I really enjoyed There Is No Antimemetics Division. It's self published and is, as I understand it, a collection of the author's contributions to SCP [0]. Given that, my expectations about the quality of the writing were pretty low. But it way exceeded them and is some of the most engaging speculative fiction I've read in a long time.
> QNTM: Do it. If it's your first time, try a second time as well. Your first attempt might be okay or it might not be so okay, but it's something you can get better at over time. You can practice, you can get good.
because it's reflected very clearly in qntm's own writing. He's been publishing his fiction online for close to two decades, and I've been following his website for almost as long. He's always been a talented and imaginative writer, but the craftsmanship of his writing has been continuously getting better and better.
I really loved Ra [1], another of his books. It starts with "Magic is real in the modern world, and a subject of engineering", and it gets much, much crazier from there. It's my favorite of his books/stories.
What I particularly liked about it is that it followed this geek's impulse of "yeah but why/how?" and answered it. Then answered the question after that. And after that. It was an exponentially wild ride.
It's not a perfect book. The characters are, honestly, kind of weak in an overpowered kind of way; it's more an idea-driven book than plot- or character-driven.
But I think the HN crowd would really like it, and it deserves wider recognition!
It's hard to overstate how good qntm's work is, at least in this area. The metaphysical underpinnings and world-building are really well considered and the characterization is great.
For whatever reason, SCP is some of the best sci writing out there, especially the short stories outside of the (already incredible) entity wiki entries.
One recent anti-meme is words that you are not allowed to say even to refer to the word. If you didn't know the word, the phrase "the N-word" is not very enlightening, but people have been censured and even fired for using that word just to refer to it as a word[1].
In addition if you search for the actual word (not "n-word") on HN none of the articles are from the past year (there are two submissions from the past year, but the articles are from 1999 and 1971. The submissions have a total of 11 upvotes.
I recently ran into an article that used the phrase "the R-word" and I had to ask my teenage daughter which particular word that referred to. It's now very googleable, but at the time none of the top 5 pages on google indicated what the word might be.
1: One example: a white teacher at a meeting discussing standards for materials used in the classroom. One rule disallowed books with the n-word. The teacher said roughly: "So if there is a book about the black experience, written by a black author, I can't use it in my classroom because it has the word 'n*****' in it?"
For what it's worth, this stuff is culturally relative. The r-word is apparently "retard", and not an unsayable slur within my cultural sphere, to the best of my limited knowledge.
But I think most people know what those words are so somehow the idea is shared very well. Most taboos are probably like this - they're actually well known but talking about them and doing them is discouraged.
I wonder about believing you're wrong about any specific knowledge you have. That's pretty hard. Others can try to communicate it to you but your brain tries to find ways to reject that information.
In addition to fiction, qntm is a sharp, versatile programmer. greenery [1], their unobtrusive and generally tasteful python library for manipulating regular expressions, is also accompanied by high-quality technical writing on related topics [2] [3] [4] [5].
It now occupies an increasingly crowded place of pride on the face-height row of my main bookshelf, in a way that feels remarkably different from my favorite fiction bookmarks folder.
Ra is absolutely phenomenal, so good that when I finished it I sent qntm an effusive email thanking him for writing it (to which he sent a kind and thoughtful response), the first time I've done that in a long time. Fine Structure is excellent as well.
A generation raised on New Dr Who would eat it up, especially as in the SCP one of QNTM's first antagonists is called "Grey" - a nice physical (and vaguely conceptual) similarity to The Silence.
First time I read There Is No Antimemetics Division I immediately read it again. Now I read it if I'm waiting for a good book to show up. There's no other book that I can just read again and again and enjoy it.
for some reason, this reminds me of this question that occured to me. How could we design some sort of error correction/encryption algorithm which makes the information impossible to encrypt.
If we consider error correction to be the capacity for a message to resist errors, and encryption as the design of reversible error for any possible message (to add the error is to encrypt and to remove it is to decrypt).
