Remote

SpeakerToManagers

@SpeakerToManagers@wandering.shop

mastodon 4.6.5

Retired software engineer. Progressive lefty from trade-union socialist communist family. Neurodivergent (ADD, OCD) & physically disabled. Interested in a lot of things including photography, computing, art, SFF, experimental video, astrobiology, complex adaptive systems, poetry, visual mathematics …
#Fractals, #ReactionDiffusion, #GenerativeArt, #CellularAutomata. 
Allergic to libertarianism, AI hype, trans-humanism, crypto currency & web3.

𝐋𝐢𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐛𝐞𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬.

0 Followers

0 Following

30 Posts

Joined November 15, 2017

Politics:

Progressive left/ socialist/ trade unionist/ anti racist

Professional:

Object-Oriented design and programming, OODB, Computer Graphics & UI, Functional Programming

Interests:

SFF, Complex Adaptive Systems, Social Al, Geometry

Personal:

Pronouns: He/They. Old and not in the way, disabled, ADD, OCD, Upper Left Coast

Posts

SpeakerToManagers @SpeakerToManagers@wandering.shop · Jul 23, 2026

Replying to @mvilain@sfba.social

@mvilain@sfba.social @fatsam@mstdn.social Or try to get back the mortgage on his soul.

SpeakerToManagers @SpeakerToManagers@wandering.shop · Jul 23, 2026

Replying to @steinarb@mastodon.social

@steinarb@mastodon.social The 8 bit CPU chips of that era (8080, 8085, Z80) ran typically at between 1 and 5 MHz, though there were some binouts that ran faster. You were running on thin ice if you tried to overclock, though. Go too fast and the memory address & data lines would go out of spec and read or write garbage.

SpeakerToManagers @SpeakerToManagers@wandering.shop · Jul 23, 2026

Replying to @cstross@wandering.shop

@cstross@wandering.shop @noctuaminervae@toot.si @simonzerafa@infosec.exchange @mwl@io.mwl.io @scrivenerapp@mastodon.world Just when you thought it was safe to start editing! https://github.com/UlrikHjort/Emacs-text-editor-for-the-Commodore-64/blob/main/README.md

SpeakerToManagers @SpeakerToManagers@wandering.shop · May 17, 2026

Replying to @rainynight65@aus.social

@rainynight65@aus.social @Em0nM4stodon@infosec.exchange Yeah, that’s tech SOP for consent to EULAs. I can’t read the damn things because the text is too small and I can’t find a way to change the font size.

SpeakerToManagers @SpeakerToManagers@wandering.shop · May 17, 2026

Replying to @soph@grrl.me

@soph@grrl.me The sad part of all this is that even this level of piratical greed won’t be enough to pay for the infrastructure the hyperscalers want to build for training new generations of models that won’t get them what they promised: AGI that might actually makes these gadgets useful (and even more dangerous than what they’re giving us now).

SpeakerToManagers @SpeakerToManagers@wandering.shop · May 09, 2026

Luddite Labs
https://open.substack.com/pub/bloodinthemachine/p/the-ai-inflected-crisis-artists-are?selection=f53cab14-fec0-463a-9c5d-a9f62141a8a1&r=dz8ws&utm_medium=ios

SpeakerToManagers @SpeakerToManagers@wandering.shop · Mar 31, 2026

“The grey goo of the soul.”
https://open.substack.com/pub/catvalente/p/blood-money-the-anthropic-settlement?r=dz8ws&utm_medium=ios

SpeakerToManagers @SpeakerToManagers@wandering.shop · Mar 30, 2026

Replying to @theonion@bots.defencegeeks.net

@theonion@bots.defencegeeks.net Like he needed an excuse!

SpeakerToManagers @SpeakerToManagers@wandering.shop · Mar 25, 2026

Replying to @cstross@wandering.shop

@cstross@wandering.shop True. Searle assumed some godlike being carefully filled in the google or so entries in the lookup tables that controlled the way the little man (or was it a p-zombie? I get confused) inside the room created the translations. I am seriously annoyed by thought experiments that start with incoherent postulates.

SpeakerToManagers @SpeakerToManagers@wandering.shop · Mar 24, 2026

Replying to @cstross@wandering.shop

@cstross@wandering.shop @Sweetshark@social.tchncs.de The Chinese Room was debunked 40 years ago, and I still get people quoting it at me. Not to speak of the people who don’t understand that Neural Nets are not anything like biological neurons. I get tired of explaining CogSci 100 (prerequisite for 101).

SpeakerToManagers @SpeakerToManagers@wandering.shop · Mar 22, 2026

Replying to @bruce@darkmoon.social

@bruce @cstross @dearlove They didn’t need guillotines, they’ve got airlocks. And all billionaires want to go to space.

SpeakerToManagers @SpeakerToManagers@wandering.shop · Mar 19, 2026

Replying to @Climatehistories__dup_44950@mastodon.social

@Climatehistories@mastodon.social @cstross@wandering.shop Correction: we’ll sell you a revocable license for it. Piss us off and we’ll delete everything you know.

SpeakerToManagers @SpeakerToManagers@wandering.shop · Mar 04, 2026

Replying to @CliftonR@wandering.shop

@CliftonR@wandering.shop And they should all be one size too small.

