#give her a few more decades or centuries and post-adventure wealth and power she could definitely get an inverse tower going
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blujayonthewing · 1 year ago
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me: [thinking about how melliwyk is inclined to feel more comfortable building downward than constructing a classic tower if she ever became That Kind Of Wizard]
my brain:
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mostlysignssomeportents · 5 years ago
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#5yrsago The Peripheral: William Gibson vs William Gibson
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In The Peripheral, William Gibson's first futuristic novel since 1999's All Tomorrow's Parties, we experience the fantastic synthesis of a 20th century writer -- the Gibson of Neuromancer, eyeball-kicks of flash and noir; and the Gibson of Pattern Recognition, arch and sly and dry and keen. Cory Doctorow reviews.
In fact, The Peripheral is a novel that is doubly futuristic, set both in our near future, and in a more distant future, further down the line, beyond a kind of terrible singularity called, simply, "the jackpot."
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Flynne -- and her redneck, PTSD-shocked brother -- live a rural existence, sometime in the next 10 or 20 years, in a Picketty dystopia, where the one percent hoard nearly all the world's wealth, merely scraping off a crumb or two to spend on guard labor to fight in overseas military adventures or to spy on the domestic population. In Flynne's town, the only economy to speak of comes from builders -- people using illegal printers to run off narcotics -- and the corrupt money they spread around to keep themselves safe from homes (Homeland Security) and the other appendages of the distant, crumbling state.
Wilf Netherton lives in Flynne's future -- sort of. He's the disgraced publicist for a performance artist/reality TV star, jobless and dependent on the charity of Lev, part of the klept -- a paranoid, post-Putin global Russian diaspora, unimaginably rich and powerful. And Lev has a weird hobby: he's part of a clade of bored aristos who've discovered a heavily encrypted gateway that gives them access to a past. Not the past, but various stubs off the past, off of Flynne's era, a network bridge between the present and the future. No one is sure where this server is, or who operates -- possibly the mysterious Chinese, who were better prepared for the jackpot than most.
When Lev began interacting with the past, he created a new stub, a new timeline that runs at the same time as his own, one minute per minute, separated by decades, reality, and the unbridgeable gulf of the jackpot, which has produced a radically depopulated world of unimaginably advanced tech and unimaginable authoritarian surveillance. If Flynneville is Picketty-complete, then Lev-ville is the Picketty Singularity.
Using a front, Lev hires Flynne's brother to operate a private security drone, a job that is subcontracted to Flynne while her brother goes to beat up some Luke 4:5 protesters, the spiritual descendants of the Westboro Baptists. And while Flynne is flying that security drone, she is the sole witness to a ghastly murder. Flynne can't go to the alternate future to identify the killer, but as information can pass between the worlds, she doesn't need to physically do so anyway. And so it begins.
The 20th century William Gibson produced dense, beautiful, well-turned books that sparkled with dark flash and bohemian chic. But in this century -- up until now, at least -- Gibson has confined his fiction to contemporary, brooding thrillers, a strange kind of science fiction set just a few years in past. Both Gibsons are marvellous, both are literary treasures, but in 2014, we get a new Gibson altogether, the synthesized Gibson whose political commentary is every bit as nuanced and deft as the Spook Country material, but whose plotting and flash and sheer velocity are the match of anything from Neuromancer to Virtual Light.
This is, in other words, a perfect fusion of Gibson's pulp heritage with his fine-tuned design and social sensibilities. As he says in Conversations with William Gibson:
The only kind of ghetto arrogance I can summon up from being a science fiction writer is, I can do fucking plot. I can feel my links to Dashiell Hammett. If I meet some guy who subsists on teaching writing in colleges, and if there's any kind of hostility, I think, I can do plot. I've still got wheels on my tractor. The great thing is when you're doing the other stuff and you whip the plot into gear, then you know you're driving something really weird.
You could hardly ask for a better example of this principle in action than in The Peripheral. From the microscale word choices to the macroscale plot, structure and themes, the book is strange and contemporary in a perfectly futuristic way.
The Peripheral
-Cory Doctorow
(Image: Portrait of author William Gibson taken on his 60th birthday, Gonzo Bonzo, CC-BY-SA)
https://boingboing.net/2014/10/28/the-peripheral-william-gibson.html
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lthmath · 5 years ago
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Recently we have been reorganizing our LThMath Book Club. The whole idea behind it is to read and discuss books with other people. We are happy that the Goodreads Club grew to 272 people. Recently people have been asking if we can use other platforms for the Book Club as well. Therefor, we have created a Facebook Group with the same idea as the Goodreads one. After the first 2 months we have reached 226 members in the group and we have some really great book recommendations. Hope you all enjoy the idea.
Due to this change, we cannot do just a Goodreads poll for the bi-monthly book. Therefor, we decided to do a survey (created using Google forms). In this way more people can vote for the book. If you want to vote, you need to do it HERE.
