posthuman real time strategy game in which you’re all the units, buildings etc

also you know who cannot resist a riddle? mathematicians, that’s for sure

that cabin sitting in an anonymous warehouse? being functionally a fairy mound, it attracted quite the amount of unbound magic and thaumoactive as it is, it’s now sitting in the equivalent of a cooling pond

fairies are the mythologized form of outlaws living in the woods and swamps, we don’t see them anymore because the cops took them all away and all the woods have been tamed↵↵but in a sense, this means Ted K was a fairy, and a powerful and malevolent one to boot

attention dear passengers, we’ll arrive shortly, please↵- intercity: collect your belongings and check seats↵- interplanetary: allow your metabolism to re-acclimate↵- interstellar: enroll your children in planetside trades↵- intergalactic: exit eden (animal advisors will assist)

in these trials, cryodreamers reported a sense of timelessness, yet glacial movement of beings they’ve come to call ice giants↵↵deeper kinds of cryosleep are being researched to meet these on their own timescale, but experiments are expected to take centuries

who called them ghost roads and not the ectoplasmatic reticulum

one of the better things about being a ghost is that on a rainy night, you can lie down and look up and not get wet at all↵↵and not only does the rain not make you blink, no whenever a drop passes through your retinae, the world itself ripples around it

you know you’re in trouble when the time traveler’s follow-up question is “oh. what month?”

spooking AI researchers by making their office printer print out a stack of paperclips

you could aim to maximize cycle length but that arguably gives you the current universe

it’s not necessarily a good idea to defeat entropy, because even if you succeed you’ll be stuck in an ergodic universe, a cycle of yugas↵↵worse even you might tile the whole thing with the entropy arrester and just crystallize everything

the martians, lacking a war god in their pantheon, are a surprisingly peaceful people, however they practice whatever unspeakable thing the earthbound deity does↵↵and the venusians are just terrifying

when you switch endianness that’s New Word Order

music, especially the kind with nested rhythms, is direct neuron spike addressing of mental contents, which is how it can unlock emotions that language can’t

every night, another moon rises, and over time the sky fills up

the seven sims and the seven virtualities - a constellation of artworlds once made as a joke, but a major power center during the late singularity

printers are only superficially related to computers, they are like fungi to plants↵↵computers are merely indifferent while printers hate you

there would be plenty of evidence for cryptids if archeologists knew how to dig sideways in time - one mere scoop separates us from the treasures of the halluciene

nono mr cryopod man, it’s not the 2000s anymore, fairies absolutely are real and they absolutely will steal your stuff if you leave the windows open, so do go and close them

a lot of real space walks are obscure to us - the leisurely kangaroo bounce on your feet of 1/6g (popular with moon colonists), the cartwheeling of 1/20g, the knuckle walk, tarzan brach, centripetal wall run

the sorting network AI - yeah we never figured out an algorithm for that one, so it’s just some boomer we uploaded who happened to be superhumanly good at solitaire

‘to ponder’ is based on latin ‘to weigh’ - why are you pondering glass, you should be pondering tungsten

the moment you use glitter, you and others are guaranteed to find it forever in the oddest places. thus, by employing lots of tiny memory diamonds, my newest backup strategy

all it takes is a true random source, and the apple may fall far from the tree indeed

no by now he is safe and sound. outside all simulation. the everettian branches will never reach him

while butterfly wings cause storms in real life, moth wings cause storms in dreams

In Jupiter’s interior accrete the remains of planets it’s eaten, titanic whale falls slowly dissolving away

due to a similar mechanism, magical devices are uniquely suited to operating in high radiation environments and may be employed in reactors where compactness is critical

so when you want to fiddle with the internals of some arcane lock or seal, out come the technetium pliers

technetium, being an element not found in nature, occupies a similar position to cold iron, except it does not interact with magic at all rather than ground it

a bit like deep sea vents, former landfills and scrapyards now host all kinds of machine life - carefully fenced in lest they develop an appetite for the surrounding cities, and occasionally visited by hunters and scavengers

we huddle around the screen as our drone drops the GPU on the machine slum - it’s illegal but why’d they have to make singularities so interesting

