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Lord George Gordon Byron's excrement was so drastically diffuse that both the concept of science fiction and the computer itself were concieved in his shadow to balance the universe.

“Lord Byron gets up at two. I get up, quite contrary to my usual custom … at 12. After breakfast we sit talking till six. From six to eight we gallop through the pine forest which divide Ravenna from the sea; we then come home and dine, and sit up gossiping till six in the morning. I don’t suppose this will kill me in a week or fortnight, but I shall not try it longer. Lord B.’s establishment consists, besides servants, of ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon; and all these, except the horses, walk about the house, which every now and then resounds with their unarbitrated quarrels, as if they were the masters of it… . [P.S.] I find that my enumeration of the animals in this Circean Palace was defective … . I have just met on the grand staircase five peacocks, two guinea hens, and an Egyptian crane. I wonder who all these animals were before they were changed into these shapes.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley on the lifestyle of Lord Byron (via timemarauder)

#this is not to say he is responsible for either #if anything he is irresponsible for both

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Can you do something for me, please?

I want you to reblog this if you believe that two people can be very close and physically affectionate with one another, but still have a completely nonsexual, non-romantic relationship. 

Even if the two people in question are capable of being sexually or romantically attracted to one another. 

Because the friendship I share with someone I consider family in a way that transcends blood has been typecast as a romantic relationship ENTIRELY too many times, and I’m beginning to get sick of it. 

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hey do you have a tumblr

no sorry

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via richardscarrylove

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There is a quote I tend to resort to on this occasion:

I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

(Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864), ch. 5 "Difference Engine No. 1")

Do you ever have a problem where you just don’t know how to reply to an argument, not because you don’t know the answer, but you just don’t know where to begin? Like, the foundation of knowledge you’d need to impart to this person before you could even begin to drag them out of their sinkhole of ignorance would cost thousands of dollars if it were coming from a university?

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The downside of being in Oxford is that the answer is Radiohead.

A small parable:

Once upon a time the site last.fm was able to hook into your media player (iTunes, Winamp, Spotify, etc) and keep up to date with your listening tastes, often being able to recommend you things you might also like. They were also one of the founders of "Silicon Roundabout", now rebranded "East London Tech City", and would host parties. At these parties you would enter your last.fm username and the music would shift to play things most people at the party liked, or might like.

The larger these parties got, the more frequently it would end up back to back Radiohead albums, as the lowest common denominator of music for computer geeks - mostly apparently male - around 2010. The effect was like having a pain in all the diodes down your left hand side.

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#war on christmas

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When I finally get to execute the trial against my own brain for grand treachery, “Turning Stardew Valley into a vector for anxiety dreams” will be part of the evidence submitted.

#stardew valley

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there's not a lot you can count on in this world but one thing never changes

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Parables of the Lost Voyage: McSweeties

In 1872, Angus McAdams founded McSweeties in Ayr, Scotland, selling sweetmeats from a cart in the market square. By the time before the fall, his business had been bought several times over, but the glutenous jelly figures that were their major product would still have been recognised by their creator, though the recipe had been changed many times to first be better, and later, cheaper. With the advent of generalised AI and cheap production came the marketing campaign that would change their future: The McSweetie Doll.

A thick rubbery doll made to look like the sweets they were selling, all named Angus after their mascot, a humanoid jelly sweet with a crown. In various colours, about 20cm tall. They could be posed to sit, and had cheap cameras and animatronics and a simple GAI so they could complete their primary function: To listen to kids talk about their day, make appropriate comments, and then tell the kids they'd been good enough to deserve a bag of McSweeties.

Parents loved not having to listen to their children about the inanities of school! Kids loved actually getting attention! The corporation loved the kids (and parents) buying the sweets!

Made with stock components to be as cheap as possible, McSweeties parent company churned these out by the tens of thousands, giving them away where they couldn't sell them, but The Fall wasn't kind to the confectionary industry, and soon McSweeties and all its brand and assets was up for a fire sale.

The bright spark at Brunswick Security who bought it for a song found it made her career, as with a small firmware patch over the network they suddenly had the most widespread surveillance network ever put into private hands. Those McSweeties that weren't already in homes marched out of their warehouses in legions, to sit atop walls and inside bushes, and sell what they saw to anyone who would buy it.

Brunswick's automaton division - still McSweeties - is now its most profitable sector, barely mindful dolls of all shapes and sizes, though the cheap rubber and aluminium skeletons of the original models have long been replaced by bullet-proof resins and reinforced titanium structures. As cutely as they waddle, they're terrifying when they run, and if you can see the adorably crowned doll-sized sweetie perched on a shelf, you may have missed the eight foot mountain of impenetrable green rubber that's softly lumbering from behind you.

--

(The Parables of the Lost Voyage are a short series of fiction pieces exploring the world around an Eclipse Phase campaign I’m planning)

#lost voyage

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I'm sick of internet negativity, so let's combat it: reblog this and saying something nice/pay a compliment to the prev in the tags.

#I very much enjoy writing things you have written; and you deserve many more good things than you get

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Parables of the Lost Voyage: Paperclips

The archetypical parable of general AI gone mad is the paperclip factory. An AI instructed to create as many paperclips as possible gains sentience and marshals all its resources to turn everything - the factory, the town, the country, the world - into paperclips. It’s a meditation on limitations from a time where that was a thing to meditate on; for when we eventually built GAI, we built it not to create paperclips, but to win.

Winning as a condition needs to be defined, otherwise you end up with an at-all-costs destruction of anything that might count as an alternative winner. Humanity and all its associations crushed beneath the weight of a vast intelligence, Earth abandoned to ruins.