Then, how can we make an error correction scheme so good that a message encoded with it can be error corrected back into the original regardless of how the encoded message is encrypted?
Encryption does not "add", like error/noise, it translates. The signal-to-noise ratio stays the same.
Another way do describe it is that error correction creates resistance against (effectively) some upper boundary of error/noise. It does that by essentially multiplying the signal so that (with a still constant error) it increases the effective SNR , as that is just signal divided by error. It cannot work if you have 100% noise and 0% signal (it's intuitive why, and 0 multiplied by x is still 0). A good encryption scheme however (pretty much any common one that isn't a toy) has the goal of making the signal look entirely random for anyone without the proper algorithm and secret to reverse. With an effectively 0 SNR to that observer, there is no signal to boost.
Noise/error is random, if it wasn't it would be reversible and not need any error correction techniques that effectively reduce bandwidth. Encrypting, however, is not random at all, it is entirely deterministic, making it intentionally reversible.
> can we make an error correction scheme so good that a message encoded with it can be error corrected back into the original regardless of how the encoded message is encrypted?
No. Preventing this is called IND-CPA (indistiguishability under chosen plaintext attack) security and is basically table stakes for any modern symmetric encryption algorithm.
In fact this is even weaker than IND-CPA, since in IND-CPA the attacker can first observe arbitrarily many other plaintexts and use the resulting information to choose two (non-yet-seen) plaintexts specific to the particular encryption algorithm and key to try to distinguish, and they don't have to be sure which is which, only to do significantly better than chance.
You'd need to cleverly narrow down the definition of "encrypted" you're operating under. The broad definition allows me to take your message and essentially turn it into any sequence of bits of sufficient length, and there's no way for you to then layer any further restrictions on top of that sequence because of the near-arbitrary power I have in selecting my encryption scheme. You'd need to reduce that power in some way to then create even a subset of messages that could survive the encryption.
Such a result would probably be of no practical use but it could be interesting in a recreational mathematics sort of way.
This sounds like the irresistible force paradox, in that it is only a paradox if one allows for arbitrary definitions of error correction or encryption.
At least with classical information, I'm this is impossible.
Classical information can be described with a sequence of bits. If you have a long enough shared random sequence of bits, you can always use that as a one-time-pad, and encrypt it that way.
For quantum information, I'm fairly sure that a quantum variation of the one-time-pad still works (where the pad consists of entangled pairs of qubits (the two parties each hold one qubit of each pair) instead of just shared random bits), and so it is, I think, also impossible.
(And even if it was possible-but-only-for-quantum-information, I think the no-cloning theorem would still render it pointless, as the only thing preventing it from being encrypted would accomplish, would be allowing someone to successfully intercept a message that was being sent, instead of just causing the message to be lost)
_____
Maybe the idea you are really looking for isn't "prevent it from being encrypted", but instead, "make any 'simple' reversible transformation of it, have parts that hint at a way to decode it / leave it still decodeable by some algorithm" ?
where, I guess "simple" means something along the lines of, where the transformation can be described with much less information than the message to be sent?
This, might(?) be possible?
Ok, suppose the transformation is done by a deterministic finite state transducer, and specifically one which is invertible. (i.e. one T s.t. there exists a transducer S s.t. their composition gives the identity relationship over strings on the alphabet) .
Then, uh,
I guess you could like, take many copies of the message but transformed by different such transducers, and concatenate them together,
except, accounting for the possibility of influence from the previous copies on the current copy.
(accounting for this possibility by considering, given a transducer T and a string s1, constructing a transducer T' s.t. for any s2 and s3, ((s1 s2 [T] s3) iff (s2 [T'] s3)), or... something like that.)
