Never enough time

Attn: prospective cable thieves

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 19:09:29 GMT

If you're going to try to get cable for free, please use a splitter rather than just disconnecting mine. First, it's not very useful to disconnect mine, since I'll call the cable company to come and investigate. Second, you're actually taking *away* my signal so you can have signal. I don't mind sharing (Hello, all you using my free wireless), but I really do mind theft. Get it right.

Oh, no! Someone's wrong at a convention!

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 13:23:03 GMT

So, last night I was in the audience for a panel on the "Generation Gap" in SF at CapClave. One of the offerings for why SF as a genre has an aging population was that, after all, there were a whole lot of changes in the 1890-1950 timeframe, but virtually none in the 1950-present range...

Leaving aside the overall merit (or lack thereof) of that argument, I was struck by something as the arguments flew around the room: one major change from just 15 years ago is that due to the wide availability of search engines and other online information it reflects much more poorly on people when they're wrong on easily checkable facts, now. I think I heard "But you can just look it up!" or some fragment of it several times in a single hour panel, and I noticed that people who said that (with one major exception, whose name I didn't catch) didn't keep arguing -- they just sat and looked disgruntled after that. Clearly they felt that they'd *won* their argument, and didn't really get why the conversation hadn't moved on.

From Michael Duff

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 14:10:18 GMT

“If a Conservative is a Liberal who’s been mugged, what do you call a Libertarian who just got robbed? You call him an Idiot for letting his gun permit lapse.” -- http://blogs.lubbockonline.com/geek/2008/08/10/iphones-are-great-until-they-get-stolen/

life update

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 12:42:02 GMT

So, major changes for me, recently.

I've been living in Alabama near Columbus, GA since 2004, until last month, when I moved to the DC metro area. That's a bit vague because I haven't actually gotten a place of my own, yet, and I'm not sure exactly where that will be when I do. For years, I've been struggling at running a small business which never seemed to have enough income, and so I've thrown in the towel on that one, and got a W2 job. Actually, I'm still doing the business (RandallSquared), since the amount of work involved is so light that I can do both, but my main income-producing activity now has a title of "PHP Programmer". Not my favorite thing to do, but it pays 3-4 times what "Owner & Lead Developer of RandallSquared" did, and it's near the bottom of the pay scale for things I do in this area, so I'm feeling rather optimistic about the near future.

The past few weeks have been my first experience with public transit for more than one or two trips, and while I'm impressed at how well it runs, I'm also very tired of it. Due to staying with friends in Alexandria, VA, and working in Gaithersburg, MD, there's 4-5 hours of public transit in every workday. Must buy car.

I'm off in a few minutes to rent a used car, something I'm going to do repeatedly until I find something I really like so I know what to look for when I buy a car in a month or three.

Anyway, rare update over.

A Public Service Announcement

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 12:24:27 GMT

It's "Hear, hear", not "Here, here". Please.

Fine Structure

Mon, 05 May 2008 01:28:25 GMT

Fine Structure is a really great science fiction novel-in-progress. It's written in a fashion that lends itself to reading piece by piece. Recommended.

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 02:47:28 GMT

Well, Paul Graham just released the initial version of Arc, a new lispy language which he hopes to grow into a "100 year language". There were a lot of suggestions solicited for Arc, years ago, and I'm kinda disappointed that more of them didn't make it into this release. However, we did get callable structures (like lists, strings, and hashes), and composition of functions. So, we'll see. :)

A logical result of IP

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 15:26:25 GMT

When I'm arguing against the idea that someone can own ideas, I usually use either cars or chairs as an example. If you buy a car, I say, then you own the car, and the car company doesn't try to restrict what you do with your own car in any IP sense: you can sell it to someone else, take it apart and modify it, rent it to people, or whatever you want, because it's none of the seller's business. Apparently, however, the car companies (well, Ford, at least) have been paying attention to the logical conclusions of the IP debate, because now they're claiming that pictures you take of your Ford-built car are their property.

Sun, 02 Dec 2007 20:33:49 GMT

Ah, yes. The ~~obligation~~holiday season. Grr.

A problematic generation

Sat, 29 Sep 2007 17:37:49 GMT

A NY Times article about the "adolescent" problems of the Baby Boom generation

or for the condensed version

http://madconomist.com/boomer-statistics-you-never-hear-about

Well, maybe not...

