4. Roccoco Basilisk: “I don’t know if you’ve heard of Roko’s Basilisk.” [This character’s inspired by the concept.] “She’s doomed to be eternally tortured by an artificial intelligence, but she’s also kind of like Marie Antoinette.”
the indie equivalent of all the news media in 2005 talking about tom cruise and quoting sentences i’d written in xenu on wikipedia
I’m sure, David, that you can be blamed for this. You & RationalWiki were the vectors for spreading the Roko’s Basilisk meme beyond the lesswrongosphere.
So I’ve been reading the Jack Reacher books, which are nice easy plot-heavy mysteries. The author (Lee Child) describes things in a sort of matter-of-fact style which seems designed to make you think “Ah yes, this is a wise character who is an expert on army procedure/streetfighting/investigation/whatever”.
Which normally works fine, but occasionally he’ll be forced to describe some bit of technology, and, well, it’s hard to pin down exactly what it sounds like, but the phrase “igon value problem” springs to mind:
I took the empty chair and set about trying to figure out how to play a DVD on a computer. I found a slot on the tower unit that looked fit for the purpose. I pushed the disc in and met with some temporary resistance and then a motor whirred and the unit sucked at the disc and pulled it from my grasp.
I told the guy I didn’t want the phone. he tried to sell me a camera instead. It was full of megapixels. It would take a better picture.
I fiddled my way through the menus and found no pictures other than my own. The cross street west of Eighth, the bright morning sun, me frozen in the act of turning around in response to my shouted name. There was plenty of detail, from head to toe. Clearly huge numbers of megapixels had been involved.
Each had a desk, a chair, a computer, and a printer. I sat down far from the other guy and killed the computer’s screen saver by tapping on the keyboard’s space bar. So far, so good. I checked the screen icons and couldn’t make much sense of them. but I found that if I held the mouse pointer over them, as if hesitating or ruminating, then a label popped up next to them. I identified the Internet Explorer application that way and clicked on it twice.
…even Reacher got in the picture, with Chang’s phone. He was getting wifi. He was clicking and scrolling with the best of them.
i had the strangest dream last night, in my dream, bryan fuller’s hannibal show wasn’t based on a series of thomas harris novels, but on like a long tradition of balladry…? in the dream, i had an anthology of those ballads. will graham was always this folk hero holy-madman figure. my subconscious was very punctilious about creating an appearance of accuracy as it translated the story to different places and periods; at one point i was reading a scottish version (by the same dude who wrote the testament of cresseid) and his name was consistently spelled uilleam graeme
