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Code » The HATETRIS algorithm has always been perfectly deterministic, with no "RNG". When I originally created it in April 2010, the way it worked was to examine the current well state only and use this to determine which piece to return. If the well was the same, then the piece returned was the same. This design choice had two major implications: It meant that replays could encode the player…
There Is No Antimemetics Division » Okay, so: if you see a book for sale with this cover, there are some things you should know before you buy it: it is nothing to do with me, I didn't publish it if you pay money for it, none of that money will go to me this is V1, the old self-published edition of the story, which you can just read here, for free. It is not V2, the award-nominated new edition…
There Is No Antimemetics Division » There Is No Antimemetics Division will be published in a single state as a limited edition signed by the author and artist. It will be offered for sale when copies are ready to ship and feature: Offset printing on premium paper. Thoughtful interior design and typography. Newly commissioned illustrations. A durable, Smyth-sewn binding with a ribbon marker and…
Code » qntm's leap second simulator During a leap second, Unix time cannot represent 23:59:60. So what does happen?
Code » This essay builds on results from my previous essays "How many valid JSON strings are there?" and "How many valid UTF-8 (or UTF-16, or UTF-32) byte sequences are there?". In that first essay I kind of dodged the most interesting part of the question by treating a JSON string as simply a sequence of Unicode characters, deliberately ignoring the problem of how the string was encoded on the…
There Is No Antimemetics Division » "What is different between the original self-published version of Antimemetics (V1) and the new traditionally published version (V2)?" The book has received a total end-to-end editorial overhaul. The nature of the web serial format (which was used for V1) is that there are always things you're going to look back on and wish you had an opportunity to do over…
Code » Quick simple one. A Unicode character is... well, for the purposes of this enumeration, it is an integer from 0 to 1,114,111 inclusive, which we express in hexadecimal as U+0000 through U+10FFFF. The interpretations and interactions of these characters are extremely complex, but we can actually ignore these here. In particular, I'm going to ignore issues relating to surrogates. There are…
Code » A valid JSON string is a finite series of characters, each character chosen from an alphabet of 1,114,112 possible characters, which additionally conforms to the simple grammar described at json.org. We number the characters in hexadecimal from 0x0000 to 0x10FFFF inclusive. These characters originate in Unicode, but aside from serving as a basic lookup table - character 0x0020 is a space,…
Blog » Prominent OpenAI invester Geoff Lewis may be facing a conspiracy theory-related mental health episode brought about by extended conversations with ChatGPT. I found this article to be very interesting. From my perspective, the most interesting angle here is the fact that ChatGPT is obviously just spinning SCP-esque containment documentation at Lewis. The SCP project has had problems with…
HATETRIS » This page presents every known record in the history of HATETRIS. The game was originally released in April 2010. My personal best score at the time I released the game to the public was approximately 5 lines. 2010-04-04 Atypical's 11-line run is: ϥقໂɝƐඖДݹஶʈງƷ௨ೲໃܤѢقҾחࢲටฅڗ௨ΡІݪ௨ళȣݹࢴටງ໒௨ஶໃܥ௨റІݮ௨ఴІݥذඡଈݹƍق๓অஒॴแђञඖЅи௨sǶɔۑడПݷޠقԩݹࠉൿຟɓతණງஈশ੬෪অࠑථධٽଫ൝ଆࡨশ૫СܭߜయլݚɶऋഭܭرɤธӃస൯ 2010-04-09 An anonymous…
Fiction » On sale 11 November 2025. Preorder now. ...
Code » If I see code along the lines of: const ref = application + ':' + endpoint then I'm going to request that you provide a rigorous proof that neither of the strings application or endpoint can ever contain a colon. In accordance with my belief that code should be obviously correct, not provably correct, your proof will look something like this: if (application.includes(':') ||…
Blog » Amazing as it may seem after all these years, there are still junior developers in the world. A few weeks ago at work we had a talk where senior developers (including me) were invited to spend around five minutes each talking about our personal software development philosophies. The idea was for us to share our years of experience with our more junior developers. After the session, I felt…
Blog » On this page, every vertical pixel is equivalent to 100,000 years of time. The top of the page is the Big Bang. The letter "z" in this sentence is about a million years tall. Get scrolling. That's us.↓ ↑During those 100,000 years, all of human history occurred. This sentence is several million years after humans. We're gone now. We'll never be back. The universe continues. ...
