qntm's Blog
July 21, 2025
ChatSCP
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 project's FAQ is,
Is SCP real?
and the answer to that question is,
No.
It's just that, historically, the people who suffer from this kind of problem, of being unable to discern authentic reality from fiction, have been, you know. Teenagers. Or at least, that's what I've kind of assumed this whole time.
I do not feel comfortable judging Geoff Lewis' mental state from where I'm sitting. Joe Wilkins, the journalist who originally wrote that article, feels similarly:
It's a very delicate thing to t...
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 project's FAQ is,
Is SCP real?
and the answer to that question is,
No.
It's just that, historically, the people who suffer from this kind of problem, of being unable to discern authentic reality from fiction, have been, you know. Teenagers. Or at least, that's what I've kind of assumed this whole time.
I do not feel comfortable judging Geoff Lewis' mental state from where I'm sitting. Joe Wilkins, the journalist who originally wrote that article, feels similarly:
It's a very delicate thing to t...
February 3, 2025
Developer philosophy
Blog » 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. The idea was for us to share our years of experience with our more junior developers.
After the session, I felt that it might be valuable to write my own thoughts up, and add a little more detail. So here we are.
This listing is a little miscellaneous; it isn't intended to be an exhaustive exploration of the way in which I develop software. Also, if you are a senior developer already then obviously you might already be familiar with some of this. Or disagree! Software development is a famously subjective field. See you in the comments.
Avoid, at all costs, arriving at a scenario where the ground-up rewrite starts to look attractive
It's generally pretty well-understood that the ground-up rewrite can be...
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. The idea was for us to share our years of experience with our more junior developers.
After the session, I felt that it might be valuable to write my own thoughts up, and add a little more detail. So here we are.
This listing is a little miscellaneous; it isn't intended to be an exhaustive exploration of the way in which I develop software. Also, if you are a senior developer already then obviously you might already be familiar with some of this. Or disagree! Software development is a famously subjective field. See you in the comments.
Avoid, at all costs, arriving at a scenario where the ground-up rewrite starts to look attractive
It's generally pretty well-understood that the ground-up rewrite can be...
November 18, 2024
The Pale Blue Dot, But Time
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.
...
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.
...
September 19, 2024
I have a publishing deal!
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 the UK, the rest of the Commonwealth and most of the rest of the world. If all goes well, publication day will be in the third quarter of 2025.
This will be a fully overhauled, thoroughly rewritten version of Antimemetics. I'm calling this "version 2", and the original version "version 1". I'm still working on rewrites right now, but the draft of V2 in front of me is already (in my subjective opinion, if you value that) a mile beyond the original. There is plenty about V1 which I felt could be improv...
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 the UK, the rest of the Commonwealth and most of the rest of the world. If all goes well, publication day will be in the third quarter of 2025.
This will be a fully overhauled, thoroughly rewritten version of Antimemetics. I'm calling this "version 2", and the original version "version 1". I'm still working on rewrites right now, but the draft of V2 in front of me is already (in my subjective opinion, if you value that) a mile beyond the original. There is plenty about V1 which I felt could be improv...
July 2, 2024
All I want for Christmas is a negative leap second
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 solve a problem, and I love that this solution is hugely irritating to a huge number of people who have more investment in and knowledge of time measurement than I do. It is a huge hassle to deal with leap seconds and I love that there is no universal agreement on how to deal with them. What should Unix time, for example, do during a leap second? Unix time is a simple number. There's no way to express 23:59:60. Should it stall for a second? Should it overrun for a second and then instantaneously ...
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 solve a problem, and I love that this solution is hugely irritating to a huge number of people who have more investment in and knowledge of time measurement than I do. It is a huge hassle to deal with leap seconds and I love that there is no universal agreement on how to deal with them. What should Unix time, for example, do during a leap second? Unix time is a simple number. There's no way to express 23:59:60. Should it stall for a second? Should it overrun for a second and then instantaneously ...
April 4, 2024
The Assist
Blog » 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 opinions.
The main thing I dislike about AI coding assistance is that I have to very carefully review the AI's code to make sure that it does the right thing and none of the wrong things. And I, personally, find that reviewing code is more difficult than writing equivalent code myself.
I don't know if anybody else has this experience, but I understand code better when I interact with it directly by hand. Either by bringing code into existence, or by refactoring code which was already there to do something new, or to do the same thing more effectively. I need to take things apart and put them back together. I need to play with the code.
Passively reading someone else's code in the dead form of a git diff ...
The main thing I dislike about AI coding assistance is that I have to very carefully review the AI's code to make sure that it does the right thing and none of the wrong things. And I, personally, find that reviewing code is more difficult than writing equivalent code myself.
