[ Charlie's Diary ] [ Feorag's Stuff ] [ Feorag's Free Stuff -- fonts ] [ Paganlink ] [ Free Thinkers ] [ Fisherrow Brewery ]
Visit antipope.org → On Hacker News Apr 2009 – Aug 2026
Society, Policy & Culture 41Life, Learning & Writing 32Tech Industry & Business 19Security & Privacy 4History & Retro Computing 4Science & Space 3
Back in December of 2016 I took a look at what the next year held in store for us. It spanned three blog posts and ended happily in a nuclear barbecue to put us all out of our misery: start here , continue with this , and finale: and the Rabid Nazi Raccoons shall inherit the Earth .
A lot of people are watching the spectacle of Apple vs. the FBI and the Homeland Security Theatre and rubbing their eyes, wondering why Apple (in the person of CEO Tim Cook) is suddenly the knight in shining armour on the side of consumer privacy and civil rights. Apple, after all, is a goliath-sized corporate…
Back to: The Ultimate Tech Frontier: Your Brain | Forward to: The Evil Business Plan of Evil (and misery for all)
Back to: April Fools Day is Cancelled this Year. | Forward to: Yet another bad idea
Fill this in yourself.
( This is the text of a talk I delivered at the Next Frontiers Applied Fiction Day in Stuttgart on Friday November 10th, 2023. Note: early draft, contains some typos, I'll fix them next week when I get home. )
Back to: Brief hiatus | Forward to: Tanks! Why tank stories make great tech myths
Back to: PSA: Please don't nominate the Laundry Files for a Best Series Hugo Award (this year) | Forward to: New Book Week!
Usually when I speculate about the future, I stick to two areas; either the really near future (within the next couple of decades), or the really far future (so far out that signs of continental drift should be glaringly obvious). But what about the medium term?
Back to: A writing experiment I plan to try | Forward to: PSA: Amazon order cancellations
Back to: I had a blog entry for you, but I eated it | Forward to: Beer, Boston (and books)
There is an app, currently on the Apple app store as a free download, called Girls Around Me .
To the eternal whine of the superannuated free-range SF geek ("dude, where's my jet pack? Where's my holiday on the moon? Where are my food pills? I thought this was supposed to be the 21st century!") can be added an appendix: "and what about those L5 orbital space colonies the size of Manhattan?"
Normally I don't publish private correspondence, but sometimes — rarely — I feel like hanging someone out to dry ...
(Before I begin: there are participants in the discourse who would say that we're supposed to natter on about Edward Snowden , and not the contents of his disclosures, because turning it into a personal issue rather than a political one is useful to the machineries of state. But the point I'm about to make here is…
(Disclaimer: I am a transhumanist skeptic these days, not to mention a singularity curmudgeon and a critic of Mars colonization, but I still find these ideas nice to chew on sometimes.)
Back to: Escape from the planet of the Ice Giants | Forward to: Even More Obligatory Author Shilling
The smart, fashionable startup-people these days are all trying to come up with brilliant and innovative new business models that disrupt struggling industries and synergize for break-out growth potential forming new markets. (Ahem. At least that's what they say.)
Back to: Rudy #3: Looking For The Big Aha. | Forward to: Rudy #4. More on The Big Aha.
Elsewhere on the interwebbytubes, an acquaintance asked, somewhat grumpily, if anything good had happened in the past decade (aside from the iPod).
Back to: The myth of heroism | Forward to: A footnote about the publishing industry
Back to: World building 201: Heuristics | Forward to: Upcoming reading in Edinburgh
Here in the UK, we are a signatory to the European Convention of Human Rights, which among other things includes an explicit right to privacy (considerably stronger than the implicit privacy rights acknowledged in the US, which are not enumerated directly by the US constitution).
Back to: Let's put the future behind us | Forward to: On the lack of cultural estrangement in SF
This should be titled Keynote talk for YAPC::NA 2014 . What's up with the title?
Back to: Did somebody just try to buy the British government? | Forward to: In case you were wondering ...