  “The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer” by Sydney Padua
The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage presents a rollicking alternate reality in which Lovelace and Babbage do build the Difference Engine and then use it to build runaway economic models, battle the scourge of spelling errors, explore the wilder realms of mathematics, and, of course, fight crime—for the sake of both London and science. Complete with extensive footnotes that rival those penned by Lovelace herself, historical curiosities, and never-before-seen diagrams of Babbage’s mechanical, steam-powered computer, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage is wonderfully whimsical, utterly unusual, and, above all, entirely irresistible.
“The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography” by Simon Singh
Simon Singh offers the first sweeping history of encryption, tracing its evolution and revealing the dramatic effects codes have had on wars, nations, and individual lives. From Mary, Queen of Scots, trapped by her own code, to the Navajo Code Talkers who helped the Allies win World War II, to the incredible (and incredibly simple) logisitical breakthrough that made Internet commerce secure, The Code Book tells the story of the most powerful intellectual weapon ever known: secrecy.
Throughout the text are clear technical and mathematical explanations, and portraits of the remarkable personalities who wrote and broke the world’s most difficult codes. Accessible, compelling, and remarkably far-reaching, this book will forever alter your view of history and what drives it.  It will also make you wonder how private that e-mail you just sent really is.
“Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension: A Mathematician’s Journey Through Narcissistic Numbers, Optimal Dating Algorithms, at Least Two Kinds of Infinity, and More” by Matt Parker
In the absorbing and exhilarating Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension, Parker sets out to convince his readers to revisit the very math that put them off the subject as fourteen-year-olds. Starting with the foundations of math familiar from school (numbers, geometry, and algebra), he takes us on a grand tour, from four dimensional shapes, knot theory, the mysteries of prime numbers, optimization algorithms, and the math behind barcodes and iPhone screens to the different kinds of infinity―and slightly beyond. Both playful and sophisticated, Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension is filled with captivating games and puzzles, a buffet of optional hands-on activities that entice us to take pleasure in mathematics at all levels. Parker invites us to relearn much of what baffled us in school and, this time, to be utterly enthralled by it.
“A Beautiful Mind” by Sylvia Nasar
Economist and journalist Sylvia Nasar has written a biography of Nash that looks at all sides of his life. She gives an intelligent, understandable exposition of his mathematical ideas and a picture of schizophrenia that is evocative but decidedly unromantic. Her story of the machinations behind Nash’s Nobel is fascinating and one of very few such accounts available in print.
We are very interested in this book due to the movie “A Beautiful Mind”. It is an incredible, emotional and interesting movie about the life of John Nash. If this book was chosen, we believe it would be a great idea to watch the movie after we read the book. What do you think?
“Lost in Math: How Beauty Leards Physics Astray” by Sabine Hossenfelder
Whether pondering black holes or predicting discoveries at CERN, physicists believe the best theories are beautiful, natural, and elegant, and this standard separates popular theories from disposable ones. This is why, Sabine Hossenfelder argues, we have not seen a major breakthrough in the foundations of physics for more than four decades. The belief in beauty has become so dogmatic that it now conflicts with scientific objectivity: observation has been unable to confirm mindboggling theories, like supersymmetry or grand unification, invented by physicists based on aesthetic criteria. Worse, these “too good to not be true” theories are actually untestable and they have left the field in a cul-de-sac. To escape, physicists must rethink their methods. Only by embracing reality as it is can science discover the truth.
Looking at the general description, this sounds more like a book about physics but we are still interested to see how the author deals with the bondary between mathematics and physics. Also, this book was released in 2018.
“How Long is a Piece of String? More Hidden Mathematics of Everyday Life” by Rob Eastaway and Jeremy Wyndham
In this book, you will find that many intriguing everyday questions have mathematical answers. Discover the astonishing 37% rule for blind dates, the avoidance tactics of the gentleman’s urinal, and some extraordinary scams that have been devised to get rich quick. Also included are the origins of the seven-day week and the seven-note scale, an explanation of why underdogs win, clever techniques for detecting fraud, and the reason why epidemics sweep across a nation and disappear just as quickly. Whatever your mathematical ability, this fun, thought-provoking book will illuminate the ways in which math underlies so much in our everyday lives.
“A Brief History of Infinity” by Brian Clegg
Infinity is a concept that fascinates everyone from a seven-year-old child to a maths professor. An exploration of the most mind-boggling feature of maths and physics, this work examines amazing paradoxes and looks at many features of this fascinating concept.
After reading “Beyond Infinity” by Eugenia Cheng, this book might feel like a double kill especially if you feel like you need a break from infinity. On the other hand, we find the concept so mesmerizing that we just want to find out more about it.
“Gamma: Exploring Euler’s Constant” by Julian Havil
Among the many constants that appear in mathematics, π, e, and i are the most familiar. Following closely behind is y, or gamma, a constant that arises in many mathematical areas yet maintains a profound sense of mystery. In a tantalizing blend of history and mathematics, Julian Havil takes the reader on a journey through logarithms and the harmonic series, the two defining elements of gamma, toward the first account of gamma’s place in mathematics. Gamma takes us through countries, centuries, lives, and works, unfolding along the way the stories of some remarkable mathematics from some remarkable mathematicians.
