I really enjoyed <i>There Is No Antimemetics Division</i>. It's self published and is, as I understand it, a collection of the author's contributions to SCP [0]. Given that, my expectations about the quality of the writing were pretty low. But it way exceeded them and is some of the most engaging speculative fiction I've read in a long time.<p>[0]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCP_Foundation" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCP_Foundation</a>
One recent anti-meme is words that you are not allowed to say even to refer to the word. If you didn't know the word, the phrase "the N-word" is not very enlightening, but people have been censured and even fired for using that word just to refer to it as a word[1].<p>In addition if you search for the actual word (not "n-word") on HN none of the articles are from the past year (there are two submissions from the past year, but the articles are from 1999 and 1971. The submissions have a total of 11 upvotes.<p>I recently ran into an article that used the phrase "the R-word" and I had to ask my teenage daughter which particular word that referred to. It's now very googleable, but at the time none of the top 5 pages on google indicated what the word might be.<p>1: One example: a white teacher at a meeting discussing standards for materials used in the classroom. One rule disallowed books with the n-word. The teacher said roughly: "So if there is a book about the black experience, written by a black author, I can't use it in my classroom because it has the word 'n*****' in it?"
In addition to fiction, qntm is a sharp, versatile programmer. greenery [1], their unobtrusive and generally tasteful python library for manipulating regular expressions, is <i>also</i> accompanied by high-quality technical writing on related topics [2] [3] [4] [5].<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/qntm/greenery" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/qntm/greenery</a><p>[2] <a href="https://qntm.org/greenery" rel="nofollow">https://qntm.org/greenery</a><p>[3] <a href="https://qntm.org/lego" rel="nofollow">https://qntm.org/lego</a><p>[4] <a href="https://qntm.org/plants" rel="nofollow">https://qntm.org/plants</a><p>[5] <a href="https://qntm.org/fsm" rel="nofollow">https://qntm.org/fsm</a>
It reminds me of what Baudrillard writes about "The Secret" in his book "On Seduction".<p>For a "secret" to be significant there has to be some awareness that a "secret" exists. As Don Rumsfeld would put it, it is a "known unknown".
This article asks:<p>> What information would you intrinsically not want anyone else to find out about?<p>And then injects a "subscribe" nag that says:<p>> my email address is...<p>I thought this juxtaposition was funny.
First time I read <i>There Is No Antimemetics Division</i> I immediately read it again. Now I read it if I'm waiting for a good book to show up. There's no other book that I can just read again and again and enjoy it.
for some reason, this reminds me of this question that occured to me. How could we design some sort of error correction/encryption algorithm which makes the information impossible to encrypt.<p>If we consider error correction to be the capacity for a message to resist errors, and encryption as the design of reversible error for any possible message (to add the error is to encrypt and to remove it is to decrypt).<p>Then, how can we make an error correction scheme so good that a message encoded with it can be error corrected back into the original regardless of how the encoded message is encrypted?