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Ansible
Personal blog · ansible.ukculturewriting
Ansible is a personal blog at ansible.uk about culture and writing. Since 2015, 15 different Hacker News readers have linked it 17 times, most often “Tolkien: Lord of the Royalties”. The last post was in 2005, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (14) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link David Langford's site for his comp.basilisk FAQ on hacking brains with images, plus his fiction and essays. Threads on optical illusions, neural networks and chip flaws bring it up.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 14 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /writing/c-b-faq.html8 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2015-03-01
- Tolkien: Lord of the Royalties2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-04-12
What Hacker News says?
There's also a few sequels: http://ansible.uk/writing/c-b-faq.html http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/different-kinds-of... And What Happened at Cambridge IV , which I can't find online.
Comment linking /writing/c-b-faq.html
on “Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks”Submitted Tolkien: Lord of the Royalties as a story · 3 points
HN discussionErm, you don't? I suggest you read the Basilisk FAQ before you get into real trouble... http://ansible.uk/writing/c-b-faq.html
Comment linking /writing/c-b-faq.html
on “GitHub hit by DDoS attack”Submitted PCW Plus "Langford" Columns, 1987 as a story · 1 points
HN discussionFWIW, this phenomenon is not new under the sun. I observe that we are experiencing a McLuhan Tetrad retrieval of it via our modern ~ Internet media artifact. For example, I experienced (preferentially) buying, in the 1970s, LotR paperbacks with Tolkien's picture on the back cover with his authorial economic plea -- see his statement, below, in this citation ... from "Tolkien: Lord of the Royalties" at https://ansibl…
Comment linking /sfx/tolkien.html
on “Non-Fungible Taylor Swift”Submitted Comp.basilisk FAQ – Fictional Brain Crashes (1999) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionNick Lowe, in The Well-Tempered Plot Device , is quite brutal in his criticisms. https://ansible.uk/Ansible/plotdev.html
Comment linking /Ansible/plotdev.html
on “Quote Origin: I had exactly four seconds and Google had told me it wasn’t enough”Relevant: http://ansible.uk/writing/c-b-faq.html
Comment linking /writing/c-b-faq.html
on “One pixel attack for deceiving deep neural networks”There's an FAQ about these things: http://ansible.uk/writing/c-b-faq.html
Comment linking /writing/c-b-faq.html
on “One pixel attack for deceiving deep neural networks”That might be a bit of an overreaction. But I will concede this is a close as I've ever seen this get to reality: http://ansible.uk/writing/c-b-faq.html Which is really sequel to the short story: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm , and which is followed up with http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/different-kinds-of... (the "FAQ" I linked above is in between those two things).
Comment linking /writing/c-b-faq.html
on “How a researcher hacked his own computer and found 'worst' chip flaw”For those of you interested in science fiction whose interest was piqued by this comment, here's some required reading: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm http://ansible.uk/writing/c-b-faq.html
Comment linking /writing/c-b-faq.html
on “The basic neurobiology behind the 12-dot illusion”I'm reminded of David Langford's "basilisks": http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm [edit] more in the series: http://ansible.uk/writing/c-b-faq.html http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/different-kinds-of...
Comment linking /writing/c-b-faq.html
on “Malware Encoded in DNA Can Hack Gene-Sequencing Software”I'd also encourage people to read David Langford's book, The Leaky Establishment , which is definitely not in any way based on his experiences working at the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Aldermaston, aka the UK's atom bomb factory, in the 1980s; it says so right in the dedication at the front: http://ansible.uk/books/leaky.html It tells the story of how our hero smuggles a discarded filing cabinet home with him o…
Comment linking /books/leaky.html
on “Forbidden Spheres”http://ansible.uk/sfx/sfx039.html 'She looked on him. Never before in her life had she seen such a male. He made even Gunther seem a lesser man. Her imagination had not even dreamed that such a man could exist. The men she had known earlier, even Gunther, had been no intimation that there might be males such as these. Such men, she thought, could not exist in her time. In her time there was no place; there could be…
Comment linking /sfx/sfx039.html
on “Gor — Test your system with real data”A bit of a tangent here, but anyone intrigued by the notion of hacking the brain using optical illusions should read "comp.basilisk FAQ": http://ansible.uk/writing/c-b-faq.html
Comment linking /writing/c-b-faq.html
on “Don’t assume that safety comes for free: a Swift case study”These discussions always remind me of David Langford's work: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/different-kinds-of... http://ansible.uk/writing/c-b-faq.html
Comment linking /writing/c-b-faq.html
on “Optical illusions that show how color can trick the eye”David Langford had a really great FAQ about this technology over on the comp.basilisk FAQ newsgroup: http://ansible.uk/writing/c-b-faq.html
Comment linking /writing/c-b-faq.html
on “Tissue Nanotransfection”