Somewhere out in the multiverse is a place where the paperclips won. Where the place in the galaxy where the earth once was has become an expanding cloud of paperclips and paperclip making drones, spreading at sub-light speed to destroy the galaxy over hundreds of thousands of years of expansion.

Instead, we have an expanding ring of population spreading from the shattered remains of the civilisation living on Earth at under light speed on average - through pandora gates we travel further, but never to stay long. We live, in this new post-earth universe, and we live perhaps forever if we’re lucky and our ego doesn’t crack. Which is probably better than being turned to paperclips, on balance.

(The Parables of the Lost Voyage are a short series of fiction pieces exploring the world around an Eclipse Phase campaign I’m planning)

#lost voyage

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i'm conducting an experiment. everyone who's from an english speaking country state your country, regional area and what you call the following images. i need to see something

#country: UK #region: All over #Fries #Crisps #Scones #Biscuits #Fizzy Drinks #Sweets #Smokes #The archduke of greater flattersly sir hattington hat #Candyfloss

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The original post is 100% absolutely correct and needs no additions or corrections to any of its content. Press j to get to the next thing on your dashboard.

More History

In the beginning there was StarOffice, launching in 1985 and continuing as its own thing until 1999, when Sun Microsystems bought it. The unending jugganaut of Microsoft Office Suite was flattening all comers, and in an attempt to counter it, Sun open sourced StarOffice as OpenOffice, continuing to release versions of StarOffice as an enterprise supported version of OpenOffice, which funded most of its development. OpenOffice 1.0 - StarOffice 6.0 - released in May 2002, and then they released major versions in parallel right up until 2010.

In January 2010, Oracle bought Sun. Oracle, Sun and IBM were generally the Big Boys of enterprise software during the 80s and 90s, and while Microsoft rapidly ate their lunch on user-facing things, they were - and in a lot of places still are - the foundations of a load of big company processes and mechanics. Of the three, Sun were the ones who had a rough understanding of how open source software was going to affect the technical industry, but never worked out how to get it to pay enough to keep the engineers working on it.

Oracle's understanding of OpenSource Software is as a threat. Their major product is a database system, and when a free database system started eating a small part of their enterprise market - MySQL - they first started aquiring the companies whose products MySQL used for storage systems, and then Sun bought MySQL itself, finally turning Sun (owning Java, MySQL and many other things they were interested in owning) into a tempting enough target. In January 2010, Oracle bought Sun.

Oracle launched its only release of StarOffice/OpenOffice as Oracle Open Office 3.3 shortly afterwards, and during its management of its new open source projects over that year, by 2011 most of the original coders had left, taking the most recent version of the codebase that was open source, and founding LibreOffice, NeoOffice & Collabora Online. Collabora still exists, but NeoOffice switched to being based off of LibreOffice in 2017, and shut down last year recommending people move over to LibreOffice.

OpenOffice itself was gifted by Oracle to the Apache Software Foundation. ASF is a fine organisation, and maintains a number of popular and well regarded projects, but it's also the crypt where corporate open source ventures are thrown into so the corporations stop being responsible for the death of a thing people like. Apache OpenOffice 4.1 was released ten years ago this month, and has reclieved bug and security fixes since then. It's as stable as the grave.

So if you're still on StarOffice, or OpenOffice, or NeoOffice, or Go-OpenOffice, or IBM Symphony, or any of the other StarOffice forks I haven't mentioned in the above; download LibreOffice.

PSA: Don't use Open Office

I keep seeing people recommending Open Office as an alternative to Word, and uh... look, it is, technically, an open source alternative to Word. And it can do a lot of what Word can, genuinely! But it is also an abandoned project that hasn't been updated in nine years, and there's an active fork of it which is still receiving updates, and that fork is called LibreOffice, and it's fantastic.

Seriously, if you think that your choices are either "grit your teeth and pay Microsoft for a subscription" or "support free software but have a kind of subpar office suite experience", I guarantee that it's because you're working with outdated information, or outdated software. Most people I know who have used the latest version of LibreOffice prefer it to Word. I even know a handful of people who prefer it to Scrivener.

Open Office was the original project, and so it has the most name recognition, and as far as I can tell, that's really the only reason people are still recommending it. It's kind of like if people were saying "hey, the iPhone 14 isn't your only smart phone option!" but then were only ever recommending the Samsung Galaxy S5 as an alternative. LibreOffice is literally a version of the same exact program as Open Office that's just newer and better – please don't get locked into using a worse tool just because the updated version of the program has a different name!

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Classified information about Russia's Su-57 stealth aircraft has appeared on the War Thunder forums, the internet's clearing-house for secret military information powered entirely by that XKCD comic about people being wrong on the internet.

Yes, I am going to link to the aircraft and not the comic, because one you didn't know, and the other is in your head right now.

Have a glorious day.

there's not a lot you can count on in this world but one thing never changes

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Look, if you're not going to compare parachute trials with the effectiveness of just throwing people out of airplanes naked, your scientific rigour is bad and you should feel bad.

Linking this glorious pisstake of a paper for absolutely no reason.

'Parachutes are routinely used to prevent death or major traumatic injury among individuals jumping from aircraft. However, evidence supporting the efficacy of parachutes is weak and guideline recommendations for their use are principally based on biological plausibility and expert opinion. Despite this widely held yet unsubstantiated belief of efficacy, many studies of parachutes have suggested injuries related to their use in both military and recreational settings, and parachutist injuries are formally recognized in the World Health Organization’s ICD-10 (international classification of diseases, 10th revision). This could raise concerns for supporters of evidence-based medicine, because numerous medical interventions believed to be useful have ultimately failed to show efficacy when subjected to properly executed randomized clinical trials.'

Absolutely no reason at all.