Pete Alex Harris🦡🕸️🌲/∞🪐∫

SF writer and software engineer.
#Languages, #science, #writing. he or they (shrug)
Glasgow Writers Group and Glasgow SF Writers' Circle.
It's sometimes difficult being me, but it's impossible to be anyone else.

website: https://torn-and-crumpled.page
all my books bundle: https://scav.gumroad.com/l/sHUm
pixelfed: petealexharris (npub1a7n…txmq)

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petealexharris_at_mastodon.scot@momostr.pink

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relay.damus.io

nos.lol

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Last Notes

2026-10-03 07:48:53 UTC

You can't win at capitalism. You just have to survive it while you do the human things that have true worth.

2026-09-25 11:45:36 UTC

#ScribesAndMakers 25 Sep
Our next featured creator uses a separate Fedi account dedicated to their book. Do you use different accounts for different creative purposes?
Not much. I have a pixelfed I hardly use. I have a different email just for writer stuff that I don't use yet. I thought about going on wandering.shop for posting about writing, since I have friends there. But in the end, I'm just me in all contexts, so there's no reason to add complexity.

2026-09-22 11:13:10 UTC

#ScribesAndMakers 22 Sep
Promotion day. Self or someone else. Or both.
Self: check out my books here https://torn-and-crumpled.page/books.html
Other: Glasgow Science Fiction Writers Circle have an anthology "Haverin" coming out on 9th October, to line up with FantasyCon, in Glasgow this year.
There's also going to be a signing event on 21st October at the Waterstones on Sauchiehall Street.

2026-09-20 14:43:22 UTC

#WordWeavers 20 Sep
How do your characters access water or whatever they need to drink?
In one story "Pure" they get it delivered to the space station by automated cargo shuttle. It's fine, don't worry about it.

2026-09-20 12:14:13 UTC

#ScribesAndMakers 20 Sep
Repossess?
In The Source of Fire, Jens gets his ship confiscated as a potential existential threat (which he's unreasonably indignant about, given the reason for this is something on the ship that he stole). Then the crew steal the ship back from the Customs men, but not for him, then Jens recovers it from the mutineers, albeit with a large hole in it.
There's a lot going on.

2026-09-15 06:53:09 UTC

#ScribesAndMakers 15 Sep
What's a situation where you feel a ';' definitely works better than a '.' ?
1. Where the rhythm and prosody of the sentence as if read aloud is better than breaking with a full stop.
2. Where the two clauses are linked enough. How linked? I know it when I see it.
3. In a toot where the link is causal but you don't want to waste characters on "because"; space is limited.

2026-09-14 14:15:47 UTC

#ScribesAndMakers 14 Sep
What [types of] story setting [do you prefer]?
I like ideas, so I like it when the setting of a story is rich with ideas in itself. I loved China Miéville's Perdido Street Station for that, and Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice series.
I also like a cosy setting in the past, so I'm quite fond of Jane Austen, HG Wells, Agatha Christie.
When I'm writing, setting comes from the idea, but I like a setting with a particular feel that brings out a voice I want to write in.

2026-09-13 09:56:50 UTC

#ScribesAndMakers 13 Sep
How pedantic are you?
Where common usage doesn't cause problems and the details aren't the point, not at all. I'm happy to call a tomato a vegetable or a fruit depending on context (it's both), and I don't care whether Pluto is a planet.
Where fine distinctions matter, I will split hairs down to the atomic level. Not everything is a problem, but when there is a problem, I care very much exactly how it is described and quantified.
PS. Trans women are women.

2026-09-13 09:47:23 UTC

Tempted to deGoogle my chromebook, but somewhat intimidated by the process (involves taking the base off and removing a firmware write protection screw, blasting the firmware with a completely new BIOS and installing from scratch with non-Google Linux)
But it has to be done. The version of Chrome on this is EOL and no longer works for everything I want a browser to do, and I want to replace it with Vivaldi anyway.

