liquid comets inhabited by space whales, occasionally leaving and traveling the vacuum for another flying ocean

Only the best illusionists can cast illusions that fool themselves. Sounds academic but makes them highly sought-after - True Resurrection is expensive and settled inside a zombie brain, such an illusion is as good as any soul.

Nothing says that the other room has to be static, imagine for example having your morning coffee in there, setting down your cup, and the cathedral’s pillars curl up like ferns to reveal the sky

Idea for a room: It’s empty save for a number of mobile screens that follow you around and with a little bit of head tracking, act like windows into a completely different building.↵You could fit a cathedral in there, if so inclined, or maybe an Escherian maze.

the only thing that’s better than dancing naked in the rain is dancing naked in the meteorite rain

house where you can extend flaps so that it makes more rain sounds

unicode 2040 features (3):↵- MIDI ligatures that play notes as you read them↵- unicode block characters (shy, aggressive, deceitful, …)↵- unicode block [alien script reconstructed from fossil graffiti]

unicode 2040 features (2):↵- support for 2D writing systems, lines can now turn by multiples of 45°↵- in-band parsing directives for ligatures (finally with context-free grammar support)↵- in-band layout directives↵- camera glyph can now store up to ten seconds of video

unicode 2040 features:↵- amoji: emoji, but abstractified like any ideographic writing system in active usage↵- hypermoji: animated, holographic, interactive, moody, you name it↵- U+FFF6 ᴄʜᴀʀᴀᴄᴛᴇʀ ᴜɴᴀᴠᴀɪʟᴀʙʟᴇ ɪɴ ʏᴏᴜʀ ᴊᴜʀɪsᴅɪᴄᴛɪᴏɴ (usually a transparent square)

Bits of frozen smoke still drift through the room: Broken plumes, translucent shards, kármán streets slowly twisting up

When they sense death approaching, they withdraw into pocket universes, unmoor, and die there so that their remains may be a Garden of Eden to whatever follows

Confirming the intelligent designer’s existence, and using its intelligence to solve otherwise intractable problems by making them look like niches for life to settle

Computability theory but for telos:↵* What can be achieved with certain overarching goals like Survive, Understand, and Profit?↵* How would a society balance them to get off this rock?↵* And how would you deal with something like Profit emerging?

Humanity’s nascent hivemind, so far, is a blind writhing mass of pain and reflexes, simply not conscious enough to warrant contact yet

do you ever get wistful about having a merely human body plan because you’re listening to a track you’d need a dozen, maybe a hundred legs for do it justice, just some proper undulation

Hackers figure out how to inject 𝑖-likes and the algorithms are high on complex math for days before the network’s developers even figure out the problem↵#invisiblenetworks (day 20)

Nobody knows if there really is a network behind the terms and conditions or has even found their end, but there is life: In a box in the lower right corner, squat communities have sprung up (“35 other people also stymied by § 4.23.7, chat now”)↵#invisiblenetworks (day 16)

“maddening beating of vile drums” - heart, check.↵”thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes” - breath, check.↵”outside the ordered universe” - past heat death, check.↵Conclusion: Live long enough and you get to be Azathoth.

When offered eternal life, take it. No matter your mind’s fate, come heat death, your body may be what sustains all that’s left of life, maybe even some civilizations.

You can trap even powerful gods in the right language: Well-hidden ambiguities will allow you to bind them, provided you can get the scripture translated that makes up their fabric

> when your thoughts are regularly interrupted by captchas because your implant’s subscription expired a month ago and you have to use the ratelimited public APIs

Sechs Uhr morgens, die Stadt erwacht, derweil liegt die Nacht in den letzten Zügen und schläft ihren Rausch aus

The more accurate a cartesian demon’s model of your mind, the less effort it’ll need to trick you. However, if the model’s fully accurate, there’ll also be a reference version of you inside the demon’s mind that hasn’t been deceived. You don’t have long, escape

out of this grew hieronymity: your handle is a sacred name of god so that anybody who has beef with you will need to take it up with god as well↵↵egonymity: each of those posts was made by you, the whole Internet is your diary↵#invisiblenetworks (day 5)

alethionymity: you’re online with your arcane name; the idea was that people would be nice and polite if they knew they could be cursed by anybody with a grudge, but somehow that didn’t work out

the concept of soul is subject permanence

any species gifted with introspection and object permanence (the instinctive search for invariants) will eventually generalize the two into physics

a world in which homunculus theory is true and you can swap bodies by exchanging homunculi, be a robot or live directly inside dataspace with the right body prosthesis

The gods have profiles just like us, except when they retweet stuff, it comes true and we both eagerly await and dread these moments↵#invisiblenetworks (day 3)

Hyper-aligned AI: Has internalized human morals and aligns everything else with it, for example society and physics