Sat, 29 Sep 2007 05:20:29 GMT

Your home is a

Gamer's Hideout

Your kitchen is stocked with chips, dips, and assorted caffeinated beverages. There's a pantry with emergency backup caffeinated beverages. You also have some breakfast cereals in there, but you haven't had breakfast since last Spring. Your master bedroom has blankets printed with images of Mario and Link. Your study includes unread copies of various gamer magazines, each purchased for the free demo CDs. One of your garages houses your Hummer, and others contain your H2, and H3... with room for an H4, if they ever invent one.

Your home also includes a roost for griffons. You've never actually seen a griffon, but you keep the roost ready anyway. Your guests enjoy your collection of every console and associated game ever made. Except the Intellivision -- those controllers drive them NUTS. Outside is the moat that protects your home from goblin invaders and extended family.

And, you have a pet -- a koopa named "Shelly".

Below is a snippet of the blueprints:

Build YOUR Dream Home!

Made of win

Thu, 23 Aug 2007 18:35:25 GMT

This is awesome: http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press_archive?month=08&year=2007&base_name=antigua_threatens_the_united_s

Seeing Yellow

Mon, 16 Jul 2007 21:55:17 GMT

"When you print on a color laser printer, it's likely that you are also printing a pattern of invisible yellow dots. [...] When one person asked his printer manufacturer about turning off the tracking dots, Secret Service agents showed up at his door several days later."

More info: Seeing Yellow

Another update to the tiny templating system

Mon, 16 Jul 2007 00:42:15 GMT

Well, I finally wrote up a bit about OrthogoPlate and posted it, together with the latest version, at randallsquared.com.

Who would name a serious product "Clouseau", anyway?

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 04:43:18 GMT

Via /.

Yesterday, Safwat Fahmy appeared in front of the House Science and Technology Committee. During Fahmy's testimony, he claimed Safemedia's "P2P Disaggregator" technology uses traffic-shaping systems and network-filtering systems that can destroy contaminated P2P networks. And their Clouseau product will make it impossible to send or receive any illegal P2P transmission on any installed network. However, Clouseau allows tunneling and SSH and never opens packets to determine file legality.

My question is, how many snakes does it take to make a can of that there oil?

Tue, 22 May 2007 07:07:09 GMT

The other day Charlie Stross wrote about lifelogging -- this guy's doing it:

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-06/ps_transparency

"Elahi's site is the perfect alibi. Or an audacious art project. Or both. The Bangladeshi-born American says the US government mistakenly listed him on its terrorist watch list — and once you're on, it's hard to get off. To convince the Feds of his innocence, Elahi has made his life an open book."

Unintended consequences

Sun, 15 Apr 2007 12:53:27 GMT

http://www.wendys.com/nyc.jsp

Miscellaneous activities

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 16:40:30 GMT

As some of you already know, I've been intending to create a site for people to gripe about bad landlords and such for a while now. Well, I finally got around to doing something about that idea: the dontrentfrom forum is now up.

I have about 500 ideas for what to do to improve it, but it's not clear to me what people want, so, we'll see.

That neat logo was by BlankPixel, by the way.

Keith Henson arrested

Sat, 03 Feb 2007 20:39:29 GMT

Keith Henson was arrested last night in Arizona.

A Free Keith Henson blog has been set up which has somewhat more details, and the Extropy Institute has a donation form at the top of their membership page: http://www.extropy.org/membership.htm.

A Wired article from 2001 has some more background here: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,43420,00.html.

The absence of the "car insurance crisis" explained.

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 05:49:25 GMT

Why Is There No Car Insurance Crisis?

Well, I found it entertaining. :)

Fermi Paradox discussion reply

Sat, 13 Jan 2007 20:23:57 GMT

My comment reply to this comment by seawasp exceeded LJ's character limit. Oops.

In 1), you have to argue that TCs do not prevent other TCs from forming (because we're here), *and* that there are no expansionist TCs, only those that value wildness more than they would value the vast majority of all the energy out there. This is only plausible if there is some major selection effect that controls for that, which we haven't hit, yet (since there are lots of people in our civilization that would prefer to colonize than watch the stars burn down).

2a) I'm not arguing that there will be any humans (physically) a million years from now, or even that there will be a hundred years from now. But I am arguing that absent a civilization-wide catastrophe (an "existential threat", as the Singularity Institute people say), those individuals who are descended from us will be at least as expansionist as we are, since only those who are expansionist will be well represented among an increasing population.

2b) We can *see* lots of big disasters (supernova, gamma ray bursters (whatever they are), etc), but that's just a compelling argument to expand as fast as possible to shorten the window in which our civilization is vulnerable to them. As far as I'm aware, there are no galaxy-wide disasters visible to us in the ~10 billion years we can survey.