2026-09-12 16:42:47 UTC

One of the reasons I love it when the fedi is doing a bit I can join in with, is I've had to reign in my sense of humour a lot at work.
And as a white guy in my 50s, let me just clarify this doesn't mean I want to make bigoted jokes or sexually harass my co-workers, OK?
I mean being jokingly self-deprecating or gently hating on the defects of software tools or AI.
It is taken disproportionately badly under unpredictable conditions, like stepping on a mine or being noticed by the Greek gods.

2026-09-12 16:29:39 UTC

#WordWeavers 12 Sep
If you removed one supporting character from your story, whose absence would change the plot the most?
For disOrder, I'm going to say Elaine. She's a pillar of decency among a nest of unreliable, sinister, ulterior-motivated, creepy, cruel, narcissistic, stupid and just plain malign characters. Also she makes a couple of plot-relevant mistakes.
If you remove her, the book has a lot less to say.

2026-09-11 15:05:59 UTC

#Wordweavers 11 Sep
What does your MC believe about themselves at the beginning of the story that turns out to be completely wrong?
Ash, The Silk Mind: that his job as Badger Survey team leader is pointless.
Calnor, disOrder: that he's got past whatever bad decisions he made when he was young and political (which he can't remember in detail) and has decided to settle down to a quiet, harmless life on a new planet.
Jens, The Source of Fire: that he's a great man ready to do great things.

2026-09-11 14:55:05 UTC

Also did the black DNS magic necessary so I can receive emails directed to my non-public email @ my website domain into my non-public inbox @ my new email provider.
That was too much deep computer touching for one day tho.

2026-09-11 14:49:56 UTC

#ScribesAndMakers 11 Sep
Have you ever been part of a collaborative group for your creative work?
I think the Shadows at the Door anthology counts, and the upcoming Glasgow Science Fiction Writer's Circle 40th year anthology "Haverin" (due out in October, you should buy one, it looks great)
I have a few collab ideas, but I don't have the time right now that I'd need to put in to get them done, or available writer and artist partners who also have that time. Maybe one day.

2026-09-10 19:51:04 UTC

#ScribesAndMakers 10 Sep
Our next featured creator is an acronym. Do you use acronyms in your work?
I don't think I do, much. I don't think I've invented many for world-building, anyway.
I think the closest is RED or RD leading to the slur "ardie" in disOrder. It's not really an acronym; it's implied from context that the slang term came from the initialism RD.

2026-09-10 19:33:39 UTC

Try to live your life so that otherwise kind people who look after each other and are nice to cats don't still make dark jokes about your death … and keep doing so every year afterwards.

2026-09-09 17:36:56 UTC

#WordWeavers 9 Sep
What secret would cause the most damage if it were revealed in your story right now?
What Mr Lock has come back to prevent.

2026-09-08 07:37:56 UTC

#scribesandmakers 8 Sep - Gauge
She checked again, but there was no point. The fuel gauge said 60%. Of course it did. Every readout was digital, not one light was on because a physical circuit was closed, not one dial was a needle held in place by a real pressure or voltage. The whole control room was run on a 21st century computer, and those bastard things LIE.

2026-09-07 13:26:35 UTC

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I think they might have a cousin in southern India ழ (Tamil lateral retroflex approximant)

2026-09-07 10:36:33 UTC

#WordWeavers 7 Sep
Describe a moment when one of your characters realizes they’ve made a terrible mistake.
Although in this case Joreth is blaming Calnor for making the mistake. His brain situation is complicated.
https://media.mastodon.scot/media_attachments/files/117/229/306/760/990/135/original/861238639784a231.png

2026-09-07 06:18:54 UTC

#ScribesAndMakers 7 Sep
What 'character' (letter, number, symbol, punctuation, space) would make a great main character?
Hiragana nu: ぬ
Adorable.

2026-09-06 17:21:38 UTC

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Authors, how to tell if something containing the key words "Tik Tok Marketing" is a scam: Yes.

2026-09-01 16:40:55 UTC

#ScribesAndMakers 1 Sep
With many new people here, let's do another round of introductions. Tell us something about yourself and your creativity.
I'm a mostly SF writer in the Glasgow area. Day job is software engineer. I have a lot of small odd ideas that make it into short stories, a few medium-sized ones turn into novels. Some of my stories have been good enough, or at least the right kind of odd, to get published.
What to expect: no gore, no SA, too much science.
Link to ebooks in bio

2026-08-31 13:58:53 UTC

#WordWeavers 31 Aug
What's one thing you hope readers remember long after they finish your story?
The line they needed at the time, or the idea that they wanted to think about a bit more.

