“For my next trick, I’ll bribe the idiots with their own money.”

“Well, we raided his mom’s house and confiscated all his cobbled-together e-waste.”

“And!?”

“His drives were encrypted. Apparently he ‘applied PQC patches to dm-crypt himself’, whatever that means. All I know is that it made the guys from NSA scream. There was nothing we could do.”

“So we’ve got nothing?”

“Oh no. He happily gave us both the keyfile and the passphrase.”

“So…?”

“No warez, no CSA, no political manifestos or illicit recipes. Not even tax evasion - it’s not like he has an income. Just… copyleft source code as far as the eye could see.”

Activity begets activity.

The Kingdom’s other strategy—which, so far, seems to be much more successful than its urban development efforts—has been to make itself indispensable to the AI frenzy currently sweeping the globe.

When I started reading this article, I didn’t expect to be presented with yet another solid reason to want the entire field of AI to disappear forever.

So, I guess nVidia finally ran out of companies to play financial musical chairs with. Microsoft just can’t find anymore janitorial closets to pack full of excess GPUs, so nVidia finally has no choice but to see if they can’t get consumers in on it. Gotta keep that merry-go-round spinning a little longer.

“…Talk about a television series with amazing longevity.”

It’ll have to do.

“If that’s true you should be able to prove it by doing thrice as much of everything on the list you wrote with no issue.”

These shitheads. They only had to do nothing, and they managed to fail at it.

I like having the option available as a final resort.

I wasn’t expecting medieval vore today, but here we are. A solid 8, I guess.

“As soon as you start paying me their salary in addition to my own, perhaps.”

“…Please put down the bowcaster.”

“My advice is to fuck me. Yeah, me too.”

I have so many questions.

…I like the cut of your jib.

Now, now. Look on the bright side: If true, that means no constraints. It’s an eerie echo of the first time you decided to start a new kind of state based on entirely new principles (and a lot of dead natives plus some living slaves), unhampered by existing norms or traditions of governance. You’ve done it once - who’s to say you cannot do it again?

I won’t go so far as to say “I believe in you” - that’s getting really hard at this juncture - but… At least there’s precedence.

He is, as always, correct.

Fair.

Oh no. You can get close to any star of your choosing with only minuscule amounts of reaction mass if you start out in vacuum away from significant gravity wells - eventually. Granted, the star in question may or may not have gone supernova or collapsed into a black hole by the time you arrive, but I doubt that’ll make a lot of difference to the person doing it at that point.

With that said, I’m not about to discourage anybody from taking an interest in fusion of the up-close-and-personal-kind. And if people aren’t into the math of Magnetohydrodynamics? Well, first off, sucks to be them, but second: Then donate to the cause to pay those who are. Fusion is fucking awesome, and we desperately need it.