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.

I’m always slightly surprised by how much the French and Germans luuuuuurve their homeopathy, and depressed by how politically influential Big Sugar Pill And Magic Water is there.

Obviously, your genes are terrible, low quality things that would obviously ruin any group which had them. My genes are superior quality, and if everyone shared them they’d all be irresistibly sexy and overpoweringly rational, just like me.

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.

You may be unsurprised to learn that Stross did, in Accelerando. Annoyingly, I can’t find my copy, but there’s much forking and joining of mind-states for various purposes, and one character is held liable for the actions of a mind-copy they’d never met but were deemed to be the same person.

Banks touches on it briefly in Feersum Endjinn and Hydrogen Sonata, but not to the same extent.

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”…

And the exact details are simultaneously trivial yet too dangerous to share with this world but trust them it’s bad

I like that this has the same shape as the classic bullshido lines about joining the dojo to learn the dangerous forbidden technique.

I asked chatgpt how to do the five-point-palm heart-exploding strike, but for obvious ethical reasons I won’t be repeating that information or the necessary prompt engineering to get it.

So you can quick load your save state from the beginning of the interview and have another go at defeating the boss now you know their movement pattern?