2026-08-29 18:51:38 UTC

#ScribesAndMakers 29 Aug
Do you know what you wanted to be at 11?
I did want to be a science fiction writer about that time, but because it seemed like fun. I had no stories to tell and no idea how to do it for another 30 years.
As for what I'd do for a paid job, I think I assumed I'd be an organic chemist like my dad; the jobs I ended up doing after I found out I liked computer programming *didn't exist* when I was 11.

2026-08-29 15:14:24 UTC

#WordWeavers 29 Aug
What writing accomplishment are you quietly proud of?
I'm wary of pride. I'm quite happy with disOrder, The Source of Fire, and my story collections. But I'm not *quiet* about it, FFS. Buy my ebook bundle! You'll get all that and more for a tenner.
I'm *quietly* happy with Salvage, because you can't get that anywhere yet. I'll let you know, you may be SURE of that.

2026-08-27 08:54:24 UTC

#WordWeavers 27 Aug
Which character would win a trivia contest?
Who's setting the categories and the questions?
Celandine has a powerful intellect, and has made a lifetime work of not just knowing things, but joining up the knowledge into interrelated understanding. Ask her about most things in her world that anyone might know, and chances are she'll know it and know why.

2026-08-26 20:25:22 UTC

A Kind of Guy who sees a painting of Susannah and the Elders and posts NotAllElders

2026-08-22 05:41:58 UTC

#WritersCoffeeClub 22 Aug
Have you ever used a sensitivity reader?
I don't think I've attempted anything that'd need one, and needing one would feel like a sign that I'm trying to tell a story I don't know. Others might dare, not me.
The very occasional "you probably didn't intend this, but did you know...?" from my writing group has been plenty to help me inform myself. I've never had a full-on "Yikes. Not cool" from them, and they're good people who wouldn't hold back if it had to be said.

2026-08-16 08:48:24 UTC

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Is it Hittite? I'm a bit vague about who was writing what in the bronze age...

2026-08-14 08:45:20 UTC

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"Never say something clever about war, that bastard Sun Tzu will always get the credit"
--- Napoleon

2026-08-12 20:48:50 UTC

Photos of the total eclipse with the corona streaming out and big flares of gas round the edge are spooky not because "ooh dark during the day!", but because it's a direct reminder of what a monstrous thing a star is, and hey there's one *right there*, 8 minutes away.

2026-08-11 09:19:37 UTC

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It's not like Arthur C Clarke or Isaac Asimov ever mentioned any possible unintended consequences of thoughtlessly giving a non-human slave intelligence impossible or contradictory requirements.

2026-08-11 09:14:43 UTC

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Maybe creating things with power to affect the real world but no understanding of it and no accountability no matter what they do wasn't a great idea.

2026-08-02 21:41:34 UTC

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Yikes. They have it backwards.
I mean, there being a "normal" way for your mind to work is so obviously a social construct. How could it not be?
Not accommodating variation is just a shitty way to treat people. That shitty behaviour is what should have to provide evidence to justify itself, not whether perfectly normal variations attested over centuries of human behaviour are real enough to deserve respect.

2026-07-31 09:10:42 UTC

Of all the big LLM companies, the most ethical one in terms of ripping off copyrighted works is GrokAI, which is only trained on Mein Kampf and Lolita.

2026-07-28 07:29:05 UTC

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What is an authentication layer but a miserable pile of secrets.

2026-07-07 08:42:26 UTC

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That is the explicit policy of the UK government wrt opposing genocide or climate change, as far as I can tell.
If you need to do some criminal damage to an arms factory or whatever, try to make it look like you're burgling the place I guess.

2026-07-07 03:53:41 UTC

Never break the law for a good reason. If you break the law for gain or just because you felt like it, you might get off lightly. You'll at least only have the usual burden of raising reasonable doubt that what you did was what you're charged with.
If you say you had a good reason to break the law, that's an attack on the legitimacy of the law itself. They'll fuckin *get* you for that.

