Simon Willison’s Weblog

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4 items tagged “charliestross”

2018

Every bitcoin proof-of-work mined is an incremental addition to a vast distributed summoning ritual powering the demon-soul at the heart of the maze, the computational equivalent of a Buddhist prayer wheel spinning in a Himalayan breeze.

Charles Stross # 3rd November 2018, 5:47 pm

2017

[On a startup using machine learning to encourage people to get addicted to apps] This technology is so unethical it needs to be criminalized globally, before it evolves into a Fermi Paradox solution... and I generally DON’T think banning technologies is a good idea. But this is like a neuroscience homebrew dirty nuke.

Charlie Stross # 9th November 2017, 10:50 pm

2016

Lovecraft-inspired fiction and cookbooks (unrelated!)

Have you considered the Laundry Files series by Charles Stross? They are novels about a secret UK government department which fights off lovecraftian threats while suffering through the typical burucracry you would expect from the UK government.

[... 49 words]

2007

Unpacking the Zeitgeist. On WoW corpse spamming: “There are thirty years’ worth of future shock condensed into this one news item [...] a harsh warning about the difficulty of accurately portraying plausible futures in literature.” # 8th July 2007, 5:36 pm