9 months is a typical direct transfer, using a traditional rocket engine whose thrust is so high you can basically treat it as infinite: accelerate up to your transfer speed in a few minutes and coast until you need to slow down in a similarly negligible amount of time. You need to set a lot of gas on fire in those few minutes, though. Electric propulsion is so low thrust that it can’t put you on that kind of direct trajectory in one go, so the trip is more of a slow spiral around the sun with continuous thrust the whole way. The tradeoff for everything taking forever is unbelievable fuel savings, which is a surprisingly common occurrence in space travel.

The playful and wise goblinbot…

Time tends to sand off the rough edges of any organization that wants to keep pulling in new members and that doesn’t need a framework of total control to protect itself from fizzling out early. It’s an evolutionary process, not just historical whitewashing. Though it’s also historical whitewashing.

Not even two spines, there’s some almost impressive Escheresque fuckery going on with how the page of the book he’s writing in is actually the cover of another? Good to know people “care” about children with disabilities enough to spend extra money on worse textbooks just for them, but not enough to actually read them, I guess.

He was all over TV the other day, joining the crowds to attend the ridiculous Nakba day propaganda ceremony. I have no doubts he’s been in just fine health lately, and if anything he’s been playing up how unwell he is to get out of court dates over and over again for months. The other big reason for his recent disappearance from public view is the likelihood of his beach house getting another knock on the door from a Shahed, maybe luckier this time.

Most of the energy from the rocket that launched the satellite went into pushing it fast sideways. If you wanted to slow it down enough to drop straight down, you’d just about need a second rocket to stop it.

Yeah, it’s upsetting how much I’ve ended up thinking back to the crap arms race for how casual a plot detail it is, and how much more apt that descriptor is for LLMs than most other sci-fi conceptualizations of AI.

At this point, especially with Fall, I think he just has a tendency to pick up and run with whatever cool idea techbros are into at the moment without any real regard for how seriously people take it as a belief, resulting in a bunch of conveniently packaged, reader-gratifying ideological vignettes for said techbros to latch onto as a coherent vision and complete the cycle. I don’t think he ever meant to genuinely promote the metaverse or digital money laundering or acausal brain hell or space eugenics, but he seems chronically incapable of mounting a systemic critique of any of his subjects in a style that demands a good guy crypto billionaire, likably clueless cultist, or badass geneticist to outsmart the Islamic terrorists, alien special forces, and conniving cosmonauts and save the day.

I do still find it somewhat concerning how many of his plots come down to “80% of everyone are mindless sheeple enthralled by a higher power,” though.

I continue to be endlessly fascinated by Anathem, by virtue of enjoying it as a kid for the wacky speculative metaphysics, enjoying it as an adult for the case study it presents in how Neal Stephenson can get you nodding along to a set of faux-lectures strung together by road tripping until he gets you to an obviously false conclusion, and now the fact that The Wick is apparently what rationalists actually believe in, just substituting simulations and reality-hacking for quantum woo and nukes? The Incanter Basilisk can entrap your consciousness by manipulating which timelines your brain is quantum-entangled with coexisting copies of your psyche exist in the multimetaverse and selecting among them to give you quantum immortality 51% attack you into the Matrix, I guess.

It’s the difference between “shooting and crying” and “shooting and laughing.” there’s no shame anymore, 0 back pressure against the worst possible depravity, no reason to waste money on PR anymore that could be spent on more bombs, because what’s anyone going to do about it?

Well, obviously?

Easy honestly, you just have to put some effort into your appearance and be ok with that attention coming from weird 60 year old men, just like anyone else.

Well, for CNC you’d likely want some way to program and upload looping movement patterns to an off-the-shelf controller, for CNC you’d want devices to negotiate and establish a safeword when they connect to the network, and for C&C you could patch OpenRA to call the API at appropriate (?) times. That’s why I think a 15th competing standard is needed here.

CNC is (ideally, without roofie roulette and a ton of social pressure to perform involved) consensual, just simulating non-consent, and there are already some interesting API standards out there for relevant haptic devices…

Is there an open-source standard for that yet?

I’m struck by how much contrast gets blasted into the shadows of every scene, reminiscent of the average RTX “remaster.” Lighting is treated not as a tool for composing scenes and guiding attention, but as a dial to be turned toward “more gooder” wherever possible. Just make everything look like everything else; that’s how you know the technology is getting Better.

You would not believe it, I just met the protagonist of sex the other day. Every time a woman mentions being interested in sex in any way, they secretly mean sex with him. I met another one the day before that, too. Actually it’s wild how many random guys on telegram, discord, forum direct messages, and literally any other means of internet communication are all the protagonist of sex.

Really not liking the ratio of tech industry sneer to ZOG NWO thought control rant in this one, honestly. (Not to mention the latter gives way too much credence to the absolute nonsense brain chippers love to spout about neuroscience.)

So, snake oil but for text.

Sure, or go see a psychiatrist and tell them you’re suicidal, or go dig up whatever other excuse you can find to go teach at some rural middle school instead of greasing the wheels of the murder machine. They have more than enough rabid racists to fill the front lines already; every waffling centrist opposition voter begrudgingly driving supply trucks is still doing exactly the job the fascist government wants them to.