Code » We've started playing a new board game. An old board game, actually; it seems like it's originally from 1975 and has gone through a few iterations. 221B Baker Street comes with a deck of 75 unique, original Sherlock Holmes mysteries and a dense book of clues. At the start of the game, one mystery is selected at random from the deck and read out to everybody. Players then start at Baker…
Blog » tl;dr: this is your last chance to buy Antimemetics V1! Less than one day remains! In fact I have two publishing deals. Some of you may have already seen this news, and you may be able to guess where this is going. The first deal is with Ballantine Books, a US-based publisher which is part of Penguin Random House. The second deal is with Del Rey, a UK-based publisher which is also part of…
Blog » In fact I have two publishing deals. Some of you may have already seen this news, and you may be able to guess where this is going. The first deal is with Ballantine Books, a US-based publisher which is part of Penguin Random House. The second deal is with Del Rey, a UK-based publisher which is also part of Penguin Random House. Ballantine will be publishing my book There Is No Antimemetics…
Blog » In fact I have two publishing deals. Some of you may have already seen this news, and you may be able to guess where this is going. The first deal is with Ballantine Books, a US-based publisher which is part of Penguin Random House. The second deal is with Del Rey, a UK-based publisher which is also part of Penguin Random House. Ballantine will be publishing my book There Is No Antimemetics…
Blog » I just want to see it. Just once. I want to watch that earthquake ripple through all of global electronic timekeeping. I want to see which organisations make it to January morning with nothing on fire. You know what a leap second is. The short version is that planet Earth is a terrible clock. I love leap seconds. I love the unsolvable problem which birthed leap seconds, I love the technical…
Blog » At work we recently started experimenting with generative AI for assistance with programming. We have a new Visual Studio Code plugin which we can ask questions in English, and it spits back code. It was a really interesting piece of, well, mandatory training. I've formed some opinions. The main thing I dislike about AI coding assistance is that I have to very carefully review the AI's code…
There Is No Antimemetics Division » This was written around March 2022, long after the completion of the Antimemetics tales on the SCP wiki. This SCP essentially covers the same narrative ground as the epilogue of Antimemetics, Champions Of Nothing. Now, redundancy in storytelling is generally something to be avoided. I have eliminated content from Antimemetics because I felt it was redundant…
Code » The HATETRIS algorithm has always been perfectly deterministic, with no "RNG". When I originally created it in April 2010, the way it worked was to examine the current well state only and use this to determine which piece to return. If the well was the same, then the piece returned was the same. This design choice had two major implications: It meant that replays could encode the player…
Fiction » "[D]elivers a refreshing dose of existential despair at the transhuman condition." — Charles Stross qntm has been writing science fiction for most of this millennium. His works start from elegant, deep hypotheticals and wind entire universes around them, pushing science, technology, logic and possibility to breaking point and far beyond. This volume collects the highlights of his short…
Code » Play Hate Tetris. This is bad Tetris. It's hateful Tetris. It's Tetris according to the evil AI from "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream". I have to be honest, this is not an entirely original idea. However, RRRR's implementation of the concept of a game of Tetris which always gives you the worst possible pieces leaves much to be desired: the keyboard interface frequently doesn't work the…
Fiction » "[D]elivers a refreshing dose of existential despair at the transhuman condition." — Charles Stross qntm has been writing science fiction for most of this millennium. His works start from elegant, deep hypotheticals and wind entire universes around them, pushing science, technology, time and logic to breaking point and far beyond. This volume collects the highlights of his short fiction,…
Blog » Mirror's Edge came out for the PlayStation 3 in 2008 and it is literally the only PlayStation 3 game I own. I bought the console in 2011 because it was a top-of-the-line Blu-ray player and I guess Mirror's Edge was the only game for the console I had any interest in playing. I wrote a belated post-mortem of the game in 2012 and concluded that it had unique strengths and significant, fixable…
Code » Exactly one of the following statements is true. In Tetris, you can always get at least one line before losing. In Tetris, a sufficiently evil AI can always force you to lose without getting a single line, by providing bad pieces. Which one? Prove it. The setup I created HATETRIS in 2010 because I wanted Tetris players to suffer. It was something I created for my own amusement and as a…
Blog » Control is a 2019 third-person action shooter developed by Remedy Entertainment. The game takes inspiration from a variety of sources, but its most prominent and notable influence is the SCP project, which is very important to me, for obvious reasons. (I don't like to call it the "SCP wiki" these days... I think this gives people the false impression that individual SCPs don't have specific…
Blog » Quite a lot of science fiction isn't about what it's about. "Lena" is about uploading, but uploading isn't real. It doesn't exist. It might exist at some point in the future, but that just seems pretty improbable to me. As I understand it, right now, to "accurately" simulate the behaviour of just a handful of neurons requires a building-sized, custom-built supercomputer, running at around…
Code » Absurdle is an adversarial variant of the charming and (currently) viral word guessing game Wordle. The mechanics of Absurdle are identical to Wordle, or as close as I can make them. Among other things, they use the same word lists. (There are actually two word lists in Wordle: one is a list of 2,315 words which can appear as answers, and the other is a list of 10,657 rather more obscure…