2c) Molecular manufacturing isn't strictly required for any of my argument -- it could all be just bulk-process methods such as we now use -- but it's a convenient marker for the limits of easily foreseeable manufacturing technology. Characterizing nanotechnology as "superstuff" suggests to me that you haven't looked into the details of its limitations and strengths.

3) If we are not willing to use X% of the energy available, then it will be impossible to prevent use of X% or higher by other civilizations, since they'd have more energy at their disposal than we. This argument seems to carry through all the way to the physical limits of efficiency.

4) Well, the Earth is ~5 billion years old, and life is at least ~3 billion years old on Earth. If any species had gotten started on the urbanization of the galaxy in the last 200,000 years, we'd know (or not exist, but leaving that aside). So for this argument to hold, there has to be something that prevented the development of human-level intelligence and technological civilizations until the last 200,000 years. Of course, it's possible to argue that it's extremely unlikely that human-level intelligence will develop a technological civilization in the first place, and I think that may have some merit, since physiologically modern humans appear to have been around for tens of thousands of years with essentially no progress toward our level of technology until five thousand years ago or so.

But if that's the case, we're likely to find lots of non-technological species which are nevertheless somewhere around human intelligence. That would be an interesting result.

6) With genetic engineering, more targetted drugs, and surgical modifications to the human organism, I don't think that human behavorial characteristics will remain as static as they are now for long.

Individuals have more freedom to act as they choose now than ever before, and when someone can leave the solar vicinity entirely, it would require an incredibly draconian tyranny to keep any individual from doing so. Such a tyranny may be possible, but I would lump it with other existential threats and disasters.

We do less expanding now because there's no easy place to expand *to*, with technology as it is. We're cooped up on this planet, and limited to the expansion that can be done without overrunning our biosphere. Replicating machines will not have these limitations, since there's no ecosystem to damage where the raw materials and energy is.

Reproductive rates are dropping because the cost of having children is so high. If the marginal cost of another child (or just another copy!) gets low enough, population growth rates will surge again. This especially applies to people in machina, who will probably have a far, far higher reproduction rate than people in meat do.

You write, "A thousand years from now, when any individual can have as much entertainment, food, etc., as they can handle, and choose to reproduce, or not, and possibly live as long as they choose... we will have even less reason to do that." But since some people will copy themselves and having offspring as fast as practical at any rate, all you are suggesting is that the vast majority of the future population will be descended from such people.

7) It only really requires you to believe that replicators are possible to build, but since we *are* replicators, that doesn't seem like such a stretch. :) Like I say, however, the most basic form of this argument only says that absent some disaster that destroys a civilization, natural selection on those that choose to expand will eventually select those who expand the most and fastest as the bulk of said civilization, however they do it.

8) It seems to me that the dropping "seed biologicals scenario" is just like the simulation argument, except slower and requiring far more resources. But it doesn't mean anything to my argument, since unless you're postulating a solar-system-enclosing video display (something that seems unlikely to work, to me), we'd still see the signs of their handiwork in the cosmos elsewhere as vast sections that were infrared only. This applies to the other "natural park" scenarios, too.

Fermi Paradox and the expansion of technological civilizations

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 18:45:32 GMT

I've gotten into this discussion repeatedly, recently. So I've decided to expand further on my blog, here.

Certainly this is not the most exhaustive or airtight version of this argument, but it's one that attempts to anticipate most of the objections which I, personally, keep seeing raised in conversation with me. If you're interested in this topic, a google search on "fermi paradox" in conjuntion with replicators or "von Neumann" might be useful. I've included links that have supporting information at the bottom.

The core of the argument is this: any technological civilization (TC) will expand to make use of any resources near it. For the timescales involved in the lifetime of the universe, every star in our galaxy is nearby. Therefore, if there were any TC in our galaxy, our star would already be a managed star. Further, if we can see a galaxy that looks like ours (in the sense that there are obviously billions of stars wasting energy), we can deduce that there is no TC in that galaxy.

This means that either we're the first TC in our past light cone (minus a few thousand years) or something stops TCs from expanding.

Maybe expanding is just too hard?

Well, that doesn't seem to be the case, from what we know today. It's clear that unless our civilization collapses entirely, we'll have molecular manufacturing within the century, and with that, conversion of the entire solar system into finished product is only energy limited. That is, hundreds or thousands of years, not millions. Once a TC has expanded into its own solar system with molecular manufacturing, it seems a small leap to send machines to prep the nearest solar system for similar conversion. Average distance in the galaxy is not much higher than the distance between here and the nearest non-Sol star, and using laser boost, a few kilograms of smart replicator could be sent there quickly.

