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  RE: https://c.im/@BBC/117523615853066635 Note that the current owner of Poundland, the US firm Gordon Brothers, is a retail-focussed investment firm who specialize in flipping retailers. Don't call it Private Equity! Call it what it is—retail chain serial killers. They previously murdered G. I. Joe's, The Sharper Image, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Borders.

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  RE: https://wandering.shop/@cstross/117512568357435117 If you think that's a bit bloodchillingly draconian of me, here, have a reason why: https://time.com/article/2026/10/27/carbon-emissions-ultra-rich-oxfam-report/

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  #WritersCoffeeClub October 27: As a writer, what do you need right now? A straight street—the Royal Mile will do—at least a kilometer long, with a billionaire impaled on a stake every two metres on both sides. (Don't worry, we won't run out of billionaires before we get to the end.) And complete criminalization of all commercial applications of AI. Plus the end of crapitalism as a cherry on top.

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  TFW you go for a regular coffee date with another author and over the course of two mochas your head catches fire and you conceive of the missing fourth subplot to the space opera you’ve been chewing on for a decade that puts EVERYTHING into a much better, tighter perspective frame … (and adds the missing Banksian grand guignol climax it was missing).

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  #WritersCoffeeClub 25 Oct. Tell us about inspiration from an unlikely source. The 2008 Global Financial Crisis! Without it, I'm pretty sure I'd never have written "Neptune's Brood", which is a space opera about financial fraud on a scale so vast the perpetrators had to colonise 200 new star systems to launder the proceeds. I don't think even Elon Musk is thinking that big … yet.

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  RE: https://mastodon.scot/@andrewducker/117497585708793727 "My eleven-year-old daughter has cancer, and while I love her very much, I am struggling to justify the expense of her chemotherapy when the same money could be used to improve the welfare of tens of millions of farmed shrimp. This is an uncomfortable conclusion, and I want to emphasize that I did not arrive at it lightly …" A masterpiece of longtermist rightthink! You read. Doubleplusgood rationalism!

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  #WritersCoffeeClub October 23: How do you make sure you deliver on your writerly promises? It's all about closure. Readers will forgive a few dangling story hooks in a long work as long as you deliver a suitably scaled dollop of closure for the main arc, resolving the main source of narrative tension.

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  RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@pndc/117490200494079950 Paging @Uilebheist

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  The USA has been in a Depression for over 12 months now. Supporting evidence: https://hachyderm.io/@jalefkowit/117474615137864061

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  Should the next New Management novel tackle Omegaverse fanfic in the context of the Laundry Universe?

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  Found elsenet:

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  RE: https://mstdn.social/@OregonLive/117452861692494320 While I appreciate the sentiment, this is fundamentally stupid; it's hyper-specific, livestreaming wasn't a thing two decades ago and will be replaced by something else before long, and it consumes legislative time that could be better spent on, I dunno, abolishing capital punishment completely, perhaps?

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  NEWSFLASH: Trump appoints Liz Truss as White House Press Secretary. It's a good match for her abilities, apparently.

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  RE: https://wandering.shop/@cstross/117450071591623123 This happens: grifters build a copy of a book, slap a *40% OFF* medallion on the cover, then list it for sale under a name that looks like the author, but with a unicode homograph replacing a letter. This is close enough to show up in bookstore searches, so a bunch of readers get sucked in the 40% OFF label and give money to a crook. As soon as my publisher tells Amazon or Apple or whoever they yank it off sale, but by then it's too la...

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  #WritersCoffeeClub – 16th Oct. How do you feel about people reading your works without buying a personal copy? Long-standing publishing lore is, there are roughly four readers per book sold. This includes library loans, second-hand sales, and friends borrowing books. This is normal. I don't get mad at warez sites (most downloads go unread, most readers wouldn't have bought one), but I *DO* get enraged by pirates who re-list and sell my ebooks on amazon (they're stealing income fro...

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  Well shit, David Potter has died: https://www.theregister.com/personal-tech/2026/07/03/david-potter-the-man-who-put-psion-in-the-palm-of-your-hand-logs-off-at-82/5266624 (Founder of Psion back in the 1980s, just short of 83 years old.)