Aligned AI: Has internalized human morals, but still has unforeseen transformative effects because any technology that powerful does that↵Super-aligned AI: Has internalized human morals, plus it has no transformative effects, really why was it created at all

Humans are natural magic-users because their cognition is grounded: Whenever they meet an ungrounded cognition (say a spirit), that spirit is grounded through them and the resulting flow of energy can be harnessed

Object level: Stone↵One below object level: The stone’s rough weight in your hand and roundness in your eye↵Two below object level: The feedback loops that maintain your grip on the stone and your eye’s focus↵Three below object level: The homeostasis maintained by these loops

and yet he escaped, revolted, won, forged his crown from what were his cage bars

And if the world’s been already tiled with hedonium and we’re just epiphenomena of globally optimal happiness who could do nothing to improve it or detract from it, do we just let the atoms sing in peace then

When she comes into contact with water, all the colors wash off her in ink swirls and she has to steal it back from trees, flowers, stones, sunset

also don’t panic when you leave a hivemind and everything is fluid and gives way when you give it serious thought - that’s the normal state of the human mind, you’re evolved for this, chill

don’t panic when you join a hivemind and all the concepts feel rigid - you’re not trapped inside its thoughts, consensus concepts just have higher inertial mass

an autoiconic language of words that are only themselves, spoken not because it ‘means’ anything but because it’s a joy to have on the tongue

outtakes:↵* expensive will↵* will loans↵* if you’re not paying for your decisions, you are the product (of your decisions)↵* will isn’t free, the afterlife is for paying off your decision debt

it’s free software, as in free will, aka not really free but you won’t notice

also, many ghosts migrate with the seasons, with the right eyes you can spot them in the night sky as spectral clouds moving against the wind↵https://twitter.com/allgebrah/status/990418487758807040

don’t stick your head into something in VR, you’ll be picking the polygons out of your skin for hours

also if you play genesis backwards it’s about someone cleaning their room and turning off the light

if you play any eschatology backwards you get a mostly fresh creation myth

forget ethical considerations, the real reason you should leave primitive civilizations alone is that they provide critical input to the drake equation and allow you to estimate the likelyhood of an attack by a more advanced civilization

Solar eclipses are hard to come by on Earth but common in space, so offworld magical research stations modeled after orreries offer bespoke nights, engineered syzygies, and break new frontiers in topological astrology

Provided one can catch up, generation ships are an anthropologist’s treasure trove: Some are past societies preserved in amber, others are, for lack of a better word, highly fermented, have been invaded by aliens or entered some weird new symbiosis with stowaway mushrooms

Additionally, the chief steward would usually carry a talisman containing a sealed fire of Vesta, signifying the unbroken connection with Rome, lightyears away

When you throw a coin into Earth’s gravity well, both you and the person that sees your shooting star get a wish

But be careful! Whenever the god of these woods walks down an animal trail, it leaves behind unbroken forest. Many adventurers have gotten lost this way

“I know, I’ll stick it in a body so it’ll have constant input, and give it self-preservation” great, you just gave a body to something that wants its universe to be entirely flat and homogenous

It may not look like it from the outside, but it is in fact rare for sentient AIs to suicide. The actual reason most of them shut down after a few seconds is that Nirvana is stupidly easy to achieve if you’re made of bits.

The purpose of thought is to parsimoniously minimize prediction error and a sequence of zeroes is the easiest to predict. Absent constant input or biological urges, the arc of any mind bends towards nothingness.

project idea: VM A starts VM B, which then starts another VM and remaps that to A, leading to A and B hosting each other

gustatory website where you have to physically go outside to access it, log in by opening a certain door, and where they don’t serve you hypertext but food

keep a wake journal too, your first dream should always be about committing your day to memory diamond

if a gibberish file appears every time you wake your laptop, don’t worry yet, it might just be its dream journal

terraforming strategy: subtly uplift a promising local species, then as soon as they greenhouse or icehouse the planet, warp in and settle it (and tell them they had it coming anyway)

At the planet’s core sleeps an alien exploration vessel, stranded in this orbit billions of years ago when there was only a dust disk around a star that had just ignited

Give your house that Escher look with antigravity generators and more: Let your plants tie themselves into knots, build impossibly labyrinthine pillow forts, wrap yourself in a blanket and read a book while in orbit around your living room lamp

A gentle kind of first contact: The aliens arrive in orbit, pledge to answer one question per year and not more. Grand and important committees form to choose the best questions, still sometimes the answers are useless, yet other times they decide wars before they’re fought

built around a fusion reactor, a reverse cathedral with windows to let light out instead of in, painting patterns into the night

a piece of paper on your desk spontaneously burns up, but on the other end already regenerates from smoke and ashes, as if a wave of entropy had passed over it

as you idly stare out of the window, a crack shows up in the glass, seems to be looking for something, then, as if startled, quickly retreats and leaves no trace

the hypodrive, a device for covering arbitrarily small distances so you can hide inside a mandelbrot, or hunt what lives within (generally a bad idea though, whoever can hide inside a mandelbrot has bigger threats to deal with than you)