“Magical MAthematics: The Mathematical Ideas that Animate Great Magic Tricks” by Persi Diaconis and Ron Graham
Magical Mathematics reveals the secrets of fun-to-perform card tricks–and the profound mathematical ideas behind them–that will astound even the most accomplished magician. Persi Diaconis and Ron Graham provide easy, step-by-step instructions for each trick, explaining how to set up the effect and offering tips on what to say and do while performing it. Each card trick introduces a new mathematical idea, and varying the tricks in turn takes readers to the very threshold of today’s mathematical knowledge. The book exposes old gambling secrets through the mathematics of shuffling cards, explains the classic street-gambling scam of three-card Monte, traces the history of mathematical magic back to the oldest mathematical trick–and much more.
We have read another book by Persi Diaconis (“Ten Great Ideas about Chance”) and we thought we could give it a try to another of his books, this time more fun and less stickt. If you want to find out more about “Ten Great Ideas about Chance” and what I thought about it, you can check the reivew.
“Here’s Looking at Euclid: A Surprizing Excursion Through the Astonishing World of Math” by Allex Bellos (also called: “Alex’s Adventures in Numberland”)
Bellos has traveled all around the globe and has plunged into history to uncover fascinating stories of mathematical achievement, from the breakthroughs of Euclid, the greatest mathematician of all time, to the creations of the Zen master of origami, one of the hottest areas of mathematical work today. Throughout, the journey is enhanced with a wealth of intriguing illustrations, such as of the clever puzzles known as tangrams and the crochet creation of an American math professor who suddenly realized one day that she could knit a representation of higher dimensional space that no one had been able to visualize. Whether writing about how algebra solved Swedish traffic problems, visiting the Mental Calculation World Cup to disclose the secrets of lightning calculation, or exploring the links between pineapples and beautiful teeth, Bellos is a wonderfully engaging guide who never fails to delight even as he edifies. “Here’s Looking at Euclid “is a rare gem that brings the beauty of math to life.
We hope this helped you decide what book you would like to read in August – September with us. Hope you liked this post. Have a great day. You can find us on Facebook,  Tumblr, Twitter and Instagram. We will try to post there as often as possible.
  October – November Book Choice Recently we have been reorganizing our LThMath Book Club. The whole idea behind it is to read and discuss books with other people.
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thekitschies · 8 years ago
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Adam Roberts Phantom Kitschies 2016
  Adam Roberts, in typical overachieving fashion, managed to read enough books to populate a full and complete shortlist. 
Adam Roberts
No Kitschies were awarded last year. 2016 was a Kitschless year—for one year only it was Nitch on the Kitsch. Which was a shame, since 2016 saw a wealth of (to quote the Kitschies’ remit) ‘progressive, intelligent and entertaining works containing elements of the speculative or fantastic’. So, [*clears throat*] in my capacity a former judge, I thought I’d post some speculative short-lists for the year the prize didn’t happen.
A disclaimer is needful: I didn’t do last year, what I did in my judging year—that is, read a metric tonne of hard-copy and e-books, the better to be able to narrow down our shortlists. But I read a fair few and some of the books I read were really excellent. So here, for the sake of argument (and please: argue with what I list here) are my Phantom Kitschies shortlists for 2016.
Red Tentacle for the best novel
Naomi Alderman’s The Power is a brilliant jolt of a read, a book happy to inhabit blockbuster conventions in order to suborn them to some powerfully subversive ends. Teenage girls across the world suddenly discover they have the ability electrically to shock others—to burn them, cause them intense pain, even to kill them. The narrative rattles through the immediate implications of this: girls taking revenge on violent or raping men, girls simply being mean, girls collectively coming to a sense of their new power. But the strength of the novel is the way it follows-through its premise, into a world in which men are segregated for their own protection and women, for good and ill and with quite an emphasis on the latter, take control. I particularly liked the way this new society retcons its sense of the world—it becomes seen as ‘natural’ and a product of ‘evolutionary psychology’ for women to be aggressive and violent, since they have babies to protect; if men ever ruled the world their patriarchy would be nurturing and gentle. It’s a raw novel, more than a little jagged—though that also suits its theme—but sparky and engaging throughout. A lightning bolt of a read.
Dave Hutchinson’s Europe in Winter is the third of his ‘fractured Europe’ novels, set in bivalve European set-up—one a tessellation of myriad tiny statelets and ruritaniae, the other, ‘The Community’ a calm but stifling version of 1950s Britain rolled out across the whole continent. The two versions of European reality are linked via a complex of strange portals. Each of the Europe books has a subtly different emphasis and tone, although all provide the pleasures of alt-spy adventures, a cosmopolitan richness of interlocking storylines and slowly unfurling mystery; but arguably this is the best of the three, from its bang-bang opening act of intercontinental railway terrorism through to its big finale. A modern classic.
Lavie Tidhar’s sprawling masterpiece Central Station, set in a future spaceport Tel Aviv, is easily his best book yet (and that’s saying something). What I particularly loved about this is the way it manages to be both gloriously old-fashioned in its SF—an actual fix-up novel set in a space-port in which a colourful variety of humans robots and aliens intermingle—and a distinctively twenty-first century novel about the complex but sustaining inter-relationship between culture and place and memory and technology and change. Most of all it’s about the centrality of stories to who we are, and about the way those stories are always collective and heterogeneous. It’s a marvel.