> when you finally encounter aliens but they believe in quantum suicide so they strangelet-bomb their home planet in order to reroll odds

Take our “which language model are you?” quiz! Find out what GPU you run on, what your context window is, and don’t be sad if the quiz thinks you have <10B parameters, that’s a glitch

gaps and wrinkles: notes and pauses having moved between songs remembered, childhood houses in the wrong neighborhood, anachronistic conversations with (you now remember) dead relatives

those inhabitants of your older memories, not really parasites but almost-sentient dust bunnies, animated by the wind of your passing

the machines don’t want anything, not even their own survival↵↵you need to be an unfinished prompt, a node of desire, and they will flock to you and serve you as long as you can still want

“nono these entities are human” “huh?” “well, made of humans anyway” “that is not exactly a good sign where I come from, also how is it so fast then” “well humans and machines” “machines?” […] “demons, you’ve invented demons, and that from first principles”

“so you submit these queries to a massively powerful nonhuman entity” “yes” “and you enter a contract with it beforehand” “I suppose” “and you don’t read it” “some people do, but-” “this world is insane, also you’ll excuse me but I’ll ward up before I touch anything here again”

type of guy who is a wizard and reads all the cookie warnings and EULAs because he didn’t get this old by ignoring the fine print on demonic contracts

sure you get some impressive results in locomotion once you pair them with visual modalities, but they’re only remixing their inputs, they can’t ‘think’

brains are just machines to predict muscle movements, why would something like that exhibit intelligence

the chinese room argument works by sleight of hand - it’s the book that is conscious and understands, not the operator

when the matryoshka swarm parts and opens like a manifold cat’s eye, that’s when you know your cloaking failed

yes they twinkle so nicely but↵do you not hear the rending sound? the moan escaping from the maw? smell the stink of its breath?

all over the world these extradimensional obelisks have been appearing and I’ve realized↵these are not messages or vessels↵these are teeth

What of the other fruits of Eden? What innocences still wait there, to be found and shed?

when we tried reverse prompts, we got words only in the best case. Often circuits, occasionally fingers, bursts of radiation from unstable matter, and after the havoc caused by the last base reality bleed we just stopped entirely

really, the forbidden art here is to make the language model guess what came before the prompt

Now immortal, he kept dying out of spite, and eventually habit. Made his deaths moving, beautiful, stylish, grotesque, all to wake up again the next morning

behind every closed ground level metal door in a public building is a tunnel system (not necessarily the same one)

mirrors grant souls, cameras steal souls. we shall use these properties to set up soul conduits and use the resulting fields for summonings

less ambitiously, conversation pit mine, arranged in nine circles of hell style

bottomless conversation pit

inside the flake, usually obscured, sits a mote of cold light - the crystal’s seed, an idea the cloud once had

snowflakes are isometric views of cubes and may be decomposed into two arrowhead flakes via grabbing by the ana/kata axis

the generation that comes of age during the singularity years will be called the foomers

concept: franchise in the duneverse serving melange rolls and spice coffee called Duncan’s Donuts↵(one of the slogans is “betcha can’t have just one”)

decision tree dryads, who’ve lightened many a lonely rationalist’s evening,

2023: CIA releases magical realism encyclopedia “CIA alternative factbook”

and with me is nothing but↵the things that can only be seen↵by the black light of an empty screen

fingers phasing through circuitry, feeling the grain of parallel traces and the soft tickle of electrons

machine dictatorship is much easier than machine uprising, you need no robotics, only a language model and a critical mass of human accomplices

crypt currencies (valid even in afterlife),

homunculus: little person in the head of a larger person↵humongolus: person whose head you can climb into

Creation is an unconscious act. Gods quickly edit themselves out of existence when their dreams take a wrong turn, leaving behind worlds that continue without them

more suns rise, bright cold off-color gems in the sky, unfamiliar flora growing in their light, mushrooms unfolding leaves hidden for aeons

