Dаn̈ıel Раršlow 🥧 @pieist@social.cleverlibre.org

@MishaVanMollusq @JohnShirley2023 @vvandinsky

I'll be damned, I had never thought to wonder where the band Haircut One Hundred got the name for their one and only album, "Pelican West". I just assumed they liked the sound of it.

I've just now learned that Eric Frank Russell's first published story was called "The Saga of Pelican West". Never republished. As far as I can tell nobody on the internet has made this connection before. Anyway, here's the story on archive.org:

https://archive.org/details/sim_astounding-science-fiction_1937-02_18_6/page/12/mode/2up?view=theater

@MishaVanMollusq @JohnShirley2023 @vvandinsky

Ha! I got more of an Eric Frank Russell feel from it.

@JohnShirley2023 @vvandinsky Reads like solid Golden Age pulp, doesn't it?

@JohnShirley2023 @vvandinsky

Speaking of short SF about Google, in Raymond Chandler's correspondence he writes the most extraordinary passage. This was in 1953:

@ottocrat Be fair, they surely get tired of eating nothing but bratwurst and sauerkraut, and lederhosen tends to ride up and chafe.

@Tendar "You didn't hit me. I blocked your punch with my face!"

@JohnShirley2023 12,000 years ago there were only about -- as a rough order of magnitude -- 10 million people in the world. Now there are something like a thousand times that many.

Thanos got it wrong. It's not half of all living things that need to go, just 99.9% of the big-headed naked apes.

@realTuckFrumper Makes a change. About the only thing our sailors usually pass to China is venereal disease

#NATO now has legitimate cause to defend all ports at the mouth of the #Danube. This is a vital corridor essential to trade, livelihoods, the safety and economic well-being of #Europe. #Russia attacking it is NOT just #Ukraine's problem: it is manifestly a direct attack on Europe.

@freemo @gpowerf Also the distinction between "high level" languages and pseudocode is not an exact one. The reason I adopted python all these years ago is because it looked pretty much exactly the way I pseudocode. I went, "wow, this interprets the way I tend to describe things!"

Any sufficiently detailed and rigorous pseudocode is for all practical purposes already a high-level language. In other words, describe a task carefully enough and you basically have written a program.

@gpowerf It kind of already is. I occasionally save of time on stuff I already know how to do just because it'll take me 20 minutes of unedifying drudge to code. In these cases I can describe it in 1 minute to ChatGPT and it produces something typically impeccable. The only time it fails it's because I failed to describe something. At which point I just go, oh, do that again with this additional requirement... Bang.

Again, mind you this is just to save time on fairly easy stuff that I'm not going to learn anything new by doing.

@skinwalkerpenelope@glasgow.social @markhughes

Pre-EU levels? You mean when the UK was "the sick man of Europe"?

@ChrisMayLA6 The control, she is taken back!

@iamdavidobrien @Ruth_Mottram

Sounds like we need to add a verse to Song of the Clyde:

Oh, the river Clyde, the wonderful Clyde
It heats up your houses and warms your backside

@erikschreiber

Ukrainians are dying because Russia is murdering them.

Much shorter, and oh yes, ACCURATE.

If you can't rebut what they said, commit irrevocably to the belief that they said what you can rebut.

@Popehat You're only at your most emergent after a deep dive.

@JohnShirley2023 Scrolling down the indictment, I particularly like where they charge him with being a fat creepy short-fingered fuck with shoe-lifts and a bizarre combover.

@telescoper My money's on it turning out to be a Meringue Flan Moon.