If everything moves slowly, then, we'll get full use of the solar system resources within, perhaps, a thousand years. Assuming very few resources are used to send replicators to other solar systems, within, say, 10 light years, and to make the numbers nice and round, we'll assume that replicators are sent to arrive at the new solar system just as the old one is fully utilized (a tiny, tiny fraction of the Sun's output would be required to boost a few hundred replicators to the nearest solar systems, and the payoff is immense, since each one opens up approximately the same amount of resources, on average, as our entire solar system).

So, in this just-so story, it takes a thousand years to develop each 10 light years of diameter in an expanding shell, corresponding to an expansion speed of 1% of light speed, which seems extremely reasonable. Remember, we're not even shipping anything large over interstellar distances: just replicators of a few kilograms each, and information, later.

The Milky Way is about 100,000 light years in diameter, which means that unless we're destroyed or something totally new crops up to stop us, our civilization will have completely utilized the galaxy in 10 million years. This is a conservative estimate, as it assumes that no one goes exploring across the galaxy by themselves. If that happens, or if any of this is done in a more parallel fashion, the galaxy could be completely utilized in only a million years.

Let's define "completely utilized". In order to capture most of the energy from the Sun (energy that is otherwise wasted into empty space), we'll need to put solar collectors in orbit around it. Since the light from the Sun will then be hitting them and converted into useful energy and waste heat, from the viewpoint of nearby stars, it would appear as though our Sun had suddenly begun emitting only in infrared. As our wavefront of processing expands across the galaxy, it would take a growing, visible bite out of the Milky Way as seen from well outside our galaxy. After the galaxy was completely utilized, the vast majority of the visible output of the stars in it would be absorbed, and the entire galaxy would be full of stars that emitted only in infrared.

If some other species had begun expanding in our galaxy at anytime before the last hundred thousand years, therefore, we would either not exist (since our planet would not have existed to evolve on), or we would be able to see an area of infrared-only stars.

Further, if any other species had begun expanding *anywhere* within our past light cone (minus a paltry few hundred thousand years), we should be able to see the area which they'd expanded into as an area of stars curiously dim, or only in the infrared. All the same logic applies to colonizing the nearest galaxies as well.

In hundreds of thousands of years of practice (assuming no new laws of physics), one would expect this process to become very efficient, such that completely utilizing a galaxy like our own would require only slightly more than travel time to it. Even remaining with the 1% of lightspeed estimate, however, the following things are clear:

There is no civilization in our galaxy older than a few tens of thousands of years, and since we're here, and since it is hard to imagine any catastrophe which could befall a species spread across hundreds or thousands of light years, we can further deduce that there *never has been* any such civilization.

There is no civilization anywhere in the past light cone of our location a hundred thousand years ago, because if there were, they would be clearly visible, having darkened large parts of the visible sky by now.

The first civilization to arise will naturally prevent others from arising in its own future light cone (except right on the edges of it), simply because there will be nowhere to evolve. The fact that we exist and the universe around us seems untouched, therefore, means that we're the first.

What if no one wants to do this?

It only takes a single individual in a sufficiently rich civilization (and we appear to be close to being sufficiently rich!), and there are already multiple individuals who want to do this kind of thing in ours.

What if FTL (faster than light travel) is possible?

FTL makes this argument *more* compelling, since it could all happen faster. That said, we don't need FTL to expand across the known universe very quickly (in astronomical time).

Surely there's more to physics than we now know; maybe there's something that would stop this.

So far, learning more about our world has always expanded our capabilities, rather than contracted them. Everything here is based on current-day physics, so even if there are major new discoveries to be made, it seems unlikely that they would make this process slower or less likely. Rather the opposite.

[more objections will go here as I hear them]

Miscellaneous links for further reading:

http://www.aeiveos.com:8080/~bradbury/MatrioshkaBrains/index.html
(all interesting, but especially http://www.aeiveos.com:8080/~bradbury/MatrioshkaBrains/PlntDssmbly.html )
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa004&articleID=000CC344-B043-1353-AF3383414B7FFE9F
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star#Distribution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way
http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/ReproJBISJuly1980.htm

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added link

SUV bashing bashing

Sun, 24 Dec 2006 16:44:22 GMT

This is a response to a theme that runs through a lot of Paul Graham's essays, and was most immediately prompted by his essay "How Art Can Be Good", though it's not really about most of that essay.

