The notion of a Singularity became a quasi-religious belief among some techies, a millennial conviction that computers would essentially eat everything and we’d all be living in a giant videogame. Pile on the bullsh*t and keep a straight face.Īccelerando gave me the courage to write my own Singularity novel-which I called Postsingular - it exists in paperback and ebook.
Hell, even the Greeks knew how to write about gods. For several years before this, SF writers have been p*ssing and moaning and saying, “Gosh, we really can’t see past the Singularity.” And then Stross just goes in there and plows ahead. In 1995, I read Stross’s novel/story-sequence Accelerando. (Here’s a page listing Stross’s US editions.) And he’s not working in the sterile, Arthur Clarke mode of futurology, no, he’s writing druggy, antiestablishment satire, in some ways similar to cyberpunk-a mix of nihilistic humor and apocalyptic speculation. In recent years, Charles Stross has become my favorite high-tech SF writer. But now, as I lightly revise it in 2021, Tumblr has cleaned up.Īnyway, the heroine of Stross’s novel Rule 34 is working in the playfully dubbed “Rule 34” branch of the Edinburgh police department, tasked with investigating the more kinky and dangerous things that the online locals might be getting up to. You might want to adjust your Safe Search filter level to an ‘adultness’ level you’re comfortable with.īack in 2013 (when I wrote this post) you used to be able to search “Tumblr porn _”, with the reason for narrowing down to Tumblr sites being that Tumblr pages weren’t encrusted with intense adware (and possible malware). You can test Rule 34 for whatever entity _ you want by Googling “porn _” and then selecting the Image option on the Google results page. No exceptions.” (You can find a nice summary of internet rules in this 2009 essay.) The CA Rule 34 is, however a very dull one, which produces patterns of parallel diagonal lines.īut it turns out “Rule 34” is hacker slang for the dictum: “If it exists, there is porn of it. Rule 30 is a very good generator of pseudorandom sequences, and Rule 110 is in fact a universal computer, capable of emulating any possible computational process. In the 1980s, the computer scientist Stephen Wolfram enumerated the simplest possible CAs in a list numbered from 1 to 255. Before reading Charles Stross’s novel Rule 34, I’d been under the misapprehension that the title was referring to cellular automata or CAs.
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