Guess he’s still pretty shaken by the car-covered-in-hammers incident.

And speaking of electronic ass-monitoring, I’m reminded of this gem from 10 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ

So little has changed since then!

To my limited knowledge, no, for various values of “someone”. It is just a sort of malign beige juggernaut that’s shitty all by itself without needing external direction.

Sounds like the exordium device from the Revelation Space books.

TESCREAL was chosen, at least in part, because it would be easier to search for. TREACLES matches all sorts of other stuff.

Didn’t Silicon Valley have them all flung into the abyss? Or maybe they were just a myth made up to annoy venture capitalists?

(But yes, I probably should have said “freelance” rather than just “professional”. I haven’t actually thought very hard about how commercial moderation is done, beyond reading horror stories about Facebook)

So I realise that this is very euro-centric and the majority of people on earth don’t get this sort of convenience, but… fast and easy interbank transfers and contactless debit and credit card payments just do all the stuff that most people want out of electronic cash, and transaction logs are a small price to pay for a substantial reduction in risk.

The problem isn’t just the nature of blockchains, the problem is the uses to which such systems will be put. The explosion in ransomware fuelled by bitcoin et al isn’t something that can be replicated with physical cash at the same scale, for example (consider why you want electronic cash in the first place). Similarly, the need to “be your own bank” will always expose you to a greater risk of fraud and theft and loss, because being a bank is harder than people seem to think.

The technology involved is (almost) irrelevant.

Nothing concrete, unfortunately. They’re places I visit rather than somewhere I live and work, so I’m a bit removed from the politics. Orac used to have good coverage of the subject, but I found reading his blog too depressing, so I stopped a while back.

Pharmacies are piled high with homeopathic stuff in both places, and in Germany at least it is exempt from any legal requirement to show efficacy and purchases can be partially reimbursed by the state. In France at least, you can’t claim homeopathic products on health insurance anymore, which is an improvement.

He doesn't really play with the multiple-copies-of-one-person interacting though, from recollection. The Stone Canal touches on it, but Accelerando thinks a lot more about the interesting possibilities of what Stross calls "Multiplicity", where folk can freely fork many instances of themselves and potentially join the mind states up again later, etc. Revelation Space cheated its way around thinking about the issue by having alpha-levels be copy-protected. Altered Carbon has it be a rare and brief thing for anyone to be running in more than one place at once. I can see why they did this, but Stross' stuff is more interesting because he didn't shy away from that. I feel like this should be right up Peter Watts' alley, but I don't think he's written anything on this (yet). Uploads not plausible enough for him, I guess.

For other works that you may or may not be familiar with... Lena (or MMAcevedo, which seems like a better title) is a nice short online work that does a better job. Soma is a computer game (in the "walking simulator" style) that also has some great moments, though the protagonist is annoyingly oblivious.

I'm sure you can pitch using AI to design fusion reactors to these folk. Then all you need to do is to use the avalanche of VC capital to fund engineers and physicists who will be providing the "training data"...

You can always use something like generational indices. They pop up a lot in ECS systems. A suitable container with an opaque index type prevents creation of invalid references, lets you check reference validity at runtime, and generational indices prevent reuse. The compiler can’t help with lifetime tracking, but that’s a problem with any shared reference type pointing to a resource with a lifetime that can only be known at runtime, eg. Arc.