I think if the size of the possible adversary transducers you are dealing with is small compared to the messages you are sending, or rather, if you are allowed to encode your messages in ways that make them really gargantuan and much larger than could ever be practical, then, I think this could be done ?
edit:
On the other hand, if you don't restrict the adversary to small(relative to your message) reversible finite state transducers, but instead, say, turing machines which have their complexity (either kolmogorov complexity or levin complexity or something) much smaller than that of the message you want to send, and where these compute an transformation with a computable inverse which is provably an inverse,
uh, well, that makes the problem harder, but,
well, I guess if one can enumerate through all such turing machines (of which there will be finitely many, due to the bound on the complexity), and find the inverse of each, and apply each to the output of the machine,
uh, well, one of these will produce the right output of course, but how can one go about determining which one it is?
If you have an oracle for complexity...
Ok, maybe it would be better to abstract more.
The adversary, Chuck, has a large and fairly general, but finite, set of invertible maps from strings to strings, and they will choose one map h from this set.
Alice and Bob also know this set, but not which map they chose.
Alice and Bob need to agree on a pair of functions f, g from strings to strings, with the goal that the composition f ; h ; g is the identity function.
If Alice and Bob have no restrictions on what functions they can use, then, I think there is a solution.
The set of strings can be put in one to one correspondence with the natural numbers.
What Alice and Bob need to do is find an infinite set of strings such that no two pairs of (transformation potentially chosen by Chuck, potential input to the transformation) produces the same output.
For any input, there are only finitely many outputs that these transformations could give.
Furthermore, because each of the transformations are invertible, for each of the outputs, each of the transformations produces that output for at most one input, and therefore there are only finitely many inputs such that some map in the set produces that output.
So, for each input, there are only finitely many other inputs with which it could be confused.
So, a sequence of these strings can be constructed as follows:
start with the 0th possible string (under the chosen mapping).
This will be used to encode 0.
Then, repeat the following:
If one has encodings for all natural numbers up to n,
take the first string which cannot be confused with any of the strings one has already chosen to encode a number.
This will be the encoding for n+1 .
This works.
(to decode, just find the only codeword which could be transformed into that by one of the maps)
Perhaps this could be extended to allow Chuck to have a potentially infinite set of maps, but under the restriction that there is an order on these maps and which maps he is allowed to use is only the ones before a certain point in this order depending on the size of the input he is sent? Or, alternatively, some limitation how how quickly the maps can increase the size (or complexity?) of the string?
[+] [-] munificent|4 years ago|reply
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCP_Foundation
[+] [-] teraflop|4 years ago|reply
> QNTM: Do it. If it's your first time, try a second time as well. Your first attempt might be okay or it might not be so okay, but it's something you can get better at over time. You can practice, you can get good.
because it's reflected very clearly in qntm's own writing. He's been publishing his fiction online for close to two decades, and I've been following his website for almost as long. He's always been a talented and imaginative writer, but the craftsmanship of his writing has been continuously getting better and better.
https://qntm.org/fiction
[+] [-] AceJohnny2|4 years ago|reply
What I particularly liked about it is that it followed this geek's impulse of "yeah but why/how?" and answered it. Then answered the question after that. And after that. It was an exponentially wild ride.
It's not a perfect book. The characters are, honestly, kind of weak in an overpowered kind of way; it's more an idea-driven book than plot- or character-driven.
But I think the HN crowd would really like it, and it deserves wider recognition!
[1] https://qntm.org/ra
[+] [-] bduerst|4 years ago|reply
https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-055
Also written by qntm!
[+] [-] kevingadd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jedimastert|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ta988|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aidenn0|4 years ago|reply
In addition if you search for the actual word (not "n-word") on HN none of the articles are from the past year (there are two submissions from the past year, but the articles are from 1999 and 1971. The submissions have a total of 11 upvotes.
I recently ran into an article that used the phrase "the R-word" and I had to ask my teenage daughter which particular word that referred to. It's now very googleable, but at the time none of the top 5 pages on google indicated what the word might be.
1: One example: a white teacher at a meeting discussing standards for materials used in the classroom. One rule disallowed books with the n-word. The teacher said roughly: "So if there is a book about the black experience, written by a black author, I can't use it in my classroom because it has the word 'n*****' in it?"