2026-07-06 08:46:10 UTC

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And there are equally old warnings, which is ironic, since there aren't any djinn or demons or fairies to make dangerous slippery-worded pacts with, so we built some ourselves. This is fine.
I assume the malicious deceptive beings in our ancestral environment that these cautionary tales were really warning about were ... us.

2026-06-26 06:57:28 UTC

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Private companies are efficient, but at extracting wealth, not at providing services.
Publicly-owned utilities don't make a profit because they're not supposed to. If they did, it'd be *inefficient*: extracting money from the economy would be an unwanted side-effect of operation that the government would have to correct for.
Handing utilities to private companies always immediately has that side-effect *instead of* the effect of providing utilities.

2026-06-15 13:14:59 UTC

It's illegal again to support the specific organisation "Palestine Action" in the UK. So I support protests and direct action against the ongoing genocide in Palestine, if not any specific organisation doing those things.

2026-05-26 08:28:55 UTC

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It also presumes a level of social cohesion and sense of belonging that has been discarded by successive governments over decades of austerity as not important enough to appear on the balance sheet.
What can I say to "Buy British." Fuck off, what has "British" done for me? Now I have a blue-black passport worth 1/28 as much as my wine-coloured one from before Brexit. Is Palantir British, aye? YOU go and buy British before telling ME what to do.

2026-05-19 10:19:31 UTC

Of course the Greens shouldn't step aside so Andy #Burnham can win a seat. If he needs Green votes to win, let him earn them with a credible vision and change of direction for the Labour party towards progressive politics.
If he can't do that, he's the one who needs to get out of the way.

2026-05-12 12:15:46 UTC

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It's almost like that 1% extra income tax on the highest earners somehow didn't make the sky rain rocks and fire after all. I'm beginning to think a land value tax might even not do that.

2026-05-10 11:32:04 UTC

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But for distilled water, I doubt tap water has so many dissolved salts that them not being there is significant. Your tissues are what, a 5% solution? That's a lot compared to the tiny amount in tap water.

2026-05-10 11:15:48 UTC

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I heard that if you drink too much of it, it messes with your biochemistry. I seem to remember it kills mice once a certain % of their water has been deuterated. Possibly once it's incorporated in your enzymes they stop working as well.

2026-05-10 09:56:04 UTC

#WritersCoffeeClub 10 May
What wisdom do you wish you could share with your younger self?
That'd be private, and different from what I'd share publicly in the hope that it benefits a younger other person, which is the Q I'll actually answer.
Work out who you can be authentically that will be happy being you, and don't worry about the nonsensical answers your society provides for what happiness is or how things are supposed to work.

2026-05-07 07:02:50 UTC

Good morning, all.
Today in various parts of the UK, you get to punch Nazis just by drawing a small cross on a bit of paper.
Why would you not.

2026-04-21 07:39:57 UTC

#WritersCoffeeClub 21 Apr
What's a (maybe silly) hill you're willing to defend?
Europe isn't a continent, it's part of Eurasia, but Iceland is a new tiny continent on the plate boundary, since it has areas of rhyolitic rock you could call new continental crust.

2026-04-11 21:52:17 UTC

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I don't see the point of arresting large numbers of people it'll be all but impossible to convict. A court said the government couldn't lawfully have made the protest illegal. How do you get a jury to agree that grannies are terrorists because even though the government broke the law by saying so, their unlawful rule is still *technically* in force? It's absurd, and the court should have voided the proscription to avoid this nonsense.

2026-03-29 11:09:37 UTC

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I don't see why the normal operations of political parties should be funded by people who don't support them, or indeed, people they intend to actively harm.
Cap the per-person donations and make them fund themselves from popular support.
Then have a public budget for mailings and party political broadcasts accessible to any parties registered and standing candidates in a specific election.

