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Angus McIntyre
@angusm@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06I play with words, cameras & computers
2006 Followers
147 Following
50 Posts
Joined November 25, 2016
Science-Fiction/Fantasy Writing:
Photography & More:
Travel/Photo Blog:
Languages:
en (native) / fr, it (fluent) / es, nl (some)
Boosted by @trending@homestead.social
The UK government's plan to teach 10 million British children how to use VPNs may be one of the most ambitious IT education projects ever launched. Experts have praised the scheme, saying that a deft combination of incentives and peer education make it more likely to succeed than other, comparable initiatives.
"With the rise of autocratic governments worldwide, VPN-literacy is more essential than ever.” said one expert, “This bold project definitely comes at the right time.”
#UKSocialMediaBan
A new “Neuromancer" teaser gives more details of AppleTV's upcoming series based on @GreatDismal@mastodon.social's genre-defining cyberpunk novel. In the trailer, the mysterious Armitage hires ace console jockey Case to help him activate his legally-purchased copy of Microsoft Office 365. Frustrated by Case's failure and an endless series of “Unknown Error 0x0 “ pop-ups, Armitage orders street samurai Molly to kill everyone in Redmond, but she is unable to buy a plane ticket because the 2FA email never arrives.
Boosted by @joe@f.duriansoftware.com
Replying to
@pervognsen@mastodon.social @joe@f.duriansoftware.com @cstross@wandering.shop Last I heard, Kai Krause – designer of all this, and pictured in the third image — had been given a castle by the German government as a home for some kind of design research center.
I like to think that the Germans looked at him and said “Obviously, this is a man who should have a castle.”
Eric Wenger, whose algorithms Kai packaged up behind his UI, is still writing software too. I vaguely covet his ArtMatic image synthesizer, but it's not cheap.
The reason why the Artemis mission has everyone so fascinated is because it is a showcase for the efforts of people who are very, very good at their jobs, at a time when the news cycle is dominated by people who are not merely terrible at their jobs, but awful human beings as well.
All these headlines about how AI makes people lazy and dumb make me feel very smug, because I was lazy and dumb long before AI came along.
Boosted by @trending@homestead.social
RE: https://wandering.shop/@cstross/117291228961971527
When I finally got around to starting the Laundry Files, I expected the usual @cstross@wandering.shop trademarks: madcap inventiveness, off-the-charts grotesque, wry commentary on institutions and conventions, page-turning pacing etc. What took me by surprise was the emotional depth. My heart regularly aches for poor Bob and Mo.
Anyway, to quote the man himself, “Is good book. You read.”
In fact, is all good books. You read all. Start here.
Quoting
SPECIAL OFFER: "The Atrocity Archives", the first novel in the Laundry Files (by me), is on special offer for just $1.99 on Kindle today (US store, not UK/EU): https://www.amazon.com/Atrocity-Archives-Laundry-Files-Book-ebook/dp/B000OIZUIA
—They don't normally discount this one, so if you want a cheap way into the multiple Hugo-winning series, this is your chance.
Open quoted postMay his memory be a warning.
Boosted by @hypebot@tacocat.space
With Peter Thiel's company Palantir increasingly in the news, a lot of people are still uncertain what the company stands for and what its core values are. Basically, what you need to know is that in "The Lord of the Rings” only three people owned palantíri:
- the Dark Lord Sauron, the epitome of everything evil,
- his almost equally evil lackey Saruman, and
- Denethor, a depressive autocrat who finally ended himself in a failed murder-suicide.
That pretty much tells you what to expect.
Boosted by @cstross@wandering.shop
Knock, knock
Who’s there?
Kuh-thool
Kuh-thool who?
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aea6285
Replying to
@anthracite@dragon.style @cstross@wandering.shop The Ones Who Say “I Hear Omelas Is Nice This Time Of Year” When Planning Their Vacations
They promised me a #cyberpunk future full of sentient computer networks and bad-ass lady assassins in skintight fetishwear, and instead I got the one where ... (checks notes) ... people are sending me #phishing emails trying to compromise my electric toothbrush.
Boosted by @cstross@wandering.shop
Replying to
@cstross@wandering.shop I’m partial to a nice spot of barratry, myself.
My former barrister brother-in-law said that barristers on opposing sides of a case (who were often friends outside the courtroom) would sometimes challenge each other to include specific obscure words in their speeches. After having successfully introduced, say, "walrus” into a speech, the barrister would then, with great solemnity, cause a note to be passed to opposing counsel that just said "Neener neener neener”.
