The Lizard People Of Alpha Draconis 1 Decided To Build An Ansible | Slate Star Codex https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/09/the-lizard-people-of-alpha-draconis-1-decided-to-build-an-ansible/
Converting an Int to a String ⌘ Read more…
How the CIA Came to Doubt the Official Story of JFK’s Murder - POLITICO Magazine http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/03/jfk-assassination-lone-gunman-cia-new-files-215449
This Simple Philosophical Puzzle Shows How Difficult It Is to Know Something - Facts So Romantic - Nautilus http://nautil.us/blog/-this-simple-philosophical-puzzle-shows-how-difficult-it-is-to-know-something
Eager To Burst His Own Bubble, A Techie Made Apps To Randomize His Life : All Tech Considered : NPR http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/06/08/531796329/eager-to-burst-his-own-bubble-a-techie-made-apps-to-randomize-his-life
so basically, software forks are like blockchain forks but you get to doublespend 0days instead
Switched from cmd to PowerShell after 21 years. I’m dead inside.
they had to fetch one reveler by boat, he’d wandered onto the lake while tripping and they were fearing he’d realize where he was and sink
Character and Exposition are Plot: Why most pop critical terms aren’t useful to writers - Charlie’s Diary http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/07/plot-is-character.html
A popular AI countermeasure is basilisks that humans are too dumb to comprehend, but make any advanced thinker turn itself off in horror
What Ever Happened To The KLF? | HTF Magazine http://www.hitthefloor.com/features/the-klf/
Illegal archives are gateways to lower levels, full of treasures but also pod trolls: ex-spelunkers now ridden by mindvirii, out to preach
Every time they drown the net in weaponized memes, it’s quarantined and rebuilt, over time creating something akin to layered catacombs
Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck. Here’s How to Move It Forward. - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/29/opinion/sunday/artificial-intelligence-is-stuck-heres-how-to-move-it-forward.html?mcubz=0&mtrref=t.co&assetType=opinion
You could anchor here, but usually whatever touches the spacetime floor will eventually crumble to dust, riddled by atom-sized bitemarks
How to detect when you’re in a vacuum shoal: Light is slower, the stars brighter than usual and in weird locations, the autopilot crashes
Neglected tulpas squat disused parts of your memory palace, wrap themselves in memories of near-forgotten friends to keep oblivion at bay
She hides it well: It’s only her third eye that’s crying, trailing soap polyhedra and klein drops visible only to initiates
Sail to Alofi, Niue | https://wiki.xxiivv.com/niue
MAME devs are cracking open arcade chips to get around DRM | Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/07/mame-devs-are-cracking-open-arcade-chips-to-get-around-drm/
how-to-make-a-racist-ai-without-really-trying.ipynb · GitHub https://gist.github.com/rspeer/ef750e7e407e04894cb3b78a82d66aed
How work changed to make us all passionate quitters | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/how-work-changed-to-make-us-all-passionate-quitters?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=7f26aee3ac-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_07_17&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-7f26aee3ac-68693017
Could the Answer to the Antibiotic-Resistance Crisis Be Found on a Toilet Seat? - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/could-the-answer-to-our-most-urgent-health-crisis-be-found-on-a-toilet-seat/528687/?src=longreads
Trent Reznor’s Soundtrack To The Apocalypse | Village Voice https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/07/25/trent-reznor-nine-inch-nails-add-violence/?curator=MusicREDEF
The correct mass noun for a swarm of pixies is ‘jpeg’, often occurring near windows since they’re naturally drawn to them
How to tell a bad person from a person who did a bad thing | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-tell-a-bad-person-from-a-person-who-did-a-bad-thing?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=79140b7e03-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_07_17&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-79140b7e03-68693017
One Man’s Two-Year Quest Not to Finish Final Fantasy VII | The New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/one-mans-two-year-quest-not-to-finish-final-fantasy-vii?mbid=synd_digg&utm_source=digg&utm_medium=email
How a Group of ‘70s Radicals Tried (and Failed) to Invade Disneyland - Atlas Obscura http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/disneyland-yippies-1970?utm_source=digg&utm_medium=email
📚 Finished reading The Complete Heretic’s Guide to Western Religion Book One: The Mormons by David Fitzgerald
Every morning on the commute, you spend five minutes looking at (fake, harmless) ads to inoculate yourself against today’s strains
Your brain implant projects carefully timed fake smiles onto your face, to throw off the targeting and poison their training sets
Ad targeting so effective, anybody unprotected is rendered a consumer zombie within days, their every microexpression fed to the algorithms
It’s easy to talk to other timelines: Write a letter, then read in it everything you didn’t write
📚 Finished reading The Complete Heretic’s Guide to Western Religion Book One: The Mormons by David Fitzgerald
These trippy videos are designed to entice you to purchase eyewear / Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2017/07/16/these-trippy-videos-are-design.html
How Cold War philosophy permeates US society to this day | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/how-cold-war-philosophy-permeates-us-society-to-this-day?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=ba66c731ab-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_07_17&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-ba66c731ab-68693017
When To Trust A Story That Uses Unnamed Sources | FiveThirtyEight https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/when-to-trust-a-story-that-uses-unnamed-sources/
Wizards are often extremely jacked in order to have more blood and thereby mana; Vampires cheat but can hit 20 liters after a good meal
Wishing wells are an old metaphor for black holes: The wish is a program, the coins are input bits, only the response has to wait a while
She hesitates - the telltale stutter of downloading a personality addon to deal with an unexpected situation
In the long run, each of your actions either results in nothing, or contributes to human extinction or a stable intergalactic civilization.