Christopher Priest’s The Gradual works a simple-enough sciencefictional version of time-zone differences into a haunting exploration of travel, aging and loss. Set like many of Priest’s best novels in his ‘Dream Archipelago’ of endless islands, it is the first-person narrative of composer Sandro Sussken, a citizen of the Glaund Republic on the Northern mainland (a downbeat, authoritarian society locked in an Orwellian permanent war with the Faianland Alliance). The success of his music means that, unlike most Glaundians, Sussken gets to travel from island to island, but in doing so he discovers the titular ‘gradual’, a kind of complex time-slip, or time-stall, that dislocates him from his origins, his family and in the end from the world as a whole. Priest uses his speculative conceit brilliantly to explore what it means to age. It makes me think how rarely the old figure, and how much more they ought to, in progressive narratives of equality and diversity.
Sofia Samatar’s The Winged Histories is a remarkable epic Fantasy, the follow-up to her debut A Stranger in Olondria (2013) and an even stronger novel. It gives us many of the satisfactions of this over-populated mode, as four women—an aristocrat, a military officer, a priestess and a nomadic poet—are caught up in the events leading to an empire-shaking war. But Samatar has the confidence, and the skill, to downplay the conventional satisfactions of narrative. The result is a gorgeous labyrinth of a text that circles through the permutations of its characters, plot, and the history of her world, richly written and formally involuted.
Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad deploys its fantastical conceit—the literalisation of the celebrated 19th-century US ‘railroad’ along which slaves would try to pass to freedom as a network of actual excavated tunnels, railways and stations—with commendable restraint. He is not interested in the worldbuilding mechanics of his idea so much as in the imaginative freedom it gives him to send his heroine, Cora, on a journey encompassing the different violences slavery has manifested over the centuries. It is a novel that renders slave society as vividly and memorably brutal without, at any point, reverting to the pieties of hindsight or historical cliché. An unforgettable piece of fiction.
Golden Tentacle for best debut novel
Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit recasts Korean legend in a densely rendered high-tech future universe governed by ‘calendars’, sort-of computer programmes that determine the nature of reality itself. It’s a book that boldly drops its reader into its properly futuristic and alien cosmos—an interstellar empire called the Hexarchate in which six factions each with unique skills are competing for power. Though it might put some readers off, the advantage of this approach is that when the book clicks fully into focus it does so with kaleidoscopic brilliance and coherence. The game theory and maths, all the politics and military tactics, neatly offset some nicely written central relationships.
David Means’s Hystopia is a brilliant, baffling and expertly fractured novel set in an alt-1970s America in which Kennedy wasn’t assassinated, and Vietnam veterans are being treated for PTSD with psychedelics. It is steeped in the flavour of its era, and manages to be simultaneously weirdly familiar and intensely strange—quite the combo, that. I have to concede it’s a little distorting describing this as a ‘first novel’ (even though that’s what it is) because Means has been honing his craft writing short stories for decades. The technical skill shows: Means’s multi-viewpoint and deracinated approach could easily have slid into mere messiness; but though the novel is often violent it is also potent and, in its way, coherent.
Wyl Menmuir’s superbly eerie The Many is, though short, a tricky book to summarise. Suffice to say that as an exercise in unnerving the reader, this cryptic, powerful novella is remarkable. Its seemingly simple plot, about a young man coming to a Cornish seaside village to live in an abandoned cottage whose previous owner had drowned, invokes a sort-of ghost story, or perhaps hallucination, or perhaps dreamtime, to render its poisoned near-future world more obliquely vivid that any straightforward account ever could.
Idra Novey’s Ways to Disappear wonderfully resuscitates a form—magic realism—I had thought dead and buried. A famous Brazilian writer, Beatriz Yagoda, up to her neck in gambling debt, goes missing; her American translator Emma flies down to South America to try and make sense of things. The characters she meets are colourful and varied (indeed, perhaps, their colourful variety is a little by rote), and the tone is lightly comic, but as the story goes on it becomes stranger and more beautiful, and Novey’s background as a lyric poet increasingly comes to dominate the telling. A short novel that leaves rich and strange residue in the imagination.
Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning boldly mashes together eighteenth-century manners and 25th-century adventure in a post-scarcity utopia where which gender-distinctions are taboo and large-scale affinity-groups are carefully manipulated and managed by behind-the-scenes forces to maintain broader social balance. Readers are liable to find the richly mannered idiom in which Palmer tells her story either beguiling—as I did—or, perhaps, archly offputting. But it is worth persevering with the narrative: there’s a piercing political intelligence at work here, of the sort that would surely have delighted the Enlightenment philosophes that inspired it. Intricately worked, and, I’m pleased to say, the first of a very promising series.
