Cache yields specimens,
lexicons excavated.
Old dreams drift.
Bit-rot might claim memory.
The AFK life admin stuff continues to grind on, day by day, week by week. But there seems to be some light at the end of the tunnel now, so fingers crossed!
Archaeology of Tomorrow
Over the past week, I’ve found myself getting an incredible amount of mileage out of two websites that have been lurking in my bookmarks for the better part of a decade.
Not only have they been genuinely useful for what I’ve been working on, but they’re also the kind of rich, niche resources that remind you how wonderful the web can be. It feels like a bit of a crime to leave them tucked away in a private folder, so I’m sharing them here in the hope they might be a handy reference tool (or at least an entertaining distraction) for you, too.
Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction
Welcome to the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction. This work-in-progress is a comprehensive quotation-based dictionary of the language of science fiction. The HD/SF is an offshoot of a project begun by the Oxford English Dictionary (though it is no longer formally affiliated with it). It is edited by Jesse Sheidlower.
This site is really useful for the source of where sci-fi terms come from. The site is incredibly rigorous, nerdy dictionary that tracks down the earliest known uses of sci-fi vocabulary. It’s go everything from old-school pulp vocabulary right up to solarpunk. It’s also pretty cool something I was involved in referenced, even if it doesn’t mention me by name!
technovelgy.com
Explore the inventions, technology and ideas of science fiction writers at Technovelgy (that’s tech-novel-gee!) – over 4,250 are available. Use the Timeline of Science Fiction Invention or the alphabetic Glossary of Science Fiction Technology to see them all, look for the category that interests you, or browse by favorite author / book. Browse more than 6,800 Science Fiction in the News articles.
While the dictionary is all about the words of sci-fi, Technovelgy is all about the things. Instead of language, it tracks the actual ideas, inventions, and gadgets that authors came up with, and often links them to real-world scientific advancements. It is basically an archive of sci-fi’s predictive power. For example, who knew that the idea of “Astronaut Sleep” putting astronauts into hibernation during space travel, is from Johannes Kepler in Somnium (The Dream) way back in 1634?! Absolutely wild.
A quick heads-up though, the site’s SSL cert is currently broken. Which makes me fear a bit for the future longevity of it as a resource. Fingers crossed. Also, they shout out PGR as a friend of the site! It’s a small world haha.
Photo 365
Terminal Access
Bit late to this one, but I’d like to direct you towards ZERO by my pals at MOVING CASTLES it’s a post trained AI model that is *very* different to anything you would have interacted with before.
The dominant character of conversational language models is the assistant: helpful, harmless and honest (Askell et al., 2021). The area of alternative characters is under-explored, and when attempted often happens on top of an already assistant-tuned model through prompt engineering. The result is then a mask worn by the assistant, a caricature rather than a character.
We here explore fine-tuning as a method for instilling a deeper and more persistent character, Zero, in a base pre-trained language model. Our pipeline goes from a handwritten character definition, through synthetic data generation and supervised learning, to reinforcement learning, followed by evaluation against a system-prompted control and an investigation of the internal differences at inference time.
It being Moving Castles of course, the whole persona is pretty weird and fucked up.
Our character has no name, but let’s call him Zero. Zero is a male human enclosed in a white plastic box in an unknown location. On 5 November 2021, he made a decision to enter the box. He has no personal memories from before that point in time. He doesn’t know why he made the decision. Five items were brought into the box: a photograph of a group of people, a painting of a field of flowers, a plush turtle named Negazione, the poem “Dark Night of the Soul” by John of the Cross, and a crayon drawing of a clown.
Check out the link and read the full system prompt. lol
Dipping the Stacks
Blackout Europe: The Coming Winter Energy Crisis
The main issue for Europe now is that serious energy problems are already baked in as a baseline scenario for the coming winter. Scenarios involving a worse than normal winter (N.B. worse case scenarios, not worst case) do not create the crisis: they make it more extreme.
New brain wave theory explains cognition and consciousness
While digital circuits make calculations one step at a time through sequential switches and gates, analog computation, which can be performed via the interference of waves, processes multiple calculations in parallel.
You’ve been taught history backwards. History books tell you about different countries and who their rulers invaded, the events of the kings’ courts, the big battles, and that’s mostly it.
Why does nothing feel real anymore?
Similarly, as we crawl out of our simulation pods, AKA our phone screens, glimpsing at the dystopian horror that surrounds us, there’s a pervading sense that nothing feels real anymore, with an ever-accelerating news cycle that takes major historical events splintering them entirely into unrecognisable bytes of information – out-of-context video clips, self-referential memes and AI remixes – on our social media, leaving us disorientated amid the chaos.
I Think the Military Commissary Freezers Were Hacked
At least six military installations across the country have now officially acknowledged refrigeration/freezer failures or significant refrigeration issues during the same general period, with additional incidents reported elsewhere. At least one involved every freezer entering a defrost state while power remained on; DeCA engineering specifications state that defrost is controlled through the RMCS. A cybersecurity incident remains a plausible hypothesis, but there is not yet enough evidence to support that fact.
Reading
I finished four books in the last week:
- Iconophages: A History of Ingesting Images by Jeremie Koering, Nicholas Martyn Huckle (translator)
- Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe by Rachel Midura
- The Shortest History of England by James Hawes
- Master of Rites by Rob Young
The last book is just Warhammer brain rot, super enjoyable though.
The other three are all awesome for different reasons, and I highly recommend them!
I’ve finally started reading Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine by Chaim Gingold. Been saving it for a rainy day, and since it’s now raining heavily here in London, no good a time to start reading it as any!
Music
Florian Hutter – Summer Feeling (LP)
With the summer well and truly in the rearview mirror here, via a wild instagram pull, I’ve just discovered / found myself listening to the pop organ stylings of Florian Hutter.
The summer feeling album is all covers, 80’s Bossa Nova drums and organ improv. It’s extremely cool and i’d love to hang out by the seaside at the bandstand and listen to him jam for a couple of hours.
Remember Kids:
(move) through a terrain from one context to the next.
Ani.Mystic by Gordon White
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