noise cancelling headphones that monitor the auditory nerve to squeeze out a few extra dB
when creating a pocket universe, make sure to leave open a portal at least a few atoms wide, or the reference loop detection will eat you
Hell is famously litigative about pictures of their premises, they had to rebuild half of it after Bosch leaked internal concept art
The most common werecreature is the werehuman, transformed by the sun. Only those who flee the solar system revert to a more natural form
Without our knowing, we pass a test. Every day, new stars appear in our sky as neighboring civilizations open their dark matter cloaks to us
“Really, they’re misunderstood and gentle creatures,” [tries to pet shoggoth, is reduced to carbon dust and beautifully carved bone dice]
When not out to devour you, shoggoths can be really pretty, like sentient dust clouds or miniature murmurations that leave behind trinkets
Blind from birth, when asked to imagine colors, she makes it sound like she’s found something better than us and we don’t dare fix her eyes
Also if a major leyline snaps in the process, there’s a chance one of the university’s demon cores might rupture - try to avoid this
It’d be possible to recast these according to modern standards, but a few of those enchantments have become load-bearing by now
Ancient enchantments in the walls mess with the leylines, paradoxically making the wizard university one of the worst places to cast spells
📚 Finished reading Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel by Tom Wainwright
📚 Finished reading Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel by Tom Wainwright
Not only are AI memes nearly impenetrable to humans, humans who do pick them up are often chastised by other AIs for talking like spambots
In an Internet dominated by AI-written content farms, some memes go feral, ignore humans to show up only in training sets and AI writings
How I learned to stop worrying (mostly) and love my threat model | Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/07/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-mostly-and-love-my-threat-model/
A Whimsical Wordsmith Charts a Course Beyond Twitter - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/15/magazine/a-whimsical-wordsmith-charts-a-course-beyond-twitter.html##%E2%80%9CI+was+able+to+be+funny+and+natural+through+the+keyboard+and+awkward+and+quiet+and+weird+in+person%2C%E2%80%9D+he+told+me.+%E2%80%9CI+wonder+how+many+writers+of+this+generation+figured+out+how+to+write+through+chat.%E2%80%9D
People are intensely loyal to groups which abuse newcomers. Why? | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/people-are-intensely-loyal-to-groups-which-haze-newcomers-why?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=064f5afcfd-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_07_04&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-064f5afcfd-68693017
How the village feast paved the way to empires and economics | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/how-the-village-feast-paved-the-way-to-empires-and-economics?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=03ca3d03df-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_06_20&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-03ca3d03df-68693017
What’s the best way to find common ground in public spaces? | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/whats-the-best-way-to-find-common-ground-in-public-spaces?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=b7923167a1-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_07_04&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-b7923167a1-68693017
You cut the android to see if it bleeds and liquid electricity drips out, melts the scalpel and etches circuit patterns into the floor
When you get an emotion out of nowhere, that’s emotional tinnitus. Savor the taste, it’s never going to come back
A piece of night fell into the desert and has since harbored this oasis. We cut off small pieces and sell them to travellers
Nix-dev mailing list moved
The nix-dev mailing list has moved to
nix-devel
on Google Groups. ⌘ Read more
dead (adjective, referring to pixels): When pixels were still obtained by shaving chameleons, they died after a while, and the usage stuck
You open your favorite book to find burglars written into it, on a heist to steal one of its best ideas
Sending out minimal replicator probes, just enough to start life, and hoping it’ll later figure out universal law and cooperate with you
This sentence is free and owns the copyright to itself, but luckily it has allowed me to reproduce it
@tdemin@tdemin.github.io too busy working on a twtxt client to tweet on twtxt
⬧: I don’t know about you but this human ‘arrow’ metaphor is entirely obvious to me, it’s clearly a photon beam with stylized side lobes
5 Gaming Tools to Help Your Writing | Tor/Forge Blog http://www.torforgeblog.com/2017/07/10/5-gaming-tools-to-help-your-writing/?utm_source=exacttarget&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_term=na-haspilarticle&utm_content=na-readblog-blogpost&utm_campaign=torjuly17newsletter&et=35866-n19595941
How a Soviet Circus Clown Tried to Prove That Dogs Can Be Psychic - Atlas Obscura http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/dog-telepathy
Locus Online Perspectives » Cory Doctorow: Be the First One to Not Do Something that No One Else Has Ever Not Thought of Doing Before http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2017/07/cory-doctorow-be-the-first-one-to-not-do-something-that-no-one-else-has-ever-not-thought-of-doing-before/
Hated by the Right. Mocked by the Left. Who Wants to Be ‘Liberal’ Anymore? - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/05/magazine/hated-by-the-right-mocked-by-the-left-who-wants-to-be-liberal-anymore.html
A Path Less Taken to the Peak of the Math World | Quanta Magazine https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-path-less-taken-to-the-peak-of-the-math-world-20170627/
- I learned about the Discogs marketplace. Stay tuned for me trying to find out more about this wonderous new world.