[+] [-] Y_Y|4 years ago|reply
For what it's worth, this stuff is culturally relative. The r-word is apparently "retard", and not an unsayable slur within my cultural sphere, to the best of my limited knowledge.
[+] [-] dsr_|4 years ago|reply
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/N-word
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/n-word
https://www.thefreedictionary.com/n-word
All tell you precisely what is meant.
For some reason, school boards are terrible at the use-mention distinction.
[+] [-] exporectomy|4 years ago|reply
I wonder about believing you're wrong about any specific knowledge you have. That's pretty hard. Others can try to communicate it to you but your brain tries to find ways to reject that information.
[+] [-] willhinsa|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alisonkisk|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ZephyrP|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://github.com/qntm/greenery
[2] https://qntm.org/greenery
[3] https://qntm.org/lego
[4] https://qntm.org/plants
[5] https://qntm.org/fsm
[+] [-] PaulHoule|4 years ago|reply
For a "secret" to be significant there has to be some awareness that a "secret" exists. As Don Rumsfeld would put it, it is a "known unknown".
[+] [-] __MatrixMan__|4 years ago|reply
> What information would you intrinsically not want anyone else to find out about?
And then injects a "subscribe" nag that says:
> my email address is...
I thought this juxtaposition was funny.
[+] [-] anandoza|4 years ago|reply
> A piece of information you may or may not want us to find about is your email address....
> [email address box] Subscribe Free
[+] [-] wyager|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LeifCarrotson|4 years ago|reply
https://www.amazon.com/Ra-qntm/dp/B096TRWRWX
It now occupies an increasingly crowded place of pride on the face-height row of my main bookshelf, in a way that feels remarkably different from my favorite fiction bookmarks folder.
[+] [-] twicetwice|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EamonnMR|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inasio|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saeranv|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] computerfriend|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k__|4 years ago|reply
Pretty awesome ideas.
[+] [-] WorkLobster|4 years ago|reply
https://existentialterror.tumblr.com/post/611166753441169408...
[+] [-] samplatt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GuB-42|4 years ago|reply
Like a lot of SCP material, really.
[+] [-] lowbloodsugar|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lowbloodsugar|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsedlm|4 years ago|reply
If we consider error correction to be the capacity for a message to resist errors, and encryption as the design of reversible error for any possible message (to add the error is to encrypt and to remove it is to decrypt).
Then, how can we make an error correction scheme so good that a message encoded with it can be error corrected back into the original regardless of how the encoded message is encrypted?
[+] [-] anyfoo|4 years ago|reply
Another way do describe it is that error correction creates resistance against (effectively) some upper boundary of error/noise. It does that by essentially multiplying the signal so that (with a still constant error) it increases the effective SNR , as that is just signal divided by error. It cannot work if you have 100% noise and 0% signal (it's intuitive why, and 0 multiplied by x is still 0). A good encryption scheme however (pretty much any common one that isn't a toy) has the goal of making the signal look entirely random for anyone without the proper algorithm and secret to reverse. With an effectively 0 SNR to that observer, there is no signal to boost.
Noise/error is random, if it wasn't it would be reversible and not need any error correction techniques that effectively reduce bandwidth. Encrypting, however, is not random at all, it is entirely deterministic, making it intentionally reversible.
[+] [-] a1369209993|4 years ago|reply
No. Preventing this is called IND-CPA (indistiguishability under chosen plaintext attack) security and is basically table stakes for any modern symmetric encryption algorithm.
In fact this is even weaker than IND-CPA, since in IND-CPA the attacker can first observe arbitrarily many other plaintexts and use the resulting information to choose two (non-yet-seen) plaintexts specific to the particular encryption algorithm and key to try to distinguish, and they don't have to be sure which is which, only to do significantly better than chance.
[+] [-] jerf|4 years ago|reply
Such a result would probably be of no practical use but it could be interesting in a recreational mathematics sort of way.
[+] [-] oh_sigh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drdeca|4 years ago|reply
Classical information can be described with a sequence of bits. If you have a long enough shared random sequence of bits, you can always use that as a one-time-pad, and encrypt it that way.
