Cunning Systems

Science fiction and fantasy authors

Science fiction and fantasy blog post notes

At a recent talk, I mentioned reading science fiction for entertainment, as well as for perspective on how the future might come out; and I was asked for a reading list. This isn’t a list of books; that’s on my todo list. Meantime, here’s a list of significant authors, and some other recommendations and relevant references.

NASA has a ‘foresighting’ panel which includes science fiction authors. Report : https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/nasa-futures-public-report-may-2023-anonymous-tagged.pdf

Science Fiction author list

Charles Stross blogs at https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/

John Scalzi blogs at https://whatever.scalzi.com/

Kim Stanley Robinson on ‘Ministry for the Future’ https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/24497348-ministry-still-riding-the-heat-wave

Jo Walton

Alistair Reynolds

Richard Morgan

Iain Banks (aka Iain M Banks)

Vernor Vinge

Neal Stephenson

William Gibson

Ann Leckie

Ursula Le Guin

Fantasy author list

Terry Pratchett

Neil Gaiman

Marc Andreesen posted his SF author list in 2007, before Andreessen Horowitz was founded. Some of the authors listed above were new to me then.

References

Tim Bray on William Gibson on AR goggles in 1993 https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2024/02/02/Vision-1993

Charlie Stross https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tech-billionaires-need-to-stop-trying-to-make-the-science-fiction-they-grew-up-on-real

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2098599-six-science-fiction-novels-you-should-be-reading

https://www.pwc.com.au/digitalpulse/science-fiction-explore-business-innovation.html

Edinburgh

New Town reflections

It’s just over a year since we moved to the New Town in Edinburgh. Time to collect some of the images from the year.

Reflecting the Georgian buildings in a large puddle next to the railings for Queen Street Gardens. 29 October 2023

North Edinburgh has many good walking paths, many of them converted from the railway network which used to connect Granton and Leith with the city. This is the Great Junction Street bridge over the Water of Leith. 9 November 2023

This is the new terminus for the tram service, which now runs from the airport to Newhaven. We often walk by one or other of the railway paths to Newhaven harbour, then along to the tram stop to return to town. 27 June 2023

Newhaven harbour, taken from the lighthouse. A few pleasure craft and small fishing boats moored; it’s also where the tenders from the big cruise ships come in. 13 April 2023

The Port of Leith takes much bigger ships. This is the Apache II, a pipe laying vessel. 7 January 2023

If you follow me on Blipfoto you will have seen these images before. It’s the most benign social media place, supported by membership fees, with no advertising. It’s possible to build a community of friends who are mutually interesting and supportive.