Blog » Prominent OpenAI invester Geoff Lewis may be facing a conspiracy theory-related mental health episode brought about by extended conversations with ChatGPT. I found this article to be very interesting. From my perspective, the most interesting angle here is the fact that ChatGPT is obviously just spinning SCP-esque containment documentation at Lewis. The SCP project has had problems with readers taking its content too seriously since its inception. The very first question in the projec...| Things Of Interest
Blog » So, Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing has been offering on-demand paperback printing services for some time... but it appears that an on-demand hardcover printing service is now in beta. And I was invited into that beta. And so, there are now hardcover editions of all of my books! Click through to each book's dedicated page for purchase links in hardcover (and paperback and ebook): There Is No Antimemetics Division Ra Fine Structure Ed These editions are 15.8cm wide and 23.5cm tall, w...| Things Of Interest
Blog » It suddenly occurs to me that not everybody who follows Things Of Interest also follows me on Twitter, or even follows follows my dedicated book announcements account. That being the case, you may not be aware that there are now paperback editions of my books! Click through to each book's dedicated page for purchase links: There Is No Antimemetics Division Ra Fine Structure Ed These paperback editions are provided using Amazon's print-on-demand service. This is my first foray into pap...| Things Of Interest
Conditions for the ultimate Deus Ex run are: Do not carry or use inventory items. In particular: No weapons. No augmentations. No lockpicks or multitools. No skills upgrades. In particular: No hacking. Never use a door c...| qntm.org
HATETRIS was originally released in April 2010. My personal best score at the time I released the game to the public was 5 lines. Since then, here is what has happened: High score progression 2010-04-04 Atypical's 11-line run is: ϥقໂɝƐඖДݹஶʈງƷ௨ೲໃ...| qntm.org
On sale 11 November 2025. Preorder now. And tell all your coolest and most influential friends. ...| qntm.org
Code » If I see code along the lines of: const ref = application + ':' + endpoint then I'm going to request that you provide a rigorous proof that neither of the strings application or endpoint can ever contain a colon. In accordance with my belief that code should be obviously correct, not provably correct, your proof will look something like this: if (application.includes(':') || endpoint.includes(':')) { throw Error() } This is because I have been down this road too many times. There are ...| Things Of Interest
Blog » On this page, every vertical pixel is equivalent to 100,000 years of time. The top of the page is the Big Bang. The letter "z" in this sentence is about a million years tall. Get scrolling. That's us.↓ ↑During those 100,000 years, all of human history occurred. This sentence is several million years after humans. We're gone now. We'll never be back. The universe continues. ...| Things Of Interest
Code » We've started playing a new board game. An old board game, actually; it seems like it's originally from 1975 and has gone through a few iterations. 221B Baker Street comes with a deck of 75 unique, original Sherlock Holmes mysteries and a dense book of clues. At the start of the game, one mystery is selected at random from the deck and read out to everybody. Players then start at Baker Street on this board and roll dice to travel around the board to other locations, such as the museum...| Things Of Interest
Blog » In fact I have two publishing deals. Some of you may have already seen this news, and you may be able to guess where this is going. The first deal is with Ballantine Books, a US-based publisher which is part of Penguin Random House. The second deal is with Del Rey, a UK-based publisher which is also part of Penguin Random House. Ballantine will be publishing my book There Is No Antimemetics Division in North America, and Del Rey will be publishing There Is No Antimemetics Division in ...| Things Of Interest
Blog » I just want to see it. Just once. I want to watch that earthquake ripple through all of global electronic timekeeping. I want to see which organisations make it to January morning with nothing on fire. You know what a leap second is. The short version is that planet Earth is a terrible clock. I love leap seconds. I love the unsolvable problem which birthed leap seconds, I love the technical challenge of implementing leap seconds, I love that they are rare and delightful and that they ...| Things Of Interest
Blog » Control is a 2019 third-person action shooter developed by Remedy Entertainment. The game takes inspiration from a variety of sources, but its most prominent and notable influence is the SCP project, which is very important to me, for obvious reasons. (I don't like to call it the "SCP wiki" these days... I think this gives people the false impression that individual SCPs don't have specific authors, when they absolutely do. The site has a chronic problem with attribution and this is p...| Things Of Interest