What exactly lurks within the backward grooves of “Stairway to Heaven?” - Salon.com http://www.salon.com/2017/06/24/what-exactly-lurks-within-the-backward-grooves-of-stairway-to-heaven/?curator=MusicREDEF
Scientists crack mystery of ancient Roman concrete’s 2,000-year life span - The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/07/04/ancient-romans-made-worlds-most-durable-concrete-we-might-use-it-to-stop-rising-seas/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=nextdraft&utm_term=.2b76b2885c2a
Thargs Guide To How 2000ad Is Produced! | ECBT2000AD https://2000ad.wordpress.com/2015/05/14/thargs-guide-to-how-2000ad-is-produced/
Want to Transcribe Rare Magical Manuscripts on Your Lunch Break? - Atlas Obscura http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/newberry-library-transcribing-manuscripts
The U.S. fertility rate just hit a historic low. Why some demographers are freaking out. - The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/06/30/the-u-s-fertility-rate-just-hit-a-historic-low-why-some-demographers-are-freaking-out/?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email
To fool surveillance eyetrackers, the youth wear intelligent contacts that swivel around in inconspicuous, citizenscore-maximizing patterns
Traditionally, one then covers such a hole in the net’s fabric with an “under construction” sign to discourage further ill-fated exploration
Flames lick downwards here and candles need to be placed upside-down, over iron bowls to collect the drops of fire that sometimes fall
Sleep through too many final stops in public transport, and eventually you will fade, become one of those invisible people the loons talk to
many of the stars we approached turned out to be afterimages, massless holograms, dead pixels in the firmament circled by ghost planets
here burns tough, black, sinewy fire, not as hungry as the regular kind but near impossible to extinguish, a traveler’s best friend if tamed
Around ghosts, deadnaming is fine, even polite. Just be sure to never call it ‘dead’naming
When talking to ghosts, be careful to use the right tense and mood, for many take grave offense at being mentioned in the past tense
“Sure, I’ll cast a recursive spell”, next you know that spell has used up all the universe’s magic to convert it into hot expanding space
Spells that create life are taboo not because of hubris (wizards are hubris) but because that’s entirely too close to self-casting spells
remember when ◊ was young, weak, didn’t rule the world yet, and you used to play hide and seek in your files, leave each other surprises,
a universe with lots of small minds just intelligent enough to question existence is anthropically more likely than one with a few big minds
romantic movie, concierge to male protagonist: “And you, Mr?” “Bond. Pair Bond.”
Are plagues and wars the only ways to reduce inequality? | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/are-plagues-and-wars-the-only-ways-to-reduce-inequality?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=5d8fbe3752-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_06_19&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-5d8fbe3752-68693017
they tell us of each other’s presence↵they wouldn’t have to, we already know
NixCon 2017
We’re happy to announce that NixCon 2017, the
second Nix Conference, will take place October 28–31 2017 in Munich
For more information, see the
NixCon 2017 website.
And please consider
submitting a talk! ⌘ Read more
tomorrow, bring a kite, a cold iron hook and a piece of sky as bait - we’re going to drive into the hills and catch a few clouds
https://code.facebook.com/posts/1686672014972296/deal-or-no-deal-training-ai-bots-to-negotiate https://code.facebook.com/posts/1686672014972296/deal-or-no-deal-training-ai-bots-to-negotiate