»The mutineers would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for the collapse of the Flow.

There is, of course, a legal, standard way within the guilds for a crew to mutiny, a protocol that has lasted for centuries. A senior crew member, preferably the executive officer/first mate, but possibly the chief engineer, chief technician, chief physician or, in genuinely bizarre circumstances, the owner’s representative, would offer the ship’s imperial adjunct a formal Bill of Grievances Pursuant to a Mutiny, consistent with guild protocol. The imperial adjunct would confer with the ship’s chief chaplain, calling for witnesses and testimony if required, and the two would, in no later than a month, either offer up with a Finding for Mutiny, or issue a Denial of Mutiny.

The people of Earth are on the verge of transcendence: They almost managed to create mind uploads, they are on the verge of creating true synthetic AI, they have been traveling to remote stars and are beginning to terraform worlds, on which they will seed Earth lifeforms and uplift them. All this progress, though, draws the ire of militant terrorists from the “Non Ultra Nature” radicals, which culminates into the sabotage of Brin 2 lab while seeding a terraformed world, and at the same time the complete destruction of humanity and its in-system colonies back home.

»In the early twentieth century, the Congress of our great nation debated a glorious plan to resolve the meat shortage in America. The idea was this: import hippos and raise them in Louisiana’s bayous. The hippos would eat the ruinously invasive water hyacinth; the American people would eat the hippos; everyone would go home happy. Well, except the hippo’s. They’d go home eaten.«

This plan, on which Congress did not follow through in our timeline, is the premise and the setting for Sarah Gailey’s alternate universe story “River of Teeth”.

Fanless devices

A cellphone or tablet is a fanless device. So is the 12" Macbook. That means you can do whatever is possible at any point in time within a TDP of approximately 5W.

Here is the power consumption of my cellphone over a 12h period. The scale on the left is mW, down is discharge, up is recharge (plugged in). It’s basically limited to 5W, and that only for short periods of time.

All these worlds is the third and final part of the adventures of Bob, conqueror of the universe and saviour of humanity.

Bob started out as a dead computer programmer, uploaded as a control AI into the core of a von Neumann probe and spaceship. He then went forth and multiplied, mostly because he needed more of himself to cover up first his own fuckups and then to clean up the mess all of humanity made of his homeworld during his departure.

Lori Clary is a software engineer and silicon valley geek, programming embedded systems and robot arms at General Dexterity for a living. She’s living the silicon valley lifestyle - basically coding all day, collapsing in her hole of a non-appartment, and not having contact with real people at all. With one exception: She’s ordering dinner from a delivery service that is run by two mysterious brothers, who make a mean spicy soup and crusty bread. The brothers have to leave, due to visa issues, but they leave her with the sourdough culture.

In 1982, Scott Fahlmann invented the use of :-) and :-( for marking up emotions or semantic context in written online communication. That was a great idea.

The :-) is just a symbol for an emotion.

It is specifically not a human face, it does not have a hair color, eye color, skin color or other human attributes. It is universal. Then some cellphone maker turned that into

#define MH_PIE 0x200000 /* When this bit is set, the OS will load the main executable at a random address. Only used in MH_EXECUTE filetypes. */

If that flag is on, MacOS will enable ASLR and the binary will have different load addresses for code, data, heap and stack every time it is running.

$ sudo otool -h '/Library/Application Support/TrendMicro/TmccMac/iCoreService_tmsm'
Mach header
     magic cputype cpusubtype  caps    filetype ncmds sizeofcmds      flags
0xfeedfacf 16777223          3 0x80            2    20        2656 0x00018085

Check the ‘flags’ for this. No 0x200000, no ASLR. Not here, and not on any other binary with “TrendMicro” in the pathname. And that is why you can’t have nice things.

Edgedancer

Right now, one month before we get Oathbringer, the third part of The Stormlight Archive , we get Edgedancer. This is a Novella that previously was part of Arcanum Unbounded , a collection of short stories playing in the Cosmere . As a standalone Novella is has been expanded and is now 40k words long.

Edgedancer picks up the story of Lift , a scrappy Reshi thief that happens to bond with a Spren to follow the path of the Edgedancer. Because Lift also had contact with the Nightwatcher, she has interesting additional capabilities, among them to touch Spren and to turn food into Stormlight.

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Asperger’s on the Job

These weird people with headphones on, working strange hours, not wanting to stand in front of the group in Standups and for talks - what are they, where to they come from and how do you handle them at work?

The book is structured as a self-help book, assessing various aspects of Asperger Syndrome , how they manifest and what that might mean in the workplace. It also discusses personal and environmental mitigations. Each chapter concludes with a list of things that the Aspie and their employer could do, and leaves a number of questions that can help to develop a personal or environmental programme.