I hope that there IS a schism in the Catholic church, so we can finally resolve the longstanding scientific question about what happens when a pope and an antipope collide.
My money is on mutual annihilation, accompanied by the emission of some high-energy cardinals, but I'm open to other suggestions.
#SSPX #religion #Catholicism #schism2026
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@SuperMoosie@mastodon.au @JohnJBurnsIII@kzoo.to @sundogplanets@mastodon.social Could we put a large lens in a lower orbit to focus all that sunlight into a tight beam aimed at their corporate headquarters?
The dystopian headline I did not expect to see today:
“Remote-controlled cockroach swarm can now breathe underwater"
Someone is 3D-printing tiny diving suits for cockroaches, because of course they are.
SCUBA apparently now means Somewhat Creepy Underwater Bug Apparatus.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-74235-1
Replying to
@pluralistic Flash mob wearing Elvis Presley masks or CV Dazzle makeup to poison their model? Portable LIDAR kit on everyone’s hats to burn out their sensors?
“The Day We All Bobby Tables’d the Met” would make a fine story title …
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@pluralistic@mamot.fr “I thought he said ‘Your piano needs tuning', but what he actually said was ‘Your piano needs Bakunin’.”
#NoGodsNoMaestros
Replying to
I feel a little bit the same way about LLMs and intelligence: that intelligence (human or otherwise) will always be kludged together out of off-the-shelf parts, rather than designed top-down according to some glorious, overarching architecture.
In the case of the human brain, existing structures were probably recruited and subverted and repurposed to cobble together what we call consciousness.
7/
Replying to
Minsky waited a beat, looking around the room to see who was paying attention, and then grinned and added “… the way I see it, if Conceptual Dependency Notation was simple enough for Roger to invent, it's simple enough to have evolved by pure chance.”
6/
Replying to
A few of us, myself included, made audible "WTF?” noises.
CDN was a formalism (to be generous) invented by Roger Schank. My own impression was that it was handwavy nonsense with no explanatory or computational utility.
(Side note: I once talked myself out of a job with Schank's group at ILS by inadvertently trashing work done by one of Schank's collaborators, unaware that my interviewer was one of his PhD students. In hindsight, I dodged a major, major bullet).
4/
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July 4th is a patriotic holiday at which Americans gather in large numbers to cheer for their favorite warplane.
/6
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Boat goes past labeled “FBI Dive Team” and I picture men in black suits with earpieces doing triple gainers off the high board.
/3
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@jay @cstross @annehargreaves @kamstrup The best man pages are written to be so opaque that the only people who can understand the man page are people who don't need the man page because they know it all already.
Or possibly because they wrote the man page themselves.
Replying to
Also, on a side note, the question of “can we make intelligent systems?" may be a distraction; we're now facing a world in which we have to live alongside increasing numbers of near-intelligent or pseudo-intelligent or just very-good-at-making-you-think-they're-intelligent systems, and that will have “interesting” consequences. I touched on that in an essay at https://theastoundinganalogcompanion.com/2023/09/08/familiar-daemons/ but I don't think we’ve yet grasped how much these fake intelligences are about to change our world.
/END
Replying to
Many years ago, Marvin Minsky came to the lab where I was working and gave a short talk about his “society of mind" concept. At the end of the talk, someone asked him what kind of representation he thought that the brain used for concepts.
(This was in the days of symbolic AI, and everyone was high on LISP and PROLOG, so the idea that the brain might have a formal representation of concepts didn't seem questionable or absurd).
2/
Replying to
Minsky responded that the brain was basically an evolutionary kludge, and so he thought the brain used a little bit of everything. He named a handful of the then-popular formalisms for knowledge representation, trotting out a list that ended with “… and Conceptual Dependency Notation.”
3/
Replying to
In the case of 'artificial general intelligence’, if it ever arrives (and I don't see why it can’t, although I don't believe it’s in any way imminent), then it'll be a similarly messy kludge assembled from bits and pieces.
And while I don't believe for a second that existing LLMs are in any way “intelligent", the technology underlying them is spookily good at doing SOMETHING, and that something might be a necessary part of building an intelligent system.
8/
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@bruces Having thought about it, I think I'd rather spoon.
Of course, this also raises the worrying possibility that humanity might spork, and I don't think anyone's ready for that.
Replying to
So it seems to me that while most of the LLM-based systems we see today are a resource-intensive party trick with many ruinous side-effects, there's something very much more interesting about the core technology, and that THAT may ultimately prove to be one of the tools in the toolbox for whoever finally Frankensteins together something that we might cautiously call intelligent. And that's why I quibble with @pluralistic@mamot.fr's “will not lead to intelligence" line.