SpeakerToManagers @SpeakerToManagers@wandering.shop · Mar 01, 2026

Replying to @cstross__dup_483@wandering.shop

@cstross@wandering.shop There once was a Dalek from Skaro Whose visual field was quite narrow They’re supposed to obliterate When shrieking EXTERMINATE! They’d get better results with an arrow.

SpeakerToManagers @SpeakerToManagers@wandering.shop · Feb 20, 2026

Replying to @cstross__dup_483@wandering.shop

@cstross@wandering.shop @josh0@babka.social It’s really hard to wash the slime off.

SpeakerToManagers @SpeakerToManagers@wandering.shop · Feb 16, 2026

Replying to @jdnicoll@wandering.shop

@jdnicoll He couldn’t have even landed one person on Mars with StarShip, but he can do that on the Moon (if he can get a lunar lander designed and built on a reasonable schedule) using Falcon Heavy. A self-sustaining colony? Well, that’s a whole ‘nother 55 gallon drum of snakes.

SpeakerToManagers @SpeakerToManagers@wandering.shop · Jan 26, 2026

Replying to @datenwolf@chaos.social

@datenwolf@chaos.social @cstross@wandering.shop Agreed. Aside from the evidence that humans are capable of non-linguistic cognition, how can we define cognition in a useful way without falling into the Anthropocentric trap if we assume it requires human capabilities (and then what about other hominins? Other primates? Cetaceans? Eusocial insects? Cephalopods?)

SpeakerToManagers @SpeakerToManagers@wandering.shop · Jan 18, 2026

Replying to @cstross__dup_483@wandering.shop

@cstross@wandering.shop The Turing Test will not fail an LLM for the same reason humans are ready to accept them as persons: humans evolved with a hardcoded behavior to perceive any language-using process as a cognitive entity and create a mental model of it. Rejecting that behavior takes a metacognitive ability that has not been taught to most people, so the problem isn’t rampant stupidity (look at how many clearly intelligent AI researchers fail this test) but rather ignorance, sometimes wilful, granted.

SpeakerToManagers @SpeakerToManagers@wandering.shop · Jan 18, 2026

Replying to @cstross__dup_483@wandering.shop

@cstross@wandering.shop The US penny coins Musk bought to put behind the fuses on the X servers ought be melting about now.

SpeakerToManagers @SpeakerToManagers@wandering.shop · Jan 08, 2026

Replying to @pluralistic@mamot.fr

@pluralistic@mamot.fr *SIGH* and then there are the dependency failures: when open source maintainers retire!

SpeakerToManagers @SpeakerToManagers@wandering.shop · Jan 08, 2026

Replying to @pluralistic@mamot.fr

@pluralistic@mamot.fr “Baroque, crufty, and obfuscated” is my new punk string trio.

SpeakerToManagers @SpeakerToManagers@wandering.shop · Jan 05, 2026

Replying to @RuthSachter@wandering.shop

@RuthSachter@wandering.shop Did Panshin ever say whether he’d written a draft? I’m not clear on just when he decided to stop.

SpeakerToManagers @SpeakerToManagers@wandering.shop · Jan 05, 2026

Replying to @yunchtime@wandering.shop

@yunchtime@wandering.shop Every couple of decades I reread the Villiers series, if only for the snark. Shows what an old fart I am.

SpeakerToManagers @SpeakerToManagers@wandering.shop · Jan 05, 2026

Replying to @cstross__dup_483@wandering.shop

@cstross@wandering.shop So the chaos in the White House and the captured media is just his accretion disk? Oh, good, maybe they’ll all melt into a quark soup.

SpeakerToManagers @SpeakerToManagers@wandering.shop · Jan 05, 2026

Boosted by

Charlie Stross @cstross@wandering.shop

I just realized (and this will definitively mark my age and my slowness of wit) that the frog dancers at the ICE protests and the No Kings march are in fact cosplaying the character Torve the Trog from Alexei Panshin’s Anthony Villiers’ series. Is anyone else still waiting for the publication of the fourth book, The Universal Pantograph?

SpeakerToManagers @SpeakerToManagers@wandering.shop · Apr 27, 2024

Replying to @nervous_jessica@mastodon.social

@nervous_jessica@mastodon.social Cheers for the robin! And is that a model of a minimal surface?

SpeakerToManagers @SpeakerToManagers@wandering.shop · Jul 16, 2023

Replying to @catvalente@mastodon.world

@catvalente You are now on a par with other 3 letter institutions like the FBI, the NSA, and the TVA. Congratulations!

SpeakerToManagers @SpeakerToManagers@wandering.shop · Jul 06, 2023

Replying to @karnythia@mastodon.social

@karnythia Welcome. We’re sort of all over the place here, but there are tools.for finding the people you followed on the bird site: https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/29/a-new-tool-movetodon-makes-it-easier-to-find-your-twitter-friends-on-mastodon/

SpeakerToManagers @SpeakerToManagers@wandering.shop · Apr 07, 2023

Replying to @dec_hl@mastodon.social

@dec_hl@mastodon.social @tubetime@mastodon.social Call it Vacuumpunk and name the big tech company Dyson.

SpeakerToManagers @SpeakerToManagers@wandering.shop · Jan 31, 2023

Replying to @ranjit@friend.camp

@ranjit@friend.camp @Sisuile@wandering.shop CatGUT violin strings as a service.

SpeakerToManagers

Posts

Remote instance