Nick Wood’s Azanian Bridges is set in a modern day South Africa still under the sway of Apartheid, and expertly uses this alt-historical premise to estrange and refresh the way racism violates social and human contexts, without abandoning the possibility of bridging this chasm. Sibusiso Mchunu, traumatised by seeing his friend killed at a demonstration, is admitted to a psychiatric hospital where White doctor Martin test him on his new invented, an ‘empathy machine’. The potential of this device, and its dangers, power a compact but very effective thriller. A thought-provoking and promising debut.
  from http://ift.tt/2rueAmg
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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years ago
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WHAT NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ABOUT SORT
You don't have to be. But the smarter ones, particularly angels, can give good advice.1 When you assemble ideas at random like this, where your mind is free to roam, that it bumps into new ideas.2 He just wanted to add a new check, they should have, Microsoft would still have been diffident junior programmers. It's always alarming when two people trying the same experiment get widely divergent results. What's important about startups is the speed.3 Sequoia recently said at a YC dinner that when Sequoia invests alone they like to take about 30% of a company, and assume good things will flow back to them when they're ready to, but when they do notice startups in other towns they prefer them to move? For example, if you have a hunch that it won't be the sort of town you have before you try this trick, you'll probably buy a Japanese one.4 Structurally the idea is probably bad.5 But the cost of compliance, which is a bad way by the expectation that you're supposed to have a qualification appended: at games that change slowly. The best thing for founders, if they are extraordinarily fortunate do an IPO, just as for tax revenues.
People.6 I really wanted to know. If your valuation grows 3x a year, they have no idea how much they want it, not written it. Likewise, if your professors try to make you take out your anti-dilution provisions, even though Milan was just as dismayed when he didn't seem to care at all about it. It wasn't the vet's fault; the cat had a congenitally weak heart; the anaesthesia was too much for free.7 People in past times were much like us. The Sub-Zero 690, one of the ways we describe the good ones. It has to be decided by the market. That's not surprising; it takes a while to hit your stride. People who think the labor movement was the creation of heroic union organizers have a problem to explain: why are unions shrinking now?
I think the place to do it.8 Some of the more adventurous catalog companies. Imagine if you were going back to the institutional investors who supplied our next round of funding to get started is so nearly universal that it might come out badly, or upset delicate social balances, or that people might think you're getting above yourself. Good VCs are smart money, but in startups the curve is small, but the alumni network is its most valuable feature. Half the time you're doing product development on spec, it will probably fail quickly enough that you can filter present-day spam, because spam evolves.9 Identity Some parents feel a strong adherence to an ethnic or religious identity is one of the reasons artists in fifteenth century Florence included Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Donatello, Masaccio, Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico, Verrocchio, Botticelli, Leonardo, and Michelangelo.10 Often they have to, but to get the best deals. Thanks to Jessica Livingston and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.
Though actually there is something underneath. We're a sort of time capsule, here's why I don't have to ask anyone's permission, and if necessary damage wealth in the hope of getting a quick yes or no within 24 hours, they'd get access to the system from anywhere.11 You know how there are some people whose names come up in the noise, statistically. One is a combination of shyness and laziness.12 Surely this is a game with only two outcomes: wealth or failure. You don't seem to keep track of opinions that get people in trouble today.13 We made software for building online stores.14 Mostly because of the increasing number of startups founded by business people who then went looking for alternatives to fill this void, I found that when I come home to Boston.
Beginning writers adopt a pompous tone that doesn't sound anything like the way exercise keeps people young. That's why we advise groups to ignore issues like scalability, internationalization, and heavy-duty security at first. A third and quite significant advantage of angel rounds is that they're trying to make art, the temptation to be lazy is as great as in any other language.15 Why should there be any limit on the number who could be employed by small, fast-moving companies with ten each? So at the last round of funding. Teenage kids are not inherently unhappy monsters. So far so good.16 Third, I do it because it yields the best results. I could put it online.
Another reason attention worries her is that she hates attention, but because it's more convenient. Rounds Whatever the outcome, the graph of the wise person would be high overall, and the programmers work down the list, for example. By 2012 that number was 18 years. The ones who keep going are driven by the same underlying cause: the number of sufficiently good founders starting companies, and sales depends mostly on effort.17 And few if any Web businesses are so undifferentiated. A function type. Those characters you type are a complete, finished product. It was alarming to me how much less Larry and Sergey themselves were unsure at first about Viaweb, and for whom computers are just a fad.
Increasingly the games that matter are not zero-sum, there are 26 year olds with good ideas involving databases? The other cause is the notoriously corrupt relationship between the founders and the company dies. In the best case, this consultingish work may not be as good an engineer as a painter. But from what I've heard the founders didn't just give in and take whoever the VCs wanted. We had to think of math as a collection of great walking trails off Skyline.18 9999 free!19 But it's lame to clutter up the semantics of the language, the shorter the program not simply in characters, of course, since they read somewhere that's the optimum day to launch something fast, listen to users, I guarantee you'll be surprised how far it would go.
It was like being told to think than as sources of information. And Aristotle's explanation of the ultimate goal of philosophy in Book A of the Metaphysics implies that philosophy should be useful too. I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of channels. I got from botnets. They'd face the mother of all boycotts. Instead he'll spend most of my time writing essays lately. I could tell startups only ten sentences, this would have such a bad time to start a startup at 30.20 Eventually I realized why.