For quantum information, I'm fairly sure that a quantum variation of the one-time-pad still works (where the pad consists of entangled pairs of qubits (the two parties each hold one qubit of each pair) instead of just shared random bits), and so it is, I think, also impossible.
(And even if it was possible-but-only-for-quantum-information, I think the no-cloning theorem would still render it pointless, as the only thing preventing it from being encrypted would accomplish, would be allowing someone to successfully intercept a message that was being sent, instead of just causing the message to be lost)
_____
Maybe the idea you are really looking for isn't "prevent it from being encrypted", but instead, "make any 'simple' reversible transformation of it, have parts that hint at a way to decode it / leave it still decodeable by some algorithm" ?
where, I guess "simple" means something along the lines of, where the transformation can be described with much less information than the message to be sent?
This, might(?) be possible?
Ok, suppose the transformation is done by a deterministic finite state transducer, and specifically one which is invertible. (i.e. one T s.t. there exists a transducer S s.t. their composition gives the identity relationship over strings on the alphabet) .
Then, uh,
I guess you could like, take many copies of the message but transformed by different such transducers, and concatenate them together, except, accounting for the possibility of influence from the previous copies on the current copy.
(accounting for this possibility by considering, given a transducer T and a string s1, constructing a transducer T' s.t. for any s2 and s3, ((s1 s2 [T] s3) iff (s2 [T'] s3)), or... something like that.)
I think if the size of the possible adversary transducers you are dealing with is small compared to the messages you are sending, or rather, if you are allowed to encode your messages in ways that make them really gargantuan and much larger than could ever be practical, then, I think this could be done ?
edit: On the other hand, if you don't restrict the adversary to small(relative to your message) reversible finite state transducers, but instead, say, turing machines which have their complexity (either kolmogorov complexity or levin complexity or something) much smaller than that of the message you want to send, and where these compute an transformation with a computable inverse which is provably an inverse, uh, well, that makes the problem harder, but,
well, I guess if one can enumerate through all such turing machines (of which there will be finitely many, due to the bound on the complexity), and find the inverse of each, and apply each to the output of the machine,
uh, well, one of these will produce the right output of course, but how can one go about determining which one it is?
If you have an oracle for complexity...
Ok, maybe it would be better to abstract more.
The adversary, Chuck, has a large and fairly general, but finite, set of invertible maps from strings to strings, and they will choose one map h from this set.
Alice and Bob also know this set, but not which map they chose.
Alice and Bob need to agree on a pair of functions f, g from strings to strings, with the goal that the composition f ; h ; g is the identity function.
If Alice and Bob have no restrictions on what functions they can use, then, I think there is a solution.
The set of strings can be put in one to one correspondence with the natural numbers.
What Alice and Bob need to do is find an infinite set of strings such that no two pairs of (transformation potentially chosen by Chuck, potential input to the transformation) produces the same output.
For any input, there are only finitely many outputs that these transformations could give. Furthermore, because each of the transformations are invertible, for each of the outputs, each of the transformations produces that output for at most one input, and therefore there are only finitely many inputs such that some map in the set produces that output. So, for each input, there are only finitely many other inputs with which it could be confused.
So, a sequence of these strings can be constructed as follows: start with the 0th possible string (under the chosen mapping). This will be used to encode 0.
Then, repeat the following:
If one has encodings for all natural numbers up to n, take the first string which cannot be confused with any of the strings one has already chosen to encode a number. This will be the encoding for n+1 .
This works.
(to decode, just find the only codeword which could be transformed into that by one of the maps)
Perhaps this could be extended to allow Chuck to have a potentially infinite set of maps, but under the restriction that there is an order on these maps and which maps he is allowed to use is only the ones before a certain point in this order depending on the size of the input he is sent? Or, alternatively, some limitation how how quickly the maps can increase the size (or complexity?) of the string?
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mwilcox|4 years ago|reply