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Scott Alexander
Personal blog · unsongbook.comwritingculture
Scott Alexander writes Unsong, a personal blog at unsongbook.com about writing and culture. Since 2016, 49 different Hacker News readers have linked it 59 times, most often “Unsong, a fantasy novel where the universe is programmable with Hebrew (2015)”. The last post was in 2017, but the archive is still widely read.
59mentions?
49HN people?
2016–2026first – last linked?
Jerusalem is builded as a city that is in the public domain. — kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com (Prologue) BOOK I: GENESIS 1. Dark Satanic Mills (Interlude א: The Cracks In The Sky) 2. Arise To Spiritual Strife (Interlude ב: The Code of the … Continue reading →
Most-linked posts?
- Unsong, a fantasy novel where the universe is programmable with Hebrew (2015)22 people · 23 mentions · first linked 2019-07-21
- Unsong16 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2016-05-20
- /6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-03-12
- /interlude-%D7%AA-trump/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-05-27
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-11-13
- /prologue-2/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-09-13
What Hacker News says?
There is also the book that he is writing, which is weird and wonderful: http://unsongbook.com/
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on “Ask HN: What is your favorite internet rabbit hole?”Submitted Unsong, a fantasy novel where the universe is programmable with Hebrew (2015) as a story · 142 points
HN discussionFor anyone who hasn't yet had the pleasure, Scott's (fiction) book Unsong is magnificent. It's one of the best books I read last year, and I read constantly. http://unsongbook.com/ Ebook https://github.com/JasonGross/unsong_scraper Sample: “I AM BUSY. I AM TRYING TO FIX CONTINENTAL DRIFT.” “I…didn’t know it was broken.” Uriel’s face became more animated, his speech faster. “IT HAS BEEN BROKEN FOR FIVE WEEKS AND FIVE…
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on “Still alive”Submitted Unsong Book as a story · 3 points
HN discussionFiction: Unsong by Scott Alexander. The funnest and funniest sci-fi yarn since Douglas Adams, amidst tantalizing explorations of theodicy and existential absurdicy. It's even free: http://unsongbook.com https://github.com/moorederodeo/Unsong-In-Ebook-Format/relea... Non-fiction: The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. Of all the books of the last ten years, I can't think of one that more transformed my understanding o…
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on “Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade?”Submitted Unsong - Scott Alexander (2015) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHonestly, I was going to nitpick, but this definition scratches an itch in my brain so nicely that I'll just complement it as beautiful. "We reason to see God", I love it. (Also, if I might give a recommendation, you might be the type of person to enjoy Unsong by Scott Alexander https://unsongbook.com/ )
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on “S1: A $6 R1 competitor?”Submitted Unsong as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSpoilers ahead, but I loved this pun: > The fraud-hunters have examined this paper closely and are unable to find any signs of fraud. I think this paper is legitimate and that its findings need to be seriously considered. ... And there’s always the chance it was a fluke, right? Can something have a p-value less than 0.001 and still be a fluke? ... > And it was! It was a fluke! A literal, physical, fluke! Edit: If yo…
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on “Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know”Submitted Unsong as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> Regarding recommendations similar to Ra, it's not exactly the same thing, but https://unsongbook.com/ is fantastic and has a similar flavor I think. The religious references on the actual website (and lack of much real explanation) made it very difficult for me to give it a chance, but I looked it up a bit and it seems like there is more to it than that, so maybe I'll give it a try. edit: reading the first chapter…
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on “There Is No Antimemetics Division (2018)”Submitted Unsong as a story · 1 points
HN discussionTrue, perhaps "messy" was the wrong word. I think what I was trying to get at was that I feel "There Is No Antimemetics Division" is more accessible for the average reader -- More narrowly focused, with a more immediate hook. Regarding recommendations similar to Ra, it's not exactly the same thing, but https://unsongbook.com/ is fantastic and has a similar flavor I think.