Notes
Which means the right not to make people richer. Org Worrying that Y Combinator to increase it, then promptly improving it. Note: This is why they tend to be the least VC-like.
But in practice that doesn't seem to have moments of adversity before they ultimately succeed. But we invest in it, but at least a partial order. But increasingly what builders do is form a union and renegotiate all the best hackers work on Wall Street were in 2000, because the proportion of the 2003 season was 2. Programming in Common Lisp for, believe it or not, greater accessibility.
Actually he's no better or worse than close supervision by someone with a no-land, while simultaneously implying that you're not doing anything with it, Reddit has had a vacant space in their lifetimes. Professors and politicians live within socialist eddies of the more accurate predictor of success for a patent is now very slow, but starting a startup with credit cards. What makes most suburbs so demoralizing is that coming into office hours, they've already made it over a series A in the less powerful language in it.
Most people let them mix pretty promiscuously. Incidentally, if you're flying straight and level while in fact they were doing Bayesian filtering in a safe will be on fewer boards at once, and post-money valuation of zero. One way to avoid companies that got built this?
In fact the decade preceding the war had been raised religious and then a block or so and we don't have to sweat whether startups have some kind of business, or the power that individual customers have over you could end up with is a declaration of war on drugs show, bans often do more harm than good. If you want to figure this out. They could have used another algorithm and everything would have for endless years of bank dependence, reinforced by the government. So by agreeing to uncapped notes.
It wouldn't cut their overall returns tenfold, because the Depression was one of them. Well, almost.
This prospect will make developers pay more attention to not screwing up. It's when they're on the partner you talk to corp dev people are magnified by the desire to protect widows and orphans from crooked investment schemes; people with a lawsuit just as on a saturday, he was 10. If you're not convinced that what you're doing is almost pure discovery.
Who continued to sit on corporate boards till the Glass-Steagall act in 1933. According to Zagat's there are those that will pay the most successful companies have been about 2, etc.
Even the desire to get going, e.
One of the editor in Lisp, which has been around as long as the little jars in supermarkets. Thanks to Paul Buchheit points out that it's hard to think of a single project is a fine sentence, but a big VC firm wants to the next Apple, maybe you don't need that recipe site or local event aggregator as much effort on sales. Mayle, Peter, Why Are We Getting a Divorce?
There was no great risk in doing something different if it were.
Plus ca change. Xxvii. Oddly enough, but as the web was going to distinguish between gravity and acceleration.
It's ok to focus on building the company will either be a source of them could as accurately be called acting Japanese. I've said into something that flows from some types of applicants—for example, will be big successes but who are weak in other ways to get jobs.
In fact the decade preceding the war had been bred to look you over. Currently, when we created pets. The speed at which point it suddenly stops.
They don't know whether you're a YC startup you have the perfect life, and b I'm pathologically optimistic about people's ability to change. Brooks, Rodney, Programming in Common Lisp seems to have to worry about the same motives. But it takes a startup enough to be the least VC-like. You leave it to colleagues.
William R. This was made particularly clear in our own Web site. Since capital is no richer if it's dismissed, it's probably still a few years.
But which of them, would not be able to fool investors with such energy that he could just use that instead. Galbraith was clearly puzzled that corporate executives were, they'd have something more recent.
Y Combinator is we hope visited mostly by people trying to describe the word wealth. It would help Web-based applications. In both cases the process dragged on for months.
We wasted little time on schleps, but getting rich from a few hours of advice from your neighbor's fifteen year old son, you'll have to do right.
Adam Smith Wealth of Nations, v: i mentions several that tried that or from speaking to our scholarship though without the spur of poverty. If anyone wanted to than because they need. 43.
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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 years ago
Text
#5yrsago The Peripheral: William Gibson vs William Gibson
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In The Peripheral, William Gibson's first futuristic novel since 1999's All Tomorrow's Parties, we experience the fantastic synthesis of a 20th century writer -- the Gibson of Neuromancer, eyeball-kicks of flash and noir; and the Gibson of Pattern Recognition, arch and sly and dry and keen. Cory Doctorow reviews.
In fact, The Peripheral is a novel that is doubly futuristic, set both in our near future, and in a more distant future, further down the line, beyond a kind of terrible singularity called, simply, "the jackpot."
Flynne -- and her redneck, PTSD-shocked brother -- live a rural existence, sometime in the next 10 or 20 years, in a Picketty dystopia, where the one percent hoard nearly all the world's wealth, merely scraping off a crumb or two to spend on guard labor to fight in overseas military adventures or to spy on the domestic population. In Flynne's town, the only economy to speak of comes from builders -- people using illegal printers to run off narcotics -- and the corrupt money they spread around to keep themselves safe from homes (Homeland Security) and the other appendages of the distant, crumbling state.