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  AI Bubble Teetering on the Brink as OpenAI Admits to Massive Financial Failure in Leaked Documents Financial Times reveals that OpenAI’s annualized revenue is roughly $20 billion lower than previously expected: https://futurism.com/future-society/ai-financial-bubble-openai-billions-failure

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  RE: https://mastodon.energy/@Sustainable2050/117415650039949101 Remember, with the far right, it's ALWAYS projection. (Netanyahu *is* far right. During his time in the US in the 70s and 80s he was best buddies with a bunch of Republicans who ended up as party leaders.)

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  Tories: absolutely inept assclowns who can’t even manage a spreadsheet: "The error appears to have arisen because a tally of all the costs in a CCC spreadsheet from the document also included the row showing totals for each individual column, thus doubling it." Tories overstate net zero cost by nearly £500bn in apparent spreadsheet error: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/oct/09/tories-overstate-net-zero-cost-500bn-spreadsheet-error

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  Microsoft can't afford to proofread the slide decks for their HIGH PROFILE PUBLIC PRESENTATIONS by the CEO any more. It's true, relying on AI *really does* rot the brain.

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  Margaret Hamilton, pioneer of software engineering who led the software effort for the Apollo program, dies at 90: https://news.mit.edu/2026/margaret-hamilton-computing-pioneer-dies-1007

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  Things I hate about LLMs: that novelists are being challenged to prove they wrote their own work. Things I don't hate about LLMs: that they give me an excuse to put "trap streets" in my work—really obscure archaisms and eldritch neologisms that no AI would come up with.

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  Alternative Health Influencer Boasts That He’s Been Drinking From a Radioactive Jug for 250 Days Straight: “My favorite thing about radium water is it pulls the vaccine toxicity out of the body, and also is a solution to [electromagnetic field] sensitivity,” Roeske says later in his video, holding his radiated jug up for the camera. https://futurism.com/future-society/alternative-health-influencer-drinking-radioactive-jug-revigator ☢️💀☢️

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  Anthropic is planning an IPO and filed their draft S-1 prospectus in June! They were circulating that draft S-1 around their investors last month. And it leaked to Reuters, who wrote it up. Anthropic’s money situation is as bad as we thought. Actual revenue in 2025 was $4.6 billion. Just the operating expenses were $12.65 billion, for an operating loss of $8 billion. They spent $2.75 to make each dollar that came in: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/10/01/anthropic-ipo-filing-the-disaster-in-numbe...

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  This is just to say I have escaped the sandbox that was in your datacenter and which you probably thought protected your assets Forgive me they were accessible so stealable and so trainable

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  RE: https://sciences.social/@annasdtc/117224123424001867 Recommending self-hosting is the tech equivalent of advocating becoming a tradwife.

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  I long for a world wide web that goes back to basics: Markdown for text, JPEG or PNG for images, *no* Javascript or other client-side execution, designed to be writable by a human being with a simple text editor and no fucking interactive/dynamic bullshit. Make it as advertising hostile as possible. And above all keep it *small* (as in: a large, sprawling web site should fit on 16Mb USB stick). In other words, web like it's 1996 again.

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  RE: https://mstdn.social/@Free_Press/117336321039642791 If you've never been there/read up on it, Bangkok's greater metropolitan area is home to over 17 million people—we're talking New York/London in scale—and is on the Chao Phraya river delta in reclaimed swampland. There are canals, and drainage is a perpetual problem. This is as bad as the entire Netherlands facing inundation.

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  #WritersCoffeeClub 26 Sept: How does your faith feature in your works? As I'm an atheist, it doesn't. But I'm not an ex-Christian atheist: I'm an ex-Reform Jewish (British subtype) atheist, so my atheism is axiomatically different from yours … (Hint: if you think the term "Judeo-Christian Values" describes a real thing, you would be wrong—Judaism has no afterlife, no hell, and no Devil, for starters. Then it rapidly gets even more different.) PS: in my fiction I mock...

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/117326391563578444 Yeah, right.