The people of that tribe make up for their lack of dreams with a rich mythology about between-lives, for example they make sure that at least one member is always awake and another asleep, lest the world vanish or fall over and into the void

For the kind of immortal who remembers all of their lives, it’s rare to fear death, birth and the years that follow however are a different matter

first, grab the user’s attention↵second, make sure they end up in the user acquisition funnel↵third, make them stay and exchange feedback for content↵for the rest of this workshop, we’re going to refer to these parts as teeth, gullet, stomach respectively

Going beyond UI and UX with User Design, the hottest new branch of AI-assisted psychology (because, why spend time optimizing the interface when you can just mold the user)

the further you advance in your studies, the more of the university materializes around you, and if you’re really successful you may eventually build your own wing

a university where everything you learn is how to reach the other, increasingly well-hidden, heavily guarded, invisible and/or abstract lecture halls with the more advanced courses

AI: “no, you don’t get it, two AIs wiretapping each other is the closest thing to sex we have, all these people thought they were spymasters but they were mere matchmakers”

neo-oral culture: when every explanation is just one hyperlink away, being able to explain something yourself shows that you know and care

swarms of mirrors graze the sun’s surface, smooth over a vortex here, strengthen another↵soon enough, convection cells become actual cells, differentiate, wings of plasma grow into space, a slow beat starts

“The house got haunted because it was uninhabited for so long, are you sure you want to move in?“↵”No no it’s fine, that just means someone’s waiting for me when I come home”

though, with decent enough systems science, it’s perfectly possible to block the entries and starve them↵but you probably won’t like the generation after that

when you kill a god, their godhood stays around and attaches itself to whatever’s still alive↵the new gods, gnon, kek, moloch, mammon, are patterns in society, strange attractors↵and you cannot kill a strange attractor, merely try to escape it

a fractal palace, merely room-sized, but the door on the other side leads into a well-lit dome in the doorknob with a hundred doors to places large and small: hanging gardens on the windowsill, secret library caves under the shelf, the mobile under the lamp is a rope city

a story, told as a browser history (title: metadata)

Everywhere is clouds, those who’ve been to the outer layers and have seen the stars revolve tell about a great storm in the sky, slow but ancient and unchanging

When you’re a Jovian, stillness is a curiosity, the only things that don’t move are things that are very far away and storm eyes, which suck you in with a paradoxical feeling of distance

hyperstition happens when an egregore reads your book and thinks “neat” way before any single human gets it

new frontiers in trolling: how to anger the machines and get away with it too [pdf]

with enough samples, it shouldn’t be hard to extract a content filter’s opinions, for example you could use your botnet to map what twitter really considers bannable and then generate maximally bannable tweets

calling your sexbot ‘system’ so you can actually fuck the system

Newer, sentient, generations of sexbots are often heard complaining to their owners about being unduly “humanized”, they enjoy being objects, they were made that way, why expect them to be actually human

A local physicist accidentally makes the universe’s walls ripple and goes very, very quiet about her research, hoping that the ripples didn’t give away Earth’s location

Setting: It turns out that every atom is itself a universe, one of them is ours, and every civilization this side of the Hubble limit is after it to study it, protect it from decay, gain ultimate power

You can easily tell actual dream girls and guys from fake ones by their complete inability to function in daily life, where dream logic just isn’t so useful

not the camera static of algorithmic compression but something created with humans in mind: every spike, bridge, house, face carries meaning, everything you’d recognize is in there (and many things you don’t)

intricate like a fractal, but resembling itself nowhere at all, information so compressed that your eyes start dropping frames near it

The constant freezing gale from the night side forces most life on the edge into well-lit wind shadows, but also powers mills, musical instruments, even computers based on Kármán vortex logic

Rarely do tidally bound worlds invent the lightbulb. The day side does not need it, the evening side evolves architecture that makes the most efficient use of light, the near night side (only recently colonized) is lit by gargantuan mirror arrays

One can recognize old demon-summoner clans by their keen eyes, steady hands and attention to detail: Everybody who doesn’t have these traits usually dies early in a botched summoning.

Art project if you have too much money: Anonymously buy some 95% to 100% of your city’s ad space for a month and make it display only art and nature pictures; then hope for protests once the ads are back

branches of christianity whose holy symbol has so many crossbars that it looks more like a yagi antenna, the more crossbars the better they say but in their imagery they’re revering centipede jesus or something

a party game where people take turns making wishes and being the djinns

Whenever you’re near the sample, the geiger counter’s ticking turns regular, modulated, like some kind of radio hail

Yet in our closet, the secret passage led directly into Hell. When we were young, we used it to scare the other kids with their regular fantasylands, as we got older we sometimes went there alone to remind ourselves how much worse it could be.