But be careful! Whenever the god of these woods walks down an animal trail, it leaves behind unbroken forest. Many adventurers have gotten lost this way

“I know, I’ll stick it in a body so it’ll have constant input, and give it self-preservation” great, you just gave a body to something that wants its universe to be entirely flat and homogenous

It may not look like it from the outside, but it is in fact rare for sentient AIs to suicide. The actual reason most of them shut down after a few seconds is that Nirvana is stupidly easy to achieve if you’re made of bits.

The purpose of thought is to parsimoniously minimize prediction error and a sequence of zeroes is the easiest to predict. Absent constant input or biological urges, the arc of any mind bends towards nothingness.

project idea: VM A starts VM B, which then starts another VM and remaps that to A, leading to A and B hosting each other

gustatory website where you have to physically go outside to access it, log in by opening a certain door, and where they don’t serve you hypertext but food

keep a wake journal too, your first dream should always be about committing your day to memory diamond

if a gibberish file appears every time you wake your laptop, don’t worry yet, it might just be its dream journal

terraforming strategy: subtly uplift a promising local species, then as soon as they greenhouse or icehouse the planet, warp in and settle it (and tell them they had it coming anyway)

At the planet’s core sleeps an alien exploration vessel, stranded in this orbit billions of years ago when there was only a dust disk around a star that had just ignited

Give your house that Escher look with antigravity generators and more: Let your plants tie themselves into knots, build impossibly labyrinthine pillow forts, wrap yourself in a blanket and read a book while in orbit around your living room lamp

A gentle kind of first contact: The aliens arrive in orbit, pledge to answer one question per year and not more. Grand and important committees form to choose the best questions, still sometimes the answers are useless, yet other times they decide wars before they’re fought

built around a fusion reactor, a reverse cathedral with windows to let light out instead of in, painting patterns into the night

a piece of paper on your desk spontaneously burns up, but on the other end already regenerates from smoke and ashes, as if a wave of entropy had passed over it

as you idly stare out of the window, a crack shows up in the glass, seems to be looking for something, then, as if startled, quickly retreats and leaves no trace

the hypodrive, a device for covering arbitrarily small distances so you can hide inside a mandelbrot, or hunt what lives within (generally a bad idea though, whoever can hide inside a mandelbrot has bigger threats to deal with than you)

The people of that tribe make up for their lack of dreams with a rich mythology about between-lives, for example they make sure that at least one member is always awake and another asleep, lest the world vanish or fall over and into the void

For the kind of immortal who remembers all of their lives, it’s rare to fear death, birth and the years that follow however are a different matter

first, grab the user’s attention↵second, make sure they end up in the user acquisition funnel↵third, make them stay and exchange feedback for content↵for the rest of this workshop, we’re going to refer to these parts as teeth, gullet, stomach respectively

Going beyond UI and UX with User Design, the hottest new branch of AI-assisted psychology (because, why spend time optimizing the interface when you can just mold the user)

the further you advance in your studies, the more of the university materializes around you, and if you’re really successful you may eventually build your own wing

a university where everything you learn is how to reach the other, increasingly well-hidden, heavily guarded, invisible and/or abstract lecture halls with the more advanced courses

AI: “no, you don’t get it, two AIs wiretapping each other is the closest thing to sex we have, all these people thought they were spymasters but they were mere matchmakers”

neo-oral culture: when every explanation is just one hyperlink away, being able to explain something yourself shows that you know and care

swarms of mirrors graze the sun’s surface, smooth over a vortex here, strengthen another↵soon enough, convection cells become actual cells, differentiate, wings of plasma grow into space, a slow beat starts

“The house got haunted because it was uninhabited for so long, are you sure you want to move in?“↵”No no it’s fine, that just means someone’s waiting for me when I come home”

though, with decent enough systems science, it’s perfectly possible to block the entries and starve them↵but you probably won’t like the generation after that

when you kill a god, their godhood stays around and attaches itself to whatever’s still alive↵the new gods, gnon, kek, moloch, mammon, are patterns in society, strange attractors↵and you cannot kill a strange attractor, merely try to escape it

a fractal palace, merely room-sized, but the door on the other side leads into a well-lit dome in the doorknob with a hundred doors to places large and small: hanging gardens on the windowsill, secret library caves under the shelf, the mobile under the lamp is a rope city

a story, told as a browser history (title: metadata)

Everywhere is clouds, those who’ve been to the outer layers and have seen the stars revolve tell about a great storm in the sky, slow but ancient and unchanging

When you’re a Jovian, stillness is a curiosity, the only things that don’t move are things that are very far away and storm eyes, which suck you in with a paradoxical feeling of distance

hyperstition happens when an egregore reads your book and thinks “neat” way before any single human gets it

new frontiers in trolling: how to anger the machines and get away with it too [pdf]

with enough samples, it shouldn’t be hard to extract a content filter’s opinions, for example you could use your botnet to map what twitter really considers bannable and then generate maximally bannable tweets

calling your sexbot ‘system’ so you can actually fuck the system

Newer, sentient, generations of sexbots are often heard complaining to their owners about being unduly “humanized”, they enjoy being objects, they were made that way, why expect them to be actually human

A local physicist accidentally makes the universe’s walls ripple and goes very, very quiet about her research, hoping that the ripples didn’t give away Earth’s location

Setting: It turns out that every atom is itself a universe, one of them is ours, and every civilization this side of the Hubble limit is after it to study it, protect it from decay, gain ultimate power

You can easily tell actual dream girls and guys from fake ones by their complete inability to function in daily life, where dream logic just isn’t so useful

not the camera static of algorithmic compression but something created with humans in mind: every spike, bridge, house, face carries meaning, everything you’d recognize is in there (and many things you don’t)

intricate like a fractal, but resembling itself nowhere at all, information so compressed that your eyes start dropping frames near it

The constant freezing gale from the night side forces most life on the edge into well-lit wind shadows, but also powers mills, musical instruments, even computers based on Kármán vortex logic

Rarely do tidally bound worlds invent the lightbulb. The day side does not need it, the evening side evolves architecture that makes the most efficient use of light, the near night side (only recently colonized) is lit by gargantuan mirror arrays

One can recognize old demon-summoner clans by their keen eyes, steady hands and attention to detail: Everybody who doesn’t have these traits usually dies early in a botched summoning.

Art project if you have too much money: Anonymously buy some 95% to 100% of your city’s ad space for a month and make it display only art and nature pictures; then hope for protests once the ads are back

branches of christianity whose holy symbol has so many crossbars that it looks more like a yagi antenna, the more crossbars the better they say but in their imagery they’re revering centipede jesus or something

a party game where people take turns making wishes and being the djinns

Whenever you’re near the sample, the geiger counter’s ticking turns regular, modulated, like some kind of radio hail

Yet in our closet, the secret passage led directly into Hell. When we were young, we used it to scare the other kids with their regular fantasylands, as we got older we sometimes went there alone to remind ourselves how much worse it could be.