Code » Absurdle is an adversarial variant of the charming and (currently) viral word guessing game Wordle. The mechanics of Absurdle are identical to Wordle, or as close as I can make them. Among other things, they use the same word lists. (There are actually two word lists in Wordle: one is a list of 2,315 words which can appear as answers, and the other is a list of 10,657 rather more obscure words which are allowed as guesses but will never appear as answers.) The major difference is behi...| Things Of Interest
Blog » So I think I've mentioned a few of times that the next thing I want to publish is a book of short stories. Due to [gestures at the world] all of this, and some other things, progress on this has been extremely slow over the course of 2021. Currently I am hung up on selecting content. At present, the book will definitely contain: "Valuable Humans In Transit" - very slightly rewritten "Gorge" - somewhat rewritten "I Don't Know, Timmy, Being God Is A Big Responsibility" - almost exactly ...| Things Of Interest
Things Of Interest » Recent stuff is at the top. Books There Is No Antimemetics Division Ra Fine Structure Ed Other fiction Lena 30 More First Drafts (subdirectory) cripes does anybody remember Google People 30 First Drafts (subdirectory) Causal Noose The Vending Machine Murders The Difference Film Maker I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility First Contact: a retrospective Gorge The Last-But-One Question Valuable Humans In Transit The Four-And-A-Halfth Planet (subdirectory) L...| Things Of Interest
Amazing as it may seem after all these years, there are still junior developers in the world. A few weeks ago at work we had a talk where senior developers (including me) were invited to spend around five minutes each talking about our personal software development philosophies....| qntm.org
At work we recently started experimenting with generative AI for assistance with programming. We have a new Visual Studio Code plugin which we can ask questions in English, and it spits back code. It was a really interesting piece of, well, mandatory training. I've formed some op...| qntm.org
"[D]elivers a refreshing dose of existential despair at the transhuman condition." — Charles Stross qntm has been writing science fiction for most of this millennium. His works start from elegant, deep hypotheticals and wind entire universes around them, pushing science, t...| qntm.org
This was written around March 2022, long after the completion of the Antimemetics tales on the SCP wiki. This SCP essentially covers the same narrative ground as the epilogue of Antimemetics, Champions Of Nothing. Now, redundancy in storytelling is generally something to be av...| qntm.org
Absurdle is an adversarial variant of the charming and (currently) viral word guessing game Wordle. The mechanics of Absurdle are identical to Wordle, or as close as I can make them. Among other things, they use very similar word lists. (There are actually two word lists in Word...| qntm.org
The HATETRIS algorithm has always been perfectly deterministic, with no "RNG". When I originally created it in April 2010, the way it worked was to examine the current well state only and use this to determine which piece to return. If the well was the same, then the piece return...| qntm.org
Mirror's Edge came out for the PlayStation 3 in 2008 and it is literally the only PlayStation 3 game I own. I bought the console in 2011 because it was a top-of-the-line Blu-ray player and I guess Mirror's Edge was the only game for the console I had any interest in playing. ...| qntm.org
Exactly one of the following statements is true. In Tetris, you can always get at least one line before losing. In Tetris, a sufficiently evil AI can always force you to lose without getting a single line, by providing bad pieces. Which one? Prove it. The setup I crea...| qntm.org
Quite a lot of science fiction isn't about what it's about. "Lena" is about uploading, but uploading isn't real. It doesn't exist. It might exist at some point in the future, but that just seems pretty improbable to me. As I understand it, right now, to "accurately" simulate th...| qntm.org
Today, 20211202 (2nd December 2021), is a palindrome in the YYYYMMDD format. It is the 83rd of what will ultimately be 366 palindromic dates in this format. The first of these was 01011010 (10th October 101). The most recent one was 20200202 (2nd February 2020). The next o...| qntm.org
So there's a thing we use at work which I call a ratchet. In our codebase, there are "patterns" which we used to use all the time, but we decided to stop using them, but removing all of the existing instances at once is too much work. We want to remove all of these instances eve...| qntm.org
Play Hate Tetris. This is bad Tetris. It's hateful Tetris. It's Tetris according to the evil AI from "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream". I have to be honest, this is not an entirely original idea. However, RRRR's implementation of the concept of a game of Tetris which always g...| qntm.org
A note from the author You can now buy this story as part of my collection, Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories. This collection also includes a sequel story, titled "Driver". This article is about the standard test brain image. For the original human, see Mi...| qntm.org