More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
This book is dedicated to all those cubicle dwellers who, in all their vast and multifaceted variety, labor thanklessly under the lash of insensate management to ensure that all the vital things in our lives do the things we expect them to do or, at the very least, don’t spontaneously explode at an awkward moment.
I am often reminded of certain spirits & fairies one reads of, who are at one’s elbow in one shape now, & the next minute in a form most dissimilar; and uncommonly deceptive, troublesome & tantalizing are the mathematical sprites & fairies sometimes; like the types I have found for them in the world of Fiction. —Letter from Ada Lovelace to mathematician Augustus De Morgan, 27 November 1840
And this was all getting a bit steampunk for my liking. If Jacob Astor turned out to be wearing goggles it was going to go very hard on him indeed.
“West Coast. Maybe out of LA or Santa Cruz,” said Stephen. “There’s some very strange people over on that side of the country. Collectives and communes and religious groups, all of them with their own little slice of magical heaven. Some of them are pretty scary too—militia types—know what I mean?”
The magical tradition I belong to exists in the gap between the observable universe and the rational clockwork creation of the Enlightenment. There’s this power. We don’t know where it comes from or why it follows the rules it does, but it definitely exists and there are definite ways to manipulate it. Further advances in science have done little to help our understanding, except to add a growing temptation to attach the word “quantum” to everything.
it was important to make a distinction between Artificial General Intelligence and ordinary AI. AGI being the sort that was self-aware enough to pass the Turing test and ask difficult philosophical questions before going “Daisy-Daisy” and trying to wipe out humanity, while ordinary AI mainly tried to sell you books on Amazon.
prayed every night for the Singularity when choirs of algorithms would upload him aloft to a digital heaven where anything would be possible and everything permitted.
Hashhishin’s paradise
Apparently nobody ever expects the GRU, Russian Military Intelligence, partly because it changed its official name to GU, but mostly because everybody is too busy worrying about the agency formerly known as the foreign intelligence wing of the KGB—the SVR RF.
Nobody ever expects the Spanish Inquisition either
She would have looked like something from Downton Abbey but only if they’d had a Halloween special directed by Guillermo del Toro.
I asked for a beer and got a bottle of Peroni instead.
I had to sell up,”
Something an American would never say
she prefers a good mystery to a misery memoir,”
everyone assumes causation when they should be thinking coincidence, and correlation when they should be asking whether Twitter is really a reliable source of information.
“In the first place I don’t ‘make’ anybody do anything,” she said. “I merely offer people the opportunity to participate in the glorious pageant that is my existence on Earth. In which they come away greatly enriched, both emotionally and spiritually.”
I’m sorry, I couldn’t find “a good song” in your music. —Siri
“Of course it worked,” she said. “These billionaires always get what they want—in the end.” Interesting, I thought—a little bit of class warfare. “Not always,” I said as primly as I could. “Tell that to Jeffrey Epstein,” she said, which meant nothing to me at the time.
what architects and builders call a crinkly tin shed.
A pole building this side of the pond
Peter not only misquotes Sir Walter Scott: O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive! But to add insult to injury, misattributes the quote to Shakespeare. This is entirely the fault of Captain Jean-Luc Picard.