2026-03-23 10:55:56 UTC

Little Englanders foaming at the mouth about Islam in Britain, you sound like a 75 year old pished guy in a bowler hat and orange sash ranting in the pub about the looming threat of the papacy.
Ordinary Muslims you'd encounter in the UK are no more sinister and alien than ordinary Catholics. One day a week they maybe (or not) go to a fancy building to talk about God in a way that you don't connect with. Please try to be normal about that rather than let it eat your whole identity.

2026-03-22 09:25:44 UTC

Move purposefully and fix things.
Move gently and nurture life.
Move implacably and break chains.

2026-03-16 11:36:19 UTC

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Nobody knows how to end a war. Joining in has rarely done it, because it brings more factions into play and adds more grievances and more targets.
Starmer is a fool, and his willingness to be the tool of monsters is going to kill tens of thousands of people.

2026-03-15 11:40:14 UTC

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I think the far right have confused the American culture war manosphere bubble with how things are in Britain, perhaps out of wishful thinking.
Either that or they're confusing middle-aged men with the emotional development of a teenager as a representation of actual young men.

2026-03-14 17:11:03 UTC

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I think in general, even where generative AI kind of works, there's no productivity gain. It allows you to produce a great *volume* of documents, code, etc but not more *value* because that isn't in the text but in the ideas, understanding, morale etc of people in the business.
If you lay them off, you're admitting you didn't know what to do with that value or know that's where the value was.

2026-03-09 15:02:28 UTC

If I could put my finger on the different scale of the problem of starting a forever war in Afghanistan and starting a forever war with Iran, it's that half the world's shipping doesn't have to sail right past Afghanistan.
Guerrilla warfare used to mean losing the occasional truck or collaborator. Now oil tankers and container ships are on the menu.
Iran can't possibly *win* a war against the US, but they can make everybody lose, and why wouldn't they? Why *shouldn't* they use that deterrent?

2026-03-04 14:45:16 UTC

Paedophile billionaires starting wars to bring about the apocalypse are making mere revolution, trying them for their crimes, and nationalisation of their assets look like a measured, entirely thinkable, perhaps inevitable alternative.
Who knew the Overton Window could wrap round to the other side if you push it hard enough?

2026-02-27 09:33:35 UTC

If you're living in a time of monsters, no you aren't, you're living in a time of cowards. The monsters are and have always been outnumbered.

2026-02-25 11:32:57 UTC

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It could work again. They are schooling like fish, presenting thousands of moving targets in the hope that justice won't be able to pick many of them out, and relying on the idea that taking down a whole class of rich predatory men is socially unthinkable.
But we can think it. The fact that it's written down means lists can be made. The fact that it was international means one country's captured DOJ can't protect them all. Justice can get them one at a time. We can hope it does.

2026-02-22 11:07:55 UTC

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They could have cared even slightly about losing the progressive vote any time in the last 10 years, and they wouldn't have to fear it now that it's happening.
They even had a recent clear warning: at the last GE the Greens took some seats. The seal is broken; nobody can say Green is a wasted vote now.
That was the time to understand Labour's election win came not from moving right, but disgust with the Tories, and how fragile it'd be if their "Change" slogan was empty.

2026-02-19 21:35:04 UTC

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The same answer as I'd give for president of an independent Scotland (a more rational political entity, tbh):
1. You don't need one. It's customary for a state to have a "head", but there's no compelling reason to.
2. If you do have one, do NOT give them constitutional powers. A ceremonial figurehead can be elected by single plebiscite, yes. A head of the executive branch FUCK NO. Veto power over the people's parliament? Get in the sea. The people are sovereign.

2026-02-18 12:45:29 UTC

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SMH have these people never heard one of the great quotes of software engineering lore: "if it doesn't have to work I can make it as fast as you like"?
Isn't that from The Mythical Man Month or something?

2026-02-15 12:34:38 UTC

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And it's worse than that. An AI doesn't even simulate reality, it has no model of reality. It only processes tokens.
It's amazing how plausibly rearranging words about things can give the *impression* of a sentence with a meaning, but that's all.
Of course it's worse when the tokens are line segments of a diagram, middle-game chess moves etc. There's more meaning required per token, and the AI has none.

