Pete Alex Harris🦡🕸️🌲/∞🪐∫ / is on Nostr

SF writer and software engineer.
#Languages, #science, #writing. he or they (shrug)
Glasgow Writers Group and Glasgow SF Writers' Circle.

Last Notes

2025-05-21 07:39:10

A dragon sitting on a pile of treasure is a profoundly amoral being.
You don't slay it to get the gold "back", you slay it because otherwise there is no end to what it will demand as tribute. It'll burn a city to increase its pile even by a small amount, and it will *never* not demand the pile get larger.

2024-06-29 18:27:00

Snails are effective carbon capture. Fast-growing plants are all very well, but you need to sequester the biomass somewhere long-term so it doesn't rot down and re-enter the biosphere as carbon dioxide, or ferment and release methane, which is worse.
Feed it to snails. As long as they have enough calcium in their diet, they'll sequester carbonate directly, and we know that stuff hangs around for a while: that's what limestone is.
Proposal: large snail farm with a small garlic farm beside it.

2024-03-18 08:45:03

Controlled flight into terrain.
Rapid unscheduled disassembly.
Spontaneous fluorination of apparatus.
Unplanned prompt criticality.
Disadvantageous zoological interaction.
End-anthropocene event.
Monday.

2024-03-12 13:03:17

Apparently my flight from Paris to Osaka later this year is a Boeing.
So that's going to be a fun and not at all stressful 10 hours of my life.

2024-03-02 10:00:49

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@npub1d7j…u8xc
The US are talking about dropping aid into Gaza, but not driving aid into Gaza and having US troops distribute that aid and protecting civilians while they receive it.
And we all know why, and their not addressing the reason why is telling in itself.

2024-02-19 13:43:08

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@npub1psd…9sr7
There's something so essentially missing from a person who gets rich from selling books to children and then decides some children are the Wrong Sort of children and shouldn't have rights.

2024-02-18 14:20:00

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@npub1psd…9sr7
Bayesian classification is fairly effective at detecting spam email, so maybe mastodon can implement a "spamminess" score for posts that you can filter your feed by (say, auto-mute posts with spamminess > 0.8) and a spamminess threshold on the posts of a new server for accepting federation from them?

2024-02-04 22:51:10

It has always been Labour party policy to abolish the House of Lords, and no matter how often they get elected it always will be.

2024-01-21 10:58:16

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@npub1psd…9sr7
WSFS should have a code of conduct for itself disqualifying bids from countries with human rights risks to writers and fans. And censorship laws are absolutely incompatible with speculative literature.
It's not like they're FIFA, this shouldn't be difficult to understand.

2024-01-13 12:24:42

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@npub1psd…9sr7 @npub1483…lv2w
It's terrifying to me that the kind of intelligence we have might be pretty fragile. We don't know how many ancient civilisations went under not because anything drastic changed in their environment, but some virus came along and ten years later they were too stupid to collectively problem-solve their way out of the next minor crisis.

2023-12-31 08:26:23

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@npub1g0t…tvm4 @npub1437…ranm
The number of countries that had it forced on them is one factor, the economic importance of some of those countries is another. I'm sceptical that there's any linguistic explanation, is all.
The various peoples speaking South American languages didn't adopt English as a second language, nor the peoples in Russia speaking various Uralic and Turkic languages. They used the second language of whichever empire absorbed them, same as southern Europe did.

2023-12-31 00:36:37

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@npub1437…ranm @npub1g0t…tvm4
Yeah it sounds like a bit of a just-so story to me. There's nothing special about English that makes it a particularly good lingua franca. By and large the countries colonised by Spain speak Spanish, and the countries colonised by Britain speak English. One or two of those happen to have become economically significant on the back of all that theft, genocide and slavery, so English became more globally useful.
It's a badge of shame really.

2023-09-12 15:45:57

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@npub14wv…ytqs @npub1t8u…c7sk
Or which feature to proprietrise next? I like public policy decisions and product design decisions to both have good reasons.
"To leverage existing market share" is a business reason nobody outside that business should care about. "To prevent waste" is a public policy reason benefiting everyone.

2023-09-12 12:57:13

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@npub14wv…ytqs @npub1t8u…c7sk
You have to scrutinise the supposed benefits of innovation that is "fuelled" by attempts to enclose a necessary feature into proprietary tech. In whose interest is that, really?
If all phones were on micro-USB instead for the next 20 years, who would actually care, and why? Even if there is a real user-centred reason to change, a new standard isn't precluded by an existing one.

2023-08-23 14:23:00

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@npub16vu…gddu
I agree the Scottish government should have the power to lower corporation tax, but I also want it to have the power to set a high minimum wage.
You can dodge corporation tax by moving your profits overseas and declaring a loss locally, but you have to pay your employees here, and they spend the money here, whereas shareholders may well not.

2023-05-03 11:08:19

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@npub1cvv…mv8d
The Greens in England and Wales need to stand up in Labour/Tory marginal constituencies and start making noise.
There is NOTHING that can stop the Labour party drifting ever rightwards to chase Tory swing voters except the fear of losing more voters on the left, and they won't fear that until their voters have somewhere else to go.
People giving up and not voting at all won't bother them, it just makes the average swing voter more right wing.