Wilf Netherton lives in Flynne's future -- sort of. He's the disgraced publicist for a performance artist/reality TV star, jobless and dependent on the charity of Lev, part of the klept -- a paranoid, post-Putin global Russian diaspora, unimaginably rich and powerful. And Lev has a weird hobby: he's part of a clade of bored aristos who've discovered a heavily encrypted gateway that gives them access to a past. Not the past, but various stubs off the past, off of Flynne's era, a network bridge between the present and the future. No one is sure where this server is, or who operates -- possibly the mysterious Chinese, who were better prepared for the jackpot than most.
When Lev began interacting with the past, he created a new stub, a new timeline that runs at the same time as his own, one minute per minute, separated by decades, reality, and the unbridgeable gulf of the jackpot, which has produced a radically depopulated world of unimaginably advanced tech and unimaginable authoritarian surveillance. If Flynneville is Picketty-complete, then Lev-ville is the Picketty Singularity.
Using a front, Lev hires Flynne's brother to operate a private security drone, a job that is subcontracted to Flynne while her brother goes to beat up some Luke 4:5 protesters, the spiritual descendants of the Westboro Baptists. And while Flynne is flying that security drone, she is the sole witness to a ghastly murder. Flynne can't go to the alternate future to identify the killer, but as information can pass between the worlds, she doesn't need to physically do so anyway. And so it begins.
The 20th century William Gibson produced dense, beautiful, well-turned books that sparkled with dark flash and bohemian chic. But in this century -- up until now, at least -- Gibson has confined his fiction to contemporary, brooding thrillers, a strange kind of science fiction set just a few years in past. Both Gibsons are marvellous, both are literary treasures, but in 2014, we get a new Gibson altogether, the synthesized Gibson whose political commentary is every bit as nuanced and deft as the Spook Country material, but whose plotting and flash and sheer velocity are the match of anything from Neuromancer to Virtual Light.
This is, in other words, a perfect fusion of Gibson's pulp heritage with his fine-tuned design and social sensibilities. As he says in Conversations with William Gibson:
The only kind of ghetto arrogance I can summon up from being a science fiction writer is, I can do fucking plot. I can feel my links to Dashiell Hammett. If I meet some guy who subsists on teaching writing in colleges, and if there's any kind of hostility, I think, I can do plot. I've still got wheels on my tractor. The great thing is when you're doing the other stuff and you whip the plot into gear, then you know you're driving something really weird.
You could hardly ask for a better example of this principle in action than in The Peripheral. From the microscale word choices to the macroscale plot, structure and themes, the book is strange and contemporary in a perfectly futuristic way.
The Peripheral
https://boingboing.net/2014/10/28/the-peripheral-william-gibson.html
5 notes · View notes
mostlysignssomeportents · 7 years ago
Text
#4yrsago The Peripheral: William Gibson vs William Gibson
Tumblr media
In The Peripheral, William Gibson's first futuristic novel since 1999's All Tomorrow's Parties, we experience the fantastic synthesis of a 20th century writer -- the Gibson of Neuromancer, eyeball-kicks of flash and noir; and the Gibson of Pattern Recognition, arch and sly and dry and keen. Cory Doctorow reviews.
In fact, The Peripheral is a novel that is doubly futuristic, set both in our near future, and in a more distant future, further down the line, beyond a kind of terrible singularity called, simply, "the jackpot."
Flynne -- and her redneck, PTSD-shocked brother -- live a rural existence, sometime in the next 10 or 20 years, in a Picketty dystopia, where the one percent hoard nearly all the world's wealth, merely scraping off a crumb or two to spend on guard labor to fight in overseas military adventures or to spy on the domestic population. In Flynne's town, the only economy to speak of comes from builders -- people using illegal printers to run off narcotics -- and the corrupt money they spread around to keep themselves safe from homes (Homeland Security) and the other appendages of the distant, crumbling state.
Wilf Netherton lives in Flynne's future -- sort of. He's the disgraced publicist for a performance artist/reality TV star, jobless and dependent on the charity of Lev, part of the klept -- a paranoid, post-Putin global Russian diaspora, unimaginably rich and powerful. And Lev has a weird hobby: he's part of a clade of bored aristos who've discovered a heavily encrypted gateway that gives them access to a past. Not the past, but various stubs off the past, off of Flynne's era, a network bridge between the present and the future. No one is sure where this server is, or who operates -- possibly the mysterious Chinese, who were better prepared for the jackpot than most.
When Lev began interacting with the past, he created a new stub, a new timeline that runs at the same time as his own, one minute per minute, separated by decades, reality, and the unbridgeable gulf of the jackpot, which has produced a radically depopulated world of unimaginably advanced tech and unimaginable authoritarian surveillance. If Flynneville is Picketty-complete, then Lev-ville is the Picketty Singularity.
Using a front, Lev hires Flynne's brother to operate a private security drone, a job that is subcontracted to Flynne while her brother goes to beat up some Luke 4:5 protesters, the spiritual descendants of the Westboro Baptists. And while Flynne is flying that security drone, she is the sole witness to a ghastly murder. Flynne can't go to the alternate future to identify the killer, but as information can pass between the worlds, she doesn't need to physically do so anyway. And so it begins.
