Charlie Stross

@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

@CinnasVerses @techtakes TESCREAL is very obviously an emergent syncretistic religion that follows the same basic structure as Christianity: it’s evangelical, but unlike pre-Constantine Xtianity it specifically targets billionaires and power elites (white males). At the rate it’s speed-running its development they’ll be burning witches for denying the divinity of the singularity within another couple of decades.

@dgerard What fascinates me is *why* coders who use LLMs think they’re more productive. Is the complexity of their prompt interaction misleading them as to how effective the outputs it results in are? Or something else?