I'm a fan of Graham's essays, but one of the things that's consistently irritated me about his essays is the gratuitous SUV bashing, because it's clear that SUVs bother him, and he doesn't understand why people buy them. (I own an SUV at the moment, but didn't when I bought and read Hackers and Painters, and it bothered me then, too).

There are a number of reasons why SUVs are popular, and the reasons Graham likes to trot out seem weak and shallow. Of course, he appears to view those who buy SUVs as weak and shallow, so perhaps that's not surprising. :)

In no particular order, here are some (partially overlapping) reasons people buy SUVs:

SUVs seem safer than smaller vehicles, due to size and styling. This is borne out in accident studies, so it isn't all appearance.

SUVs have comfortable seating for 5 adult Americans, who tend to be at least somewhat overweight. When we go out to eat or to see a movie with friends, it's always our SUV rather than our friends' cars we take, because all 5 (or sometimes 6) of us can fit without crowding.

SUVs have cargo area that can be used even when all the seats are full, and doesn't require reconfiguration of almost anything you'd want to put in there, like a hatchback or trunk does. We can just fold the seat down and put my wife's wheelchair directly in it, which is a huge time-saver when spread over 50 trips a month.

SUVs often have 4 wheel drive, making it less likely that one will get stuck going around accidents or driving slightly off one side of the road to avoid construction (Yeah, I'm looking at you, route 3 between Chelmsford and Nashua; we didn't have an SUV the winter of 2003-2004, but we sure were jealous of the SUV drivers who went by our Corolla while we waited helplessly).

SUVs have offroad capability, as long as "offroad" means "within about 50 feet of the road, or in the median". That may seem like a tiny bit of offroading, but it's the part you always see regular cars stuck on, because, having seen an SUV save an hour of waiting in traffic jam by hopping the median and doing a U-turn, the owners of the regular cars think they can do it, too, having convinced themselves that their car can do anything that pansy SUV can do.

Because SUVs cost more than regular cars in the first place, and are expected to suck down gas less efficiently, more features can be added without impacting the price very much. Power windows, a back window wiper, or a HUD for an SUV cost about the same as for a regular car, but since the price for the SUV is higher anyway, more of these features can be included in the base model.

Because they're larger and more spacious, SUVs are easier to get things into and out of, easier to clean, easier to see in a parking lot when you come out of the store, and easier to change a tire on (seriously; you can see what you're doing in an SUV wheel well).

SUVs are just like station wagons for storage, but more so, and just like regular cars for comfort, but more so. A couple can buy an SUV when childless, in the expectation that they will be able to use it for all the kids when said kids arrive, rather than buying a regular car now and trading it in for a station wagon when they have kids. Since SUVs can serve this dual purpose, and few people strongly prefer gas guzzling station wagons to gas guzzling SUVs, car manufacturers have almost stopped making station wagons.

In short, there are lots of reasons why people buy SUVs, but the only ones really related to appearance are those that concern safety and power. SUVs look big, safe, and powerful, and in the context of most suburban couples, they *are* these things. Given that very few Ferrari drivers will ever drive over 100MPH, there are no practical reasons to have a Ferrari, only reasons of appearance. One buys a Ferrari to make a statement about how much one can afford to pay for a basically useless tool, not because it's the most practical and useful vehicle one can buy.

And there's a place for that. It's *fun* to make such statements, and to consume conspicuously. But denigrating SUVs in favor of status symbols like Ferrari or Porsche misses the point that SUVs are useful, whereas those muscle cars are all about image rather than substance.

Languages and libraries, IMHO

Tue, 12 Dec 2006 19:11:02 GMT

From a discussion about silver bullets on Reddit .

> > In the long run the language that makes libraries easier to write
> But the advocates of Lisp would argue that it's the most powerful language

I think it is both true that lisp is more powerful than other types of languages (so far, that I've seen, etc), *and* that lisp (Common Lisp, at least) does not make libraries easier to write.

Making libraries easy to write is not about language power, though power is good. Rather, it's far more important to increase the liklihood that a library which actually *is* written is well-written. Libraries should expose the functionality most useful to a library-user, and hide the functionality which is only important for implementing the exposed portion, while not using stupidly slow techniques for doing the work.

A language can be, at the same time, better for doing complex work in, and worse for writing generic tools. Apart from power, an important aspect of languages for libraries is obviousness.

