Talk to me about

Things I’ll happily talk about for longer than I should, outside of work. If you love any of them too, write to me.

• Dexter

  Be funny

  Seeing Dexter awkwardly navigate the world is not only kind of funny but relatable, except I’m not a killer who kills serial killers. Sometimes Doakes lines like “You glide like a lizard on ice” run through my head when I’m doing nothing, and they always make me chuckle a little.

  I haven’t watched past season 4. I’ve tried a few times, but what happened at the end of season 4 was so devastating that I somehow couldn’t get myself to keep going. I have, however, watched Dexter: New Blood, Resurrection and Original Sin.

• Pantheon

  Upload me

  Whole brain emulation has been on my mind like a seed ever since I read Wait But Why’s posts on superintelligence back in 2017 (oh god, it’s almost 10 years, wtf?!). This series gave that seed the water to grow. It’s one of the best and most thought-provoking series about a world after whole brain emulation, and it tries just as hard to imagine a world after superintelligence, policy and governance included.

  My critique of the ending (spoilers)

  What we saw in the show can’t represent the root universe, the real world.

  1. In the show, the dying Caspian tells Maddie when they’ll meet again.
  2. Because of that hint, Maddie revives him with David’s help, and the revived Caspian is how the SafeSurf lords come to exist.
  3. The SafeSurf lords simulate the next universe, where Caspian gets the same hint from them. N+1 plays out the same way, then N+2, which is really N−1: the story loops.
  4. A loop of simulations still needs a start. Every simulation has less compute than its host, like a virtual machine inside a virtual machine, so the nesting can’t go back forever. There has to be a root universe, and someone in it runs the loop, like a dramatic movie made of real simulations.
  5. Nothing is above the root, so no one gives its dying Caspian the hint. Maddie never revives him, and there are no SafeSurf lords. The root can’t be any universe in the loop, so what we saw can’t represent the real world.

  Talk me out of it.

  My critique of Holstrom (spoilers)

  I hate how Holstrom could have just been calmer and won in the end. All he had to do was be good: people would upload themselves, and he could let be those who didn’t want to. I don’t know why he had to get the whole of humanity to upload.

  Stephen, who was supposed to be the most intellectual, couldn’t see the obvious repercussions of acting as humanity’s authority figure. Forcing people to upload was his really stupid end. To be fair, even Maddie, in the end, lost Caspian and her son by acting irrationally and emotionally.

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