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on “There Is No Antimemetics Division (2018)”You might want to link to the prologue rather than chapter 1: https://unsongbook.com/prologue-2/
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on “Super Mario Bros. 3 in 3 Minutes – World Record Speedrun Explained [video]”If you want a story that handles this scenario pretty much exactly, you might want to check out “Unsong” [0] by the excellent Scott Alexander. That world is basically a biblically-inspired computer simulation which gets corrupted when Apollo 8 crashes into the celestial sphere. Also boiling a goat in its mother’s milk causes a segfault for some reason the developer can’t quite explain. [0] http://unsongbook.com/chap…
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on “Super Mario Bros. 3 in 3 Minutes – World Record Speedrun Explained [video]”Yes. And that's just one way to address a part of this topic of one (or a small number of) religions. There's different answers, even amongst the same religion, but even more across religions. Btw, you might like https://unsongbook.com/
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on “How actors remember their lines”This is actually a plot point of Unsong https://unsongbook.com
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on “Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance”“Nominative determinism”[1] [1] https://unsongbook.com/
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on “How the SQLite virtual machine works”UNSONG. Magical fantasy set in a Silicon Valley where Microprosopus (Microsoft), Gogmagog (Google), Amalek (Amazon), and Countenance (Facebook) have figured out how to brute force discovering Divine Names of God through the magic of independent contractors. Every chapter begins with a quote from a Markov chain trained on the King James Bible, SICP, and ESR. For example: > It is good practice to have your program pok…
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on “Six works of Computer Science-Fiction (2015)”And by a different author, but a similar theme: https://unsongbook.com
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on “The Star – Arthur C. Clarke (1967) [pdf]”A similar kind of story though much longer is Unsong by Scott Alexander. The prolog starts with Apollo 8 crashing into the celestial sphere and divine magic starts leaking back into the world; Angels are real, Kabala based on the names of God allow real magic and they've been copyrighted. Our protagonist is a worker bee that spends all day saying nonsense combinations that could be True Names for his employer to pat…
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on “Can humans say the largest prime number before we find the next one?”Unsong takes inspiration from this as well - https://unsongbook.com/
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on “Making the Tibetan language a first-class citizen in the digital world”His full-length online novel was the funnest thing I've read in the last decade: https://unsongbook.com/ (a little googling will also turn up Kindle/ePub versions)
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on “Idol Words”Huh, I’m surprised some allusion to this didn’t come up in http://unsongbook.com/ . Or maybe I just missed it!
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on “L-systems”While in the very-much-breakable sphere around Earth category, there's Unsong ( https://unsongbook.com ) by Scott Alexander.
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on “NASA's Voyager Found a 30k-50k Kelvin "Wall" at the Edge of Solar System”You might want to give Unsong a try then, it's the same author: http://unsongbook.com/
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on “A History of the Silmarils in the Fifth Age”If you enjoyed this, you'll probably enjoy the Unsong book, by the same author. It's basically the same idea, only bigger and better. http://unsongbook.com/
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on “A History of the Silmarils in the Fifth Age”Wow, I don't think I've ever seen someone cite fanfiction on HN before! But considering HPMOR introduced me to Worm [0] and Unsong [1], I really can't argue with doing so. Also a relatively good way to introduce college friends to rationalism, if for some reason recommending fanfiction to friends is easier than recommending lesswrong. [0] https://parahumans.wordpress.com/ [1] http://unsongbook.com/
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on “The Era of Quantum Computing Is Here. Outlook: Cloudy”This is coming late and you might not read this, but I think you're reading too much into that quote. Scott has an uncanny ability to cherry-pick facts, usually absurd ones to paint funny narratives. He even wrote a whole fiction book based on the concept, a universe that actually runs on Kabbalah. Here's a short self-contained chapter that showcases this: https://unsongbook.com/interlude-%D7%AA-trump/ It's totally…
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on “Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)”And if you liked it you might love Scott Alexanders short The Study of Anglophysics[1] and his web serial Unsong[2] [1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/03/the-study-of-anglophysi... [2] https://www.unsongbook.com
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on “Ted Chiang on Seeing His Stories Adapted and the Ever-Expanding Popularity of SF”
