KineticLensman

Yes. I can’t drive for medical reasons and I live in a rural area with poor public transport. If my wife had to stop driving we would have to use grocery delivery or move

> Then they move to the "back seat" and consult or assist from far away

Probably not. The article mentions two active bomb disposal soldiers whose rank is Major or higher, and a colonel who oversees operations. This seems like a standard military career progression, not specific to the EOD regiment. In the armoured infantry, for example, a company commander (i.e. a Major) might still fight as a dismount, delegating a sergeant to stay in their vehicle to command it.

Also note that in the British Army, soldiers of all trades often move jobs every couple of years, sometime returning to a particular organisation but now with a higher rank.

> think that getting to orbit is just a careless hop away

Indeed. But achieving escape velocity for their host star is something else.

I'm 30% of the way through and really enjoying it.

It's definitely Miéville, but the weird doesn't cut in immediately.

The first 100 or so pages is about a young single British woman (Maur) in the 1970s/1980s. She brings up a son who becomes increasingly remote, joins the army, and then something happens to him, which is when the weird elements begin to appear (involving the disturbingly unpleasant lingering spirits of the dead). The second plot strand concerns a Brit soldier (Allardyce) whose unit participates in various weird events (also somewhat disturbing) set against British-empire post-colonial / cold war shenanigans in the 50s and 60s, although the two plot strands eventually connect.

One reviewer I saw described the first bit (which is 'mundane', in the non-fantasy sense) as a masterclass in how to present a character's interiority, and I'm inclined to agree. As with any Miéville, it helps to have access to a good dictionary. I'm a Brit who grew up at approximately the same time as Maur, which helped me understand some of the allusions (e.g. to 'the election', which is Thatcher's). But I had to read into the darker sides of British colonial disengagement to fully understand Allardyce's experiences. E.g. the so-called Malayan Emergency, a particularly brutal little war of independence in the 1950s.

In a way, it reminded me of Kraken, where Miéville throws in lots of references to real-world weirdness to better sneak his own inventions into the story world.

Seven bullet points squeezed into five pages of text

Yes. My in-laws in East Anglia lived near Ramsey Heights, which (just checked my OS map) is almost entirely below the 10m contour. The nearby Ramsey Forty Foot mostly exceeds the 10m contour. They are great places for lazy cyclists but the downside side is the relatively high winds that are uninterrupted by terrain, and which always seem to orient themselves to be a local headwind.

Lots of armchair experts incorrecting each other

I enjoyed The Diamond Age but the 'AI' is nothing like today's. The stories in Nell's primer are actually mediated by a human actor (not an AI), who becomes a mother figure for her.

I’ve been at a locals’ restaurant in Italy where the chef had sourced some truffles from a nearby wood. They were better than anything he could have got from a store

"The reason LLMs use the same cadence and cliches is that their RLHF does not emphasize writing well, the way it emphasizes, say, coding. And the reason for that should be pretty obvious: coding is where the big money is at."

Software can be checked for being 'written well' by compilers / linters etc. There is no equivalent for well-written natural prose. Spelling and grammar checkers haven't a clue about prose semantics.

"How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming" - awesome title for an Astronomy book

> It has gone from being a major producer of oil and gas

Given that North sea oil is a finite resource that has already peaked, it cannot form the basis of a long term energy strategy.

Fair enough.

In my defence, I was coming at it etymologically, where (according to the OED), a perambulator is 'A person who walks or travels through or about a place' (hence 'walker') OR 'A carriage for a baby or young child, which may be pushed along by a person on foot. Now usually shortened to pram [...] a cradle mounted on four wheels'.

So 'mobile bed' is a perfect description