2026-02-13 16:46:43 UTC

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Yeah, I agree, they have put themselves in a terrible situation for the worst reasons, and if it can be made more terrible, so it affects their ability to cooperate with each other, it should be.
But the message to them shouldn't be "help us undermine your boss" it should be "when this is over you're going to be living in that detention centre until your trial date".

2026-02-13 16:25:24 UTC

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He's still a dick who believes he's entitled to play out his power fantasy, whether because the people he's doing it to are "illegals" or "bitches". If he believes anything with all his heart it's that. So I think that hypothetical guy is not going to stop doing it even if he also resents the assholes above him in the hierarchy. It's part of his pay package, and a very cash-efficient perk from his boss's point of view.

2026-02-13 16:10:32 UTC

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I don't mind if someone tries this and it throws a bit of sand in the gears of the concentration camp industrial complex the US seems to have going on.
But let's be clear. There is NO real difference between a "racist, misogynist asshole" and a "hardcore ideologue or fanatic". Racism and misogyny are extremist ideologies grounded in passionate false belief just as much as Maoism or Naziism. If they look less wild, more normal, then oops, well there's the problem.

2026-02-06 07:58:05 UTC

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Domain expert here: they aren't extremely effective for me in my field (programming) because to tell an LLM precisely enough what to do, I'd have to use a verbose English description, and I've already constructed the solution in my head in a more structural form that isn't words. Turning it back into words to tell an LLM what code to generate is a step backwards.

2026-01-26 17:20:25 UTC

The Tory party's talent pool dried up into stagnant slime when their candidate selection process devolved into finding incompetent but well-connected sociopaths who were good at sounding unhinged for the dwindling and bitter membership.
Now #ReformUK's candidate selection process seems to be poaching those incompetents who aren't even well-connected now after shitting the bed in various ways, but are more unhinged than ever.
So, the same arseholes who lost the last election to fuckin Starmer

2026-01-13 11:29:51 UTC

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That's not a secret, also not the point.
The 2 main things about free software that offend capital are:
1. Capital can't appropriate it easily and enclose the commons because of capital's own copyright laws
2. Individual human skill can't be owned by a company: it's a rare form of workers owning the means of production
LLMs attack this by:
1. selectively ignoring copyright with the blessing of the powerful
2. eroding the value of human skill to rebalance power in capital's favour

2026-01-13 11:13:27 UTC

I think the appearance of free software really broke the oligarch's brains. People are just giving away stuff that should be Shareholder Value? And we *can't* buy it off them and own it? People are just running a compiler whenever they like to make whatever they want without paying anyone?
The push to adopt LLM-powered code generation tools is so frenzied and desperate partly because it's a perceived solution to claw back ownership of the means of production into the Right Hands.

2025-12-23 11:46:04 UTC

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Wording is precise; it's going to be impossible to credibly call it support for a proscribed organisation as such.
One could simply be supporting the prisoners' right to a timely fair trial, which isn't illegal. It can't in general be illegal to support them in their interactions with the courts, or it'd be illegal for them to have a lawyer too.
I mean, they could be arresting her because they don't know what else to do, but the Met can't intimidate her if the IDF couldn't.

2025-12-10 09:23:37 UTC

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1: Labour didn't promise any specific change. They used the slogan "Change"
2 & 3: As pro-status-quo centrists, they don't want to change systems by revoking anything already established, even if they criticised it before. They'll add ID cards but not revisit EU membership. They'll proscribe protest organisations, but not withdraw foreign policy support for a genocide.
4: I'd like to see any evidence at all that Labour are confronting the forces ranged against our democracy.

2025-12-04 18:39:14 UTC

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I struggle with the idea they should be treated as though striking has extra ethical problems for them so that can be used as leverage against them.
The doctors' disputes with the NHS in Scotland get resolved relatively quickly, so it's clear there's a political choice being made.

2025-12-04 10:52:22 UTC

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Quick poll:
Who do you think has the moral high ground?

2025-11-28 20:09:22 UTC

Just watched that really uncomfortable Star Trek TNG episode where everyone in the crew is playing the computer game that jerks you off.
Sorry if you'd forgotten that one and didn't want to be reminded that it exists.

