prof at Harvard provides emotional felatio for the moneyed class at every opportunity. @skillissuer

https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/9372418

@self Really? And here I thought Mastodon existed for the convenience of Reply Guys like that!

@dgerard If you're looking at awful.systems via a Mastodon client you never see the sidebar. Or even any indication that it isn't a Mastodon server.

@dgerard "B-B-BUT prison is meant to be for TEH POORS!! This is WRONG!!!"

@dgerard @sneerclub he's gonna start a Basilisk cult in prison, isn't he. Get out in 25 years and head straight for the executive suite in the temple his followers will have built for him.