john.ohno

Recent Actions

• Commented on Why I'm not on Google Plus
  There are really two issues here. One is whether or not trying to enforce real names is a good idea (it isn't). The other is whether or not it's even possible to do effectively (it isn't). It gives me hope...
• Commented on What am I missing?
  There is one element in Rainbows End that people rarely discuss but that depends on extreme miniaturization and ubiquitous high-speed wireless communication: the frequent offloading of processing onto other people's hardware (or municipal hardware, etc). There was this pervasive assumption...
• Commented on Brief announcement
  The supernatural-teen-romance thing you could actually probably pull off -- and it might even be non-traumatic if you managed to use it to detourn the genre's cliches. (I feel like Saturn's Children did this with the space opera genre, but...
• Commented on I am the Very Model of a Singularitarian
  This reminds me of the backstory of BLAME!, and its worldbuilding... The general idea was that semi-autonomous systems built out a very large human-habitable space (actually it was a series of dyson spheres going from right near the sun to...
• Commented on Swirling/writing (3): When I Was Stephen King
  When I write code, often I will write it, debug it, and then immediately delete it and rewrite it from memory. This is more common amongst forth programmers, who do it on a smaller scale and call it refactoring --...
• Commented on Swirling/writing (1): time & beginnings
  It's interesting when you compare the works of people who write books without knowing where they are going with them versus people who write them with a plan in mind. I didn't know about Stephen King's habits, though I suppose...
• Commented on Rewilding Etiquette
  Arguably, 'manners' is just the name given to any system of social customs that is effective at keeping people from killing each other most of the time without government/military/police intervention. I.e., manners keep the peace without enforcers, and any mechanism...
• Commented on Wicked (2)
  The ideas in this post appear to dovetail nicely with my extension of the famous 'assasination politics' essay's proposals... The idea there being that interested parties would invest in such a way that they encourage a given outcome to occur....
• Commented on Our Eucatastrophe
  This implies a kind of assumption: that order is good and chaos is bad. Entropy is an amoral force, and old order must be broken down in order to be replaced with new order (which may or may not be...
• Commented on Wicked (1)
  From your description of wicked problems, it appears as though proving whether or not a given thing is a wicked problem is itself a wicked problem (i.e., it's the P vs NP situation all over again: some problems are known...
• Commented on Beyond Prediction
  The only really reliable way of predicting the future is to invent it (make the prophecy and then cause it to come true, either by making the prophecy both doable and awesome -- the star trek communicator to cell phone...
• Commented on Living with a writer
  As a programmer, I'm like this in 'project mode' (except that I don't make a special case for the cat)....
• Commented on If I had a Billion Dollars
  I would probably put it into a fairly undirected PARC-type deal: find smart, driven people who can't sit still for more than a few hours without coming up with cool ideas, and pay them. PARC was, economically, a disaster --...
• Commented on Federov's Rapture
  I have on occasion tried to make the argument that while whether or not free will exists is irrelevant, whether or not people believe they have free will is quite relevant (because it affects things like locus of control, etc.)...
• Commented on Crime and Punishment
  Systems of law intended to be enforced by humans are structured to take advantage of what might otherwise be considered human failings. Each cog in the great law enforcement machine is arguably acting under their own free will, to varying...
• Commented on Brief absence
  July of 2012? I should have time to buy and read it before the world ends ;-)...
• Commented on Rule 34 moments
  I haven't gotten Rule 34 yet (still waiting for my local bookstore to stock it), but on the subject generally of those kinds of coincidences: Jungians tend to call it synchronicity, and refuse to explain it. Discordians call it 'the...
• Commented on "Yes, but what are your <em>credentials</em>, Mr Stross?"
  The funny thing is, I have a sneaking suspicion that this guy wouldn't mind quoting Einstein about Socialism or Asimov about anything. Being an SF author isn't necessarily indicative of even a vague understanding of science (most SF is still...
• Commented on Artificial Stupids
  One counterargument I will make is that useless (and even fairly dangerous, counterproductive, and difficult) things are done all the time. People will continue to try to write AIs with all the messy aspects of humanity, the way that people...
• Commented on Federov's Rapture
  I always associate 'the Omega point' with Tipler, not with de Chardin, though that term has been used to refer to a fairly wide range of different things (of which I consider Tipler's to be one of the craziest). I...
• Commented on Federov's Rapture
  Transhumanism relies on particular human tendencies. Immortality of the individual over the community isn't desirable except in a cultural context of individuality (which is something not completely universal in nature, and that may not even be completely universal in humanity...
• Commented on Existential threats
  To be fair, though, HR rarely lays off the whole company when things are going well (the equivalent of a civilization-ending result of dangerous memeplexes in a superorganism). More reasonable models might include (1) something less like a corporation and...
• Commented on Existential threats
  Someone beat me to it? I've been working on something like that for years >.< I'll look into it....
• Commented on Thought experiment
  While it's technically about mind uploading, the way Richard Morgan treats the problem of incredibly old people in Altered Carbon is fairly interesting. It makes the assumption that people who live for eight hundred years are much richer than people...
• Commented on Existential threats
  This one is a little far out, but it's a type 2 threat without being a type 1 threat. Say there's an extremely popular semi-automated system for information and favour exchange, that is nearly a monoculture (like if Coffee&Power and...
• Commented on Three arguments against the singularity
  There's one (not very well) hidden assumption in the AI-technological-singularity argument: that the first weakly superhuman AI will be the intended product of human ingenuity, understandable by humans and by extension understandable by anything smarter than humans. If the first...
• Commented on Glasgow
  To be fair, there is a long history of 'bible fan fiction' (also known as Apocrypha), and now-orthodox books contain a lot of what could only be considered 'ascended fanon' (the Apocalypse of John, also known as Revelations, is a...
• Commented on Cookie policy
  It's just a pdf, but with the extension ashx (not the extension pdf). Very strange. While in theory extensions shouldn't matter on a unixlike, a lot of applications still assume that extensions are meaningful. The mime type should indicate that...
• Commented on Rule 34
  The one on the left looks very similar in style to the US edition of Halting State I own, so I'm going to guess that one is the US edition. (By the by, I much prefer that style to the...
• Commented on Radioactive turd, meet punchbowl
  They don't actually do that anymore. Instead, they merely publicly resign and can't go out in public for the rest of their lives without getting the evil eye...