#qntm

“MMAcevedo, also known as Miguel, is the earliest executable image of a human brain.”

“Uh oh,” says the video processing routine.

“Uh oh?” says the decision-making part of the automobile.

“How do you contain something you can’t record or remember? How do you fight a war against an enemy with effortless, perfect camouflage, when you can never even know that you’re at war?

Welcome to the Antimemetics Division.

No, this is not your first day.”

J. J. Abrams has this storytelling device which he uses, which he calls a “mystery box”.

“Wormholery […] is basically just walking.”

“Quite quickly the developer would arrive at a situation where the simplest course of action is to produce two implementations. One would be the genuine software desired by the tester and their tests. The other would be the software which the developer really wanted to build. Crucially, the switch in behaviour would be controlled by the environment. If there’s a test running, the software would behave like this. If not, it would behave like that.”

“These are first drafts, written at lightning speed, with no editing whatsoever.”

“This is also a classic example of a science fiction invented thing - in my case, magic - which, when taken all the way to its logical conclusion, quickly results in phenomena which are too complicated to be palatably explained to readers or used meaningfully in storytelling. I have the same problem with many other things, usually time travel. The writer has a duty to overthink things.”

Science fiction novel / series of blog posts. I’m at 35% and I like it very much.

I’m in the UK, and a typical “nine to five” office (hah, bit of an anachronism there) now operates multiple ranges of times each day.