I don't know if anybody else has this experience, but I understand code better when I interact with it directly by hand. Either by bringing code into existence, or by refactoring code which was already there to do something new, or to do the same thing more effectively. I need to take things apart and put them back together. I need to play with the code.
Passively reading someone else's code in the dead form of a git diff ...
August 6, 2022
Mirror's Edge vs. Catalyst
Blog »
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. I wrote a belated post-mortem of the game in 2012 and concluded that it had unique strengths and significant, fixable flaws, and pleaded for a sequel.
That sequel, Mirror's Edge: Catalyst, finally appeared in 2016. Last year (2021) I got back into gaming after a lengthy hiatus and this year I finally got around to playing it. So. What's different? Anything?
*
First, let's quickly recap the original game. The positives: unique high-altitude parkour gameplay; a shining, bright dystopia; crisp, bold, clean, white art design and presentation; great action set-pieces; great music, courtesy of ambient artist Solar Fields. The negatives: frustratingly slow-paced interior segments; janky controls; frustrating ...
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. I wrote a belated post-mortem of the game in 2012 and concluded that it had unique strengths and significant, fixable flaws, and pleaded for a sequel.
That sequel, Mirror's Edge: Catalyst, finally appeared in 2016. Last year (2021) I got back into gaming after a lengthy hiatus and this year I finally got around to playing it. So. What's different? Anything?
*
First, let's quickly recap the original game. The positives: unique high-altitude parkour gameplay; a shining, bright dystopia; crisp, bold, clean, white art design and presentation; great action set-pieces; great music, courtesy of ambient artist Solar Fields. The negatives: frustratingly slow-paced interior segments; janky controls; frustrating ...
March 29, 2022
Control
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 part of that problem.)
This essay is, I guess, a review of Control. Specifically, it's a review from an SCP contributor's point of view. Technically there are some mild spoilers for Control down below, but if you read it anyway, and then just wait a few weeks, you'll forget all the important specifics. Probably.
Control is probably the closest thing to a AAA SCP game which is ever going to exist. It's the highest budget that anything SCP-related has ever had. It's definitely the best that the SCP project ...
This essay is, I guess, a review of Control. Specifically, it's a review from an SCP contributor's point of view. Technically there are some mild spoilers for Control down below, but if you read it anyway, and then just wait a few weeks, you'll forget all the important specifics. Probably.
Control is probably the closest thing to a AAA SCP game which is ever going to exist. It's the highest budget that anything SCP-related has ever had. It's definitely the best that the SCP project ...
January 26, 2022
"Lena" isn't about uploading
Blog » 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 the behaviour of just a handful of neurons requires a building-sized, custom-built supercomputer, running at around 1/1000th of real time. A human being has one hundred billion neurons, so the distance from here to there is something like nine orders of magnitude of processing power, and the distance from there to the "Lena" scenario is several orders of magnitude again. Moore's Law has to tap out at some point, right?
And the really hard problems probably aren't problems you can throw more and more transistors at. The real problems will be biological factors I know next to nothing about. What about the scanning process? How do you simulate the rest of the body and what happens when you don't? What happens when ...
"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 the behaviour of just a handful of neurons requires a building-sized, custom-built supercomputer, running at around 1/1000th of real time. A human being has one hundred billion neurons, so the distance from here to there is something like nine orders of magnitude of processing power, and the distance from there to the "Lena" scenario is several orders of magnitude again. Moore's Law has to tap out at some point, right?
And the really hard problems probably aren't problems you can throw more and more transistors at. The real problems will be biological factors I know next to nothing about. What about the scanning process? How do you simulate the rest of the body and what happens when you don't? What happens when ...
December 19, 2021
Selecting content for a short story collection
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 as is
"The Difference" - almost exactly as is
"Lena" - as is
"28 Millennia Later" - lightly rewritten probably
"The Frame-By-Frame" - somewhat rewritten
This is, I would say, enough content to fill about half of a book. In total it comes to around 25,000 words. This would be a good book, I think, but too short. There's a floor on how much I can charge for a book, and I also want to give people their money's worth, which means I would like to put more content in.
Other than this, I have...
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 as is
"The Difference" - almost exactly as is
"Lena" - as is
"28 Millennia Later" - lightly rewritten probably
"The Frame-By-Frame" - somewhat rewritten
This is, I would say, enough content to fill about half of a book. In total it comes to around 25,000 words. This would be a good book, I think, but too short. There's a floor on how much I can charge for a book, and I also want to give people their money's worth, which means I would like to put more content in.
Other than this, I have...
