My holiday reading was two novels by Charles Stross: one Laundry novel, The Fuller Memorandum, which I read out of sequence, and The Halting State.
They are both fun reads with lots of ideas. The Fuller Memorandum is set in 2008 and was published in 2010; The Halting State was published in 2008 and is set in 2017. The are both quite geeky but The Halting State much more so, it must be the most unashamedly geeky novel I have ever read. I can recommend them both but beware that the Laundry series is about Lovecraftian horrors and magic is just advanced computing; and Halting State is about online gaming. Which I don't do at all, and yet I enjoyed it.
#AmReading #HaveRead #CharlesStross
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ey! mann! was soll das? warum sehe ich denn das erst jetzt?? niemand hat mir was gesagt! das finde ich eine bodenlose frechheit ... sauerei, das !
#science-fiction #CharlesStross #OtherlandBerlin
#^Pre EuroCon Tabletalk with Charles Stross - Otherland Buchhandlung Berlin
#science-fiction #CharlesStross #OtherlandBerlin
#^Pre EuroCon Tabletalk with Charles Stross - Otherland Buchhandlung Berlin
Connected to the EuroCon at the MetropolCon 2026 in Berlin Charles Stross is coming to the OtherlandWe will have a relaxed Tabeltalk with Charlie about the Euro- and MetropolCon, Fantasy, Science Fiction, the end of the world and technology.Wann: 11. 12. 2025 um 19:30 // Wo: Otherland Please register: …
ey! mann! was soll das? warum sehe ich denn das erst jetzt?? niemand hat mir was gesagt! das finde ich eine bodenlose frechheit ... sauerei, das !
#science-fiction #CharlesStross #OtherlandBerlin
#^Pre EuroCon Tabletalk with Charles Stross - Otherland Buchhandlung Berlin
#science-fiction #CharlesStross #OtherlandBerlin
#^Pre EuroCon Tabletalk with Charles Stross - Otherland Buchhandlung Berlin
Connected to the EuroCon at the MetropolCon 2026 in Berlin Charles Stross is coming to the OtherlandWe will have a relaxed Tabeltalk with Charlie about the Euro- and MetropolCon, Fantasy, Science Fiction, the end of the world and technology.Wann: 11. 12. 2025 um 19:30 // Wo: Otherland Please register: …
Charles Stross, the author ( @cstross ), posted a new blog entry on why high-level executives at companies are pushing "AI" use so strongly onto their workers, even though empirical studies show negative productivity gains:
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2025/12/barnums-law-of-ceos.html
This may be more or less implied by what he wrote, but I would add that high-level executives aren't as likely to see the "this thing generated an incorrect answer / solution" aspect of "AI" use because being empirically correct is not as important to the things a high-level executive does. It's more important that they make decisions quickly and get things moving rather than making the correct decisions. [1]
Less charitably, top executives can't tell the "AI" is giving wrong answers, because they don't know the right answers.
[1] Of course it would be best for all if they could make the correct decision quickly, but you can't have everything. Where would you keep it?
#AI #LLM #CharlesStross #CharlieStross #executive #CEO #decision #answer #WrongAnswer #wat #GeorgeCarlin
Watching United States of Bedlam turning #Trumpland, while reading #charlesstross #thelaundry #labyrinthindex...
What a century, huh?
Born this Day:
Charles David George "Charlie" Stross (born 18 October 1964) is a British writer of science fiction and fantasy. His novel Accelerando won the Locus Award in 2006, and was nominated for the Hugo, Campbell, Clarke, and British Science Fiction Association Awards
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Stross
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e530 — Vibe It! – Ready Player Chum
e530 with Michael and Michael - An AI extravaganza with #VibeCoding, #AI #GamingChums, rating #LLMs via #Infocom games, #robots for #construction, #SelfAssembling #SpaceHabitats and a whole lot more.https://gamesatwork.biz/2025/09/29/e530-vibe-it-ready-player-chum/
Now, "Neptune's Brood", it looks at what happens thousands of years later:
Generations of robots making descendants so advanced that they're truly post-human, super-human, the financial and technological structures of interstellar colonization, the societal structures of entities that can clone their minds at will, sects of human-worshipping post-humans that consider de-extincting humans and colonizing star systems with them a holy calling, and a conspiracy, murder and fraud mystery on a galactic scale.
If you're nerdy enough to appreciate heists based on counter-party risk mitigation protocols, this book is for you. In fact, if you're like that, I'd recommend that you read NB first, like I did, and then enjoy SC as a prequel that fleshes out the backstory to some of the societal and technical elements.
The book is a conspiracy mystery and a cloak-and-dagger romp across the solar system with hard-sci-fi space travel so grueling and time-consuming that only robots can handle it. It's also an interesting examination of where capitalism goes at its most inhuman -- when there aren't even any humans. And finally it's an examination of the human condition by entities both trying to be human and trying to stop being so human.
It has loads of cool ideas -- how did we go about making slave androids, what happens to identity when you're an AI and can be copied, how do you create meaning when the people who defined your meaning went extinct? The world-building is creative and plausible. And the mystery has several unexpected twists of identity, allegiances and epic historical shifts.
If you find this intriguing and you're not very sensitive to mental and physical abuse when it's important to plot and motivations, or weird forms and uses of sex that post-human entities will develop in the absence of humans and human morality, I can recommend this book.
Civil servants versus cosmic horrors in The Laundry RPG. Think Brazil meets Cthulhu, but with more paperwork and fewer ducts. Not quite as dystopian as our current government, mind you - at least these lot admit they're watching. Pre-orders open for this bureaucratic nightmare from Cubicle 7 https://l.d20.ninja/2p9cpsxb #RPG #cthulhu #cubicle #theLaundry #hpLovecraft #callOfCthulhu #charlesStross
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