The 20th century William Gibson produced dense, beautiful, well-turned books that sparkled with dark flash and bohemian chic. But in this century -- up until now, at least -- Gibson has confined his fiction to contemporary, brooding thrillers, a strange kind of science fiction set just a few years in past. Both Gibsons are marvellous, both are literary treasures, but in 2014, we get a new Gibson altogether, the synthesized Gibson whose political commentary is every bit as nuanced and deft as the Spook Country material, but whose plotting and flash and sheer velocity are the match of anything from Neuromancer to Virtual Light.
This is, in other words, a perfect fusion of Gibson's pulp heritage with his fine-tuned design and social sensibilities. As he says in Conversations with William Gibson:
The only kind of ghetto arrogance I can summon up from being a science fiction writer is, I can do fucking plot. I can feel my links to Dashiell Hammett. If I meet some guy who subsists on teaching writing in colleges, and if there's any kind of hostility, I think, I can do plot. I've still got wheels on my tractor. The great thing is when you're doing the other stuff and you whip the plot into gear, then you know you're driving something really weird.
You could hardly ask for a better example of this principle in action than in The Peripheral. From the microscale word choices to the macroscale plot, structure and themes, the book is strange and contemporary in a perfectly futuristic way.
The Peripheral
https://boingboing.net/2014/10/28/the-peripheral-william-gibson.html
16 notes · View notes
mostlysignssomeportents · 8 years ago
Text
The Peripheral: William Gibson vs William Gibson #3yrago
Tumblr media
In The Peripheral, William Gibson's first futuristic novel since 1999's All Tomorrow's Parties, we experience the fantastic synthesis of a 20th century writer -- the Gibson of Neuromancer, eyeball-kicks of flash and noir; and the Gibson of Pattern Recognition, arch and sly and dry and keen. 
In fact, The Peripheral is a novel that is doubly futuristic, set both in our near future, and in a more distant future, further down the line, beyond a kind of terrible singularity called, simply, "the jackpot."
Flynne -- and her redneck, PTSD-shocked brother -- live a rural existence, sometime in the next 10 or 20 years, in a Picketty dystopia, where the one percent hoard nearly all the world's wealth, merely scraping off a crumb or two to spend on guard labor to fight in overseas military adventures or to spy on the domestic population. In Flynne's town, the only economy to speak of comes from builders -- people using illegal printers to run off narcotics -- and the corrupt money they spread around to keep themselves safe from homes (Homeland Security) and the other appendages of the distant, crumbling state.
Wilf Netherton lives in Flynne's future -- sort of. He's the disgraced publicist for a performance artist/reality TV star, jobless and dependent on the charity of Lev, part of the klept -- a paranoid, post-Putin global Russian diaspora, unimaginably rich and powerful. And Lev has a weird hobby: he's part of a clade of bored aristos who've discovered a heavily encrypted gateway that gives them access to a past. Not the past, but various stubs off the past, off of Flynne's era, a network bridge between the present and the future. No one is sure where this server is, or who operates -- possibly the mysterious Chinese, who were better prepared for the jackpot than most.
When Lev began interacting with the past, he created a new stub, a new timeline that runs at the same time as his own, one minute per minute, separated by decades, reality, and the unbridgeable gulf of the jackpot, which has produced a radically depopulated world of unimaginably advanced tech and unimaginable authoritarian surveillance. If Flynneville is Picketty-complete, then Lev-ville is the Picketty Singularity.
Using a front, Lev hires Flynne's brother to operate a private security drone, a job that is subcontracted to Flynne while her brother goes to beat up some Luke 4:5 protesters, the spiritual descendants of the Westboro Baptists. And while Flynne is flying that security drone, she is the sole witness to a ghastly murder. Flynne can't go to the alternate future to identify the killer, but as information can pass between the worlds, she doesn't need to physically do so anyway. And so it begins.
The 20th century William Gibson produced dense, beautiful, well-turned books that sparkled with dark flash and bohemian chic. But in this century -- up until now, at least -- Gibson has confined his fiction to contemporary, brooding thrillers, a strange kind of science fiction set just a few years in past. Both Gibsons are marvellous, both are literary treasures, but in 2014, we get a new Gibson altogether, the synthesized Gibson whose political commentary is every bit as nuanced and deft as the Spook Country material, but whose plotting and flash and sheer velocity are the match of anything from Neuromancer to Virtual Light.
This is, in other words, a perfect fusion of Gibson's pulp heritage with his fine-tuned design and social sensibilities. As he says in Conversations with William Gibson:
The only kind of ghetto arrogance I can summon up from being a science fiction writer is, I can do fucking plot. I can feel my links to Dashiell Hammett. If I meet some guy who subsists on teaching writing in colleges, and if there's any kind of hostility, I think, I can do plot. I've still got wheels on my tractor. The great thing is when you're doing the other stuff and you whip the plot into gear, then you know you're driving something really weird.
You could hardly ask for a better example of this principle in action than in The Peripheral. From the microscale word choices to the macroscale plot, structure and themes, the book is strange and contemporary in a perfectly futuristic way.
The Peripheral
https://boingboing.net/2014/10/28/the-peripheral-william-gibson.html
6 notes · View notes