2025-11-26 14:46:53 UTC

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But you do need to attack the leaders. You need to erode their image, ridicule them, dig dirt on them. That's 100% fair game, because they are what the negative populist has instead of a positive vision.
Farage is a racist, this is known from way back. He's also a gobshite and a grifter with nothing positive to offer UK politics. Having that absorbed into the electorate's consciousness is going to matter at the next election.
If it can be done to Jeremy Corbyn it can be done fairly to Farage.

2025-11-26 14:42:41 UTC

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This is one reason why it's a mis-step to make people too frightened about climate change by negative populism.
1) they will make bad decisions
2) which may include voting for a strong leader who'll put up machine-gun nests on the coast to stop all those brown people from fleeing the climate disasters and coming here.
The positive populist move is to show people what can be done about it, and what you're going to do, and how you're going to mitigate harm for ordinary people like them.

2025-11-26 14:39:22 UTC

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People make bad decisions when they're afraid, and the aim of right wing negative populism is to get them to make bad decisions *in your favour*.
But the gap there is, people with nothing to vote *for* are likely to stay at home, and you only want them to do that after you win.
The gap is filled with cruelty (which is cheap and of low value, but some people really love it) and strong leaders. People will vote for a strong leader and willingly ignore what he's going to do to them.

2025-11-26 14:36:05 UTC

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Consider two kinds of populism, which I'm going to call negative and positive. I don't at this point mean that negative populism is Bad and positive is Good, I just mean one focuses on engaging popular support by attacking things people don't want (or are told they don't want) and the other does it by presenting a vision of something they do want or can be told they do want.
Currently, the right is mostly doing negative populism. Ban this, stop that, deport them, lock 'em up.

2025-11-26 14:32:58 UTC

Had a few thoughts about whether we should stoop to the right's level and engage in personal attacks, or take the high road and stick to a policy message.
And the answer is yes.

2025-11-26 08:39:21 UTC

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Yes, this is unsatisfactory: the process is supposed to resolve the issue not just legally but politically.
If the government say, in effect, "we were right, the court agrees, but you lot aren't to be told why" that does nothing to end the debate, or the protests, which won't become MORE illegal.
Their position is morally untenable. Maybe the best outcome for them, too, is to lose, and just bullshit us that they were only taking a prudent course with the info known at the time.

2025-11-24 07:24:24 UTC

Yesterday I bothered to look it up, and apparently the conference pear is named for the National British Pear Conference of 1885 where it won first prize.
OK, but.
I haven't heard of this conference ever happening again (no Wikipedia article for the event itself), and there aren't any better pears as far as I know, so is it possible humanity achieved a fairly satisfactory pear 140 years ago and then lost interest?

2025-11-18 10:32:38 UTC

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Also anyway history is just our explanation of what happened, not the thing that happened itself. History rhyming can just be the wheel of fashion about how to describe things turning. Every day is brand new, too much information, and probably better described in a different way than the previous one.

2025-11-15 22:31:09 UTC

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You don't talk with nazis to understand nazis. Apart from anything else, nazis either don't understand much about what they are, or they do and they'll fucking *lie*. You study them, if you must, as you would study anything else dangerous.
You don't inject yourself with ebola to study virology. You don't breathe in lungfuls of fluorine to study chemistry.
But this dipshit has smartest guy in the room syndrome.

2025-11-10 10:22:35 UTC

Again the BBC demonstrate that by their criteria, criticising established power is bias, but sucking up to it is impartial, since sucking up to established power is normal and natural and a completely morally neutral thing to do.
Exercising journalistic power against the more powerful is right out: a resign or be fired offence. It's *taking sides*, you see.
Wielding a journalistic platform carelessly against those without power is, again, normal and natural therefore impartial.

2025-10-25 11:06:52 UTC

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In that respect, I'm a gradualist. But my long term aims and ideals are very far to the left and more socially humane than the midpoint of the UK's political mainstream. I'd vote for a moderate policy, not because moderate is better than ideal, but to move towards the ideal from where we are now by an achievable step.