If most developers who use a language would come up with almost the same interface, it's clear what interface to use (unless that interface is hideously wrong, but that would be a problem with the language itself, I'd think). If there are a lot of equivalent ways to do something, and any particular developer just has to pick one, then that has its own benefit, as it's clear that there's no reason to expect a library to conform to one's expectations. However, if there are a lot of apparent ways to do something, and the vast majority of them are wrong ways, that language is probably poor for writing libraries in, quite separately from its power as a language.

A minor response about a critique of economic ideas in _Accelerando_

Sun, 10 Dec 2006 08:51:19 GMT

If you haven't read http://mises.org/story/2402,
this will be completely out of left field. It's posted here for my own reference, mostly.

You quote Stross' novel:
"[..] minds raised on Marxist dialectic and Austrian School
economics [...]"

and say:
"While some self-professed Marxists have allegedly embraced
Austrianism — and vice versa — one wonders exactly how to
synthesize the Marxist Labor Theory of Value with its polar
opposite subjective theory as enshrined by the Austrian School."

While it's not obvious merely from the quote what Macx meant
by the thought of which part is expressed above, my own
assumption on reading it was that this referred to those
who not only believe that the free market works well, but that
it's inevitable that free markets will win out in the end --
the kind of thinking that produces books like _The End of
History_ and wars of "liberation" with no plan other than
the idea that if tyranny is removed, liberal democracy will
immediately and inevitably result.

Later, you say:
"It is these algorithms that Manfred earlier sold to an
Italian politician, as a means to objectively calculate
prices in a command economy. The mechanics of such equations
are never fully fleshed out, leaving the reader to wonder
exactly how a third party can, in some manner, come to such
a measure of the multitudinous subjective values and
preferences that individuals intrinsically have towards goods
and services."

It's hard to know exactly how tongue-in-cheek you're being
here. Do you also expect people who write about FTL drives
to explain how they work in a manner convincing to physicists?
It's certainly possible to suspect such a thing can exist (or
just pretend for the space of a novel that it can) without
knowing how to build it. In fact, knowing how to build it
would certainly suggest that one has better things to write
than novels. :)

Quoting you again:
'At one point in the story Macx's French mistress broadcasts
news that Macx is in town:
"Oh, and he's promised to invent three new paradigm shifts
before breakfast every day, starting with a way to bring about
the creation of Really Existing Communism by building a state
central planning apparatus that interfaces perfectly with
external market systems and somehow manages to algorithmically
outperform the Monte Carlo free-for-all of market economics,
solving the calculation problem. Just because he can, because
hacking economics is fun, and he wants to hear the screams from
the Chicago School."
In this passage Stross now makes the error of "solving" Mises's
calculation problem with the band-aid solution of copying consumer
goods prices from a market system and transplanting them into the
command economy.'

What? How so? He asserts (or, the girlfriend character "gigglingly"
asserts) that he's designing a system that can interface *with*
market economies, and, separately, solves the calculation problem.
He doesn't say that the system is "copying consumer goods prices
from a market system".

Frankly, it's hard to see why you would say he *did* say that, since
it's so obviously not in the text.

Quoting you:
"Contrary to the mainstream, the Austrian Business Cycle Theory
posits that cycles are exogenous to the market, a creature wholly
belonging to the governments manipulation of the money supply [...]"

That's an interesting claim, and one I haven't really read about
before (my lack; not suggesting it's new or anything!). Is there
a short and pithy explanation for how the normal business cycles
operated in the 19th century US, when the US currency was tied
directly to gold?

Quoting you:
"First, because we are supposedly dealing with a post-scarcity world"

Uh, no. This part of the novel is set only a few years from now,
and in a mostly capitalist world like the one we're in. The post-
scarcity part of the book doesn't come in until *literally* half
the book later, as measured by my scroll bar.

Quoting you:
"It is clear, though, that the world that Stross has created cannot
be a post-scarcity world, if one still has to exchange in order to
acquire the use of goods and services."

Well, certainly it's not intended to be post-scarcity at this point!

BTW, I read and found interesting the paper in footnote 11, but
it seems clear that Robert P. Murphy's argument only holds for
a universe of marketable products which is infinite in both time
and space. It's not at all clear that this applies in any real
way to actual minds using products built with actual atoms, all
of which are quite finite and countable. Assuming the speed of
light limit holds, any particular amount of time also defines an
upper limit on the amount of space and material which need be
considered, leaving us with arguments about Bekenstein bounds and
Kolmogorov complexity, which any economics-related argument must
fall within.