@gerikson @techtakes Technical nit-pick: “American hard science fiction space opera like Timelike Infinity is also influential”— Timelike Infinity was written by Steven Baxter who is *very* English indeed. Best contextualized as mid-period Interzone generation hitting its imperial phase.

@Amoeba_Girl @techtakes I guess the private equity bros behind this one were reading Larry Niven’s “A Gift from Earth” when they were teens (seems more likely than Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go”.

@BioMan I blame Konstantin Tskiolkovskii! Although to be fair, he got it from his teacher, Nikolai Federovitch Federov, grandfather of Cosmism and one of the wellsprings of TESCREAL … which brings us full-circle to the AI bros again.

@fullsquare Lead poisoning was *ubiquitous* in the USA until the late 1970s/early 1980s, due to tetraethyl lead in petrol. Everywhere around the world experienced a sharp drop in violent crime 15-20 years after it was phased out.

But mercury poisoning is more visibly lethal: see also Karen Wetterhahn:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen/_Wetterhahn

@mawhrin Sadly, they exist. And there are too many of them! I guess this means we should kill people who are fine with killing up to 50% of the—

HEY WAIT

@gerikson @sneerclub Needy Amin is a great coinage, but can I suggest Idiot Amin instead? (The resemblance between Trump and Idi Amin is glaringly obvious now if you stand their rhetoric and style of government side-by-side. Only significant difference is that Trump started with more.)

@isaackuo @Landa @V0ldek @techtakes AI is so 2026, Bro, to get ahead of the game for 2027 you need to pivot to Quantum Computing, ideally on the blockchain in an orbital data centre.

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@V0ldek @techtakes

Bro we all run on tank tracks these days, we’re all absolutely crushing it in the workplace Bro shoes are so pre-AI, you can’t grow forever all the way to upload heaven on a sole

(Pops another Special K)

@gerikson I hung out with Neal a few times and he struck me as the kind of twisty-minded guy who’s unlikely to fall for the simplistic nostrums that typify authoritarian thinkers. Conservative (with some libertarian in his background, I suspect) but not hammer-make-square-peg-fit-in-round-hole stupid. (Disclaimer: I last saw him about a decade ago.)

@Architeuthis As I keep shouting, Transhumanism (and the whole of TESCREAL) is essentially just Christianity in atheist drag.

@CinnasVerses @techtakes

This kind of ROI to me stinks of late-stages Ponzi scheme—the smart money has made its pile, but they need to keep pulling in the rubes to keep the illusion of growth running.

@smiletolerantly Ah, somebody must have boosted it into my timeline! Annoying.

@smiletolerantly Iain was thinking of Elon Musk when he wrote the character Joliet Veppers in “Surface Detail”. That’s all you need to know about his opinion of techbro billionaires. And that was back in 2009-ish. Musk was already toxic.

@fullsquare @techtakes If you want a TV show about billionaires getting their just desserts, just intone six words at the start of the intro narrative: “After the year of the revolutions …”

@gerikson You could run a lottery where the prizes were control over one of the FPV killer drones hunting him. Require a direct hit with an injector loaded with about 30% of a lethal dose of something excruciating, so everyone can get their stabby on and no one person is technically guilty of murder. (Subject to common cause doctrine in your jurisdiction, but anyway … )

@fullsquare He’ll absolutely need that capability when the bubble bursts and he needs to make a hurried exit in the direction of the extinct volcano lair he’s bought through a shell company in Polynesia!

@Soyweiser The irony is that if Musk was serious about landing a man on Mars by 2022, he had Falcon Heavy flying in 2017 and Crew Dragon flying with crew in 2020. The amount he’s spent on Starship would have covered several fully-expended FH launches to Mars transfer orbit and development of a long duration crew module. We know how to soft-land ~1-2 tons on Mars.

… What, you wanted him to bring the astronauts *back* afterwards? Are you some kind of Commie?

(But my point stands.)

@Ardubal @YourNetworkIsHaunted @fullsquare Bear in mind they’re also locked in a long-term cold war with Saudi Arabia (sunni v. shi’ite islam) and Israel (increasingly resembling a religious ethno-supremacist fascist state with regional territorial ambitions). Peace with Iran is a non-starter unless Israel and the Saudis can be forced to back the fuck off at the same time.

@Ardubal @YourNetworkIsHaunted @fullsquare This hasn’t happened in Iran, but oppressive theocracies *have* decayed from inside elsewhere—notably Ireland since 1980 (the difference now is as night and day, yet there was no revolution and no shooting, and the country has prospered). Arguably Spain’s clerico-fascist system went the same way in the 1970s. And so on.

Iran is different, though, in that it faces a violent, powerful external superpower, which indirectly props up the priesthood.