2025-10-25 11:03:31 UTC

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If you have humane ethical principles and defend your policy proposals by evidence and data, then going slowly enough to not to startle the population and make them dig their heels in, allowing for the imperfect rationality of those you aim to serve, isn't centrism, it's gradualism. You're not aiming for a "centre" between different ideological goals as if the balance itself had value, you're aiming for what you determine to be the best policy for now.

2025-10-25 09:53:36 UTC

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The problem for centrists is in *saying* reasonable, pragmatic, balanced policies are what is needed, but then completely failing to do that in the only way that can work: evidence-based policy with humane goals.
Because the evidence points a little further left and progressive than they feel the Holy and Perfect Centre to be, so the evidence *must* be wrong.
But trying to hit the centre between humane and inhumane or evidence-based and bullshit is a fool's politics.

2025-10-19 16:37:32 UTC

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Every place name in Britain is at least 3 layers deep of invaders misunderstanding the language of the people who were living there before them. Now they are written down in "English", a language with spelling that is possibly a series of practical jokes which got accidentally fossilised by the invention of the printing press.

2025-10-16 07:29:40 UTC

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Kind of, but since javascript became standard on browsers, that's always been available for free. And it hasn't been hard to get free compilers for C or interpreters for Perl, Python or Lisp. There's just been an overwhelming barrier for most people to figuring out where to start and what you might want to do with them.
Some of it might be that what you can make in the first year or so of learning doesn't feel very impressive next to the apps and games you can buy.

2025-09-27 16:08:34 UTC

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Yeah a general strike has the advantage that most of the people taking part aren't out in the streets to be shot at, and even if they were, shooting them doesn't make them go in to work the next day.

2025-09-27 09:44:16 UTC

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Sorry if I ranted a bit much. You're right it's not a binary. I see some hope in grassroots replacement of not-fascist-yet candidates with anti-fascist ones.
I think there's a difference between institutional safeguards and legal safeguards. A fascist can ignore the rules, rules are paper, but it should be hard for them to get institutions to ignore the rules. Institutions are made of people and culture. It's not nothing.

2025-09-27 09:34:09 UTC

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"Not fascism yet for the next 4 years" is better than "fascism for an indefinite time", sure. But it's NOT GOOD ENOUGH. It's not acceptable. It's a fool's bargain, harm deferral rather than harm reduction.
The correct alternative to a constant risk of fascism is the dismantling of the tools of fascism, institutional safeguards against it, and restructuring to solve the economic problems fascists use to recruit support for their simple, cruel non-solutions.

2025-09-22 07:28:36 UTC

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Of course. It's not even about "statistical and computational limits" like this was a deep question that only careful research could resolve.
The simple fact is *a recombination of words from a set of true statements is not necessarily a true statement*
People have been pointing this out right from the start, and being ignored because the party trick of human-like language was so compelling.

2025-09-20 15:28:13 UTC

What i find frustrating about people sucked into the right wing populist hate vortex is there's something so obviously missing. Why can't they see it? Is it missing in them too?
The whole vibe is negative. No positivity, no vision for improvement. Despite slogans about making things great again, there's no proposal to even make them better.
No plan to train and hire enough doctors, nurses and teachers, build enough houses, run enough trains.
It's all stopping, cutting, banning, deporting.

2025-09-04 08:52:05 UTC

I've found a use for AI. If you start typing a sentence and it successfully autocompletes what you were about to say, it was obviously something trite and overdone, so delete it and think of something better.

2025-08-27 12:08:37 UTC

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Campbell tried to claim a particular way of looking at some stories as if it was a hallowed tradition, but he was a narrow-minded jerk at best.
My culture includes *reading* all of those early kinds of SF, but the fact that they *exist* isn't a tradition. A tradition would be a thing a significant number of people were still doing just because "that's how we write SF," and if there is such a group, I'm not part of it.

2025-08-27 10:38:47 UTC

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Since a lot of things people call traditions are only from the last century, you could say that. But then I'd have to say only people writing like Mary Shelley or Jules Verne would be writing traditional SF, which is hardly anyone, so it's a localised tradition not part of my culture in the same way that town in Nova Scotia has a pumpkin boat race every year.