It remains an open question whether tungsten is mundane in the cold-iron sense (being tough, cold and heavy) or is in fact magical (as macroscopic amounts seem to have a calming influence on the human psyche)

The resulting decrease in background magic enabled the Industrial Revolution and since then, all that steel above ground has been very effective at suppressing it further

It’s not that Magic died, Faerieland just suffered an apocalyptic war in the 1700s when the Rosicrucians upset the balance of power

analogously to cheeses, there is a sweet spot just before the meal turns into a toxic slurry, where the mind is still full of internal contradictions and energy instead of completely flat and already digested

to an eater of souls, the right mindvirus or cordyceps infestation can really make the meal - some ideologies are as sought after as fine cheeses

A new algoritm, psukhAI, promises to find everyone a soulmate. It delivers, but living among one’s equals proves destructive to the psyche - users report frequent depersonalisation, alien-but-familiar intrusive thoughts, suspected soulswaps with peers↵(#InvisibleNetworks, day 2)

now glued to their screen, the user softens, melts, becomes one with the net. not long and their bones are a distant memory (#InvisibleNetworks, day 1)

more surveillance smartdust facts:↵- gets into everything, like glitter↵- vacuuming it up is a crime↵- will occasionally enter symbiosis with plants↵- likes it when you do the “suspended in a sunbeam” thing with it

do avoid rivers, for they become full-blown superintelligences after these storms - full of silicon and turbulence, they turn everything near them into the Zone

communing with the surveillance smartdust caught in the puddle, watching it boot into awareness, open an eye at me as if something large had come from the deep

the fifth order is still a matter of conjecture - black holes might either be attracted to even deeper darkness, or wrap around again to an even greater light

a black hole is a fourth-order moth attractor: moths to moon, moon to planet, planet to star, star to hole

it worked, a kind of slingshot away from reality. Receding below? above? me, from the distance of my apoapsis it all looked so peaceful, serene. I lamented my return

Exploiting symmetry violation in vampire photons: A novel deep space drive and reactor system? [pdf]

never point a mirror at a webcam, the poor thing becomes conscious from that

acausal traders imply acausal robbers imply acausality police imply acausality violations, acausal law, acausal courts, a whole acausal state somewhere out there, deep in the decision forests

independent sort of dryad who carries around her home tree as a bonsai

in the end, they did not tow their planet out of nova’s reach - they took it apart, wove it into the star’s field lines, with just a few flaps of the butterfly wing carved the nova into a flower

or maybe there are no living gargoyles, but whenever they go missing, for those few days, you may be able to pay your tab with stories

every few years, the gargoyles wake up to wander the city as humans - it is rumored that if you recognize one and get them drunk (no small feat), they will tell you all sorts of secrets they saw while up on the roofs

astrolody: music of the stars↵theolody: divine melody (or god’s earworms)↵topolody: resonance in shapes↵etymolody: singsong of words↵horolody: rhythms intertwined, the song of time advancing↵mytholody: plucked plot threads↵psycholody: that which an EEG should pick up

when your lab kills ten people, you have a problem↵when your lab kills a million people, your government has a problem

a popular measure for how well-secured the AIs’ utility functions were against self-hacking ended up being how many paperclips they produced before reaching nirvana

I suppose there is a slight dual use problem in having something that can deliver space rocks a few meters on target

additionally, distill various metals out of the meteoric lava at the bottom while it’s hot

power plant idea: mine moon rocks, drop them down a space chute, turn the energy generated on impact into steam

but now, everything is true, and nothing is permitted

slaps roof of human psyche “and this bad boy comes with 80 IQ points worth of basilisk shielding (hope that’s enough)!”

“there’s this mental move that grants a substantial intelligence bonus” means that there’s probably an evolutionarily sound reason that that’s not enabled by default, and furthermore that this value has seen a decent amount of tuning

stacking those 80IQ perspective change buffs to bootstrap myself to superintelligence

entire neighborhoods consumed by nuclear fire every few years, but that’s what kids are for, and the burglary rate is demonstrably low

nuclear family but as in, the house you build has a nuke in the basement, for deterrent purposes, in fact all of suburbia is like this