11/
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Excited planespotter: “B-1! B-2! B-52! That’s MY tax dollars!!!”
/5
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Fireboats doing water displays look like bugs with long feathery antennae.
/4
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@nash @cstross Everyone knows you don't risk attracting their attention by mentioning them by name. You have to use euphemisms like “our friends under the hill", or “the wise folk”.
Get that wrong and you have only yourself to blame when you wake up and find that your baby has a rabbit's head or roots for feet.
Replying to
This, for me, is the interesting bit of LLMs and GPTs. I'm not interested in their proven ability to spew slop (“not interested" = “I actively hate it”). Nor am I persuaded by the hypesters’ claims that their consumer-grade sycophancy-as-a-service is three point releases away from ushering in the Singularity.
But it does seem that LLMs are very … well, I was going to say 'efficient', but if you have to boil the Colorado River to write a corporate mission statement, efficient isn't the word.
9/
Replying to
Let's just say that they're startlingly good at doing a particular kind of transformation task, and there is definitely something there that merits further study. (They're also wildly uncontrollable, which is a bit of a problem if you want repeatable or predictable results).
10/
Replying to
Anyway, whether CDN was good or bad, the fact was that Minsky did NOT hold Schank in high regard (and vice-versa), so to hear Minsky saying that he thought CDN was a basic knowledge structure in the human brain was a little like hearing the Pope say that this Satan guy made some good points, actually.
5/
Replying to
@peter@thepit.social @cstross@wandering.shop It is, in fact, a golden horse’s ass. I hope that clears up any confusion.
Replying to
@russss @AlisonW @cstross "Goes faster, weighs more" is not really a recipe for increased safety. I'd bet that outcomes for people who get hit by bikeshare ebikes are also worse than with pedal bikes.
Here in NYC, the spread of ebikes -- which generate additional revenue for Citi Bike, over and above the membership fee -- means it's increasingly difficult to find a pedal bike at the bike stations. I'm sure the emergency rooms have already noticed the change.
Replying to
Firefighter behind me: “people complained about the sonic booms. C’mon! This is America!
/2
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@cstross@wandering.shop @sjvn@mastodon.social Is this the kind of “strict regulation” that you can pay handsome bribes to be specially exempted from?
Because I suspect that that’s what’s really at stake here.
Replying to
Replying to
@cstross @bruces If the world warms to the point that surface water temperatures reach 50°C, hypercanes could be the least of our worries.
But maybe you could engineer your own hypercanes by selectively heating parts of the ocean with orbital mirror arrays? I hope the Supervillain Research Council is at least looking into the possibility.
Replying to
@the_etrain@beige.party “No, no, the Rock & Roll Hall of Infamy is further down the highway. Keep going. You’ll know when you're there.”
Replying to
@SoftwareTheron @Lana The pornography writes itself:
- "I want your hard clock,” she whispered.
- Her eyes widened at the sight of his rigid, throbbing clock.
- "Give me your big clock, daddy!” she moaned.
- She went down on her knees and worshipped his clock.
- “I've never seen a clock that size before," he exclaimed.
- She could see the bulge that his clock made in his pants.
Replying to
@pzmyers@freethought.online As someone who had a partial meniscectomy a few years back, I am disturbed by a recent study that suggests that not only does the operation do no good, the outcomes may be WORSE than a placebo.
If your surgeon offers you a choice, be sure to insist on the placebo.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/05/260505234603.htm
Replying to on zpravobot.news
@eastblocvisuals@zpravobot.news @pluralistic@mamot.fr In Argentina, firefighters are routinely called upon to fight demons …
Replying to
@bruces@mastodon.social Sounds like the planet Henriada, in Cordwainer Smith's “Quest of the Three Worlds”.
“Can I go out?"
"Why not, sir? You are a true man. You can do what you wish."
"I mean, is it safe for me to go out?"
"Oh, no, sir! The wind would tear you apart or carry you away."
"Don't people ever go out?"
"Yes, sir. With groundcars or with automatic body armor. I have been told that if it weighs fifty tons or better, the person inside is safe.”
Replying to
@mattsheffield@mastodon.social Not a Christian myself, but as I understand it Jesus is QUITE LITERALLY the poster child for "suicidal empathy”, someone who felt so bad for people that he volunteered to come to Earth and get murdered by the religious and civil authorities to make things better.
I’m not sure which Bible Mr. Webbon is reading from, but unless his copy differs radically from the usual text, he may have missed the point at little.