Apropos of absolutely nothing—and would I lie to you about that?—ever since early 2020, I keep finding myself thinking about Hrunkner Unnerby, one of the characters in the "B" story of Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky.
The B story focuses on spider-like aliens native to a …
In the days of auld lang syne on Earth-that-was, in the Valley of Plain Speech in the hinterlands beyond the Lake of Ambiguous Fortune, there lived a population of pre-intelligent squirrels. Historical mammologists have classified them into two main subspecies: the west-valley ground squirrels and the east-valley tree squirrels—numbers …
As part of a series—ah, Sequence—of posts explaining the hidden Bayesian structure of language, Eliezer Yudkowsky discusses a parable about factory workers faced with the task of sorting objects which very strongly tend to either be blue, egg-shaped, furry, flexible, opaque, luminescent, and vanadium-cored (categorized by the workers …
Spambots were invariably among Eliza's least favorite clients.
"You've got to understand, Doc! It's not that I'm afraid of rejection. I can handle rejection. I love rejection!"
Most spambots these days were self-aware.
"What I can't stand is the silence that's seemingly been deliberately engineered to be as ambiguous as …
(Trigger warning: school.)
Economists distinguish a spectrum between rival and nonrival goods. If you want to know more math than your school expects of you, all you need is a book, dedication, and time. If you want an Honorable Mention on the Putnam exam (and don't care about merely getting …
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.
—Psalm 23
In the days of auld lang syne in the kingdom of Gend on Earth-that-was, the tribe of Ageep, the children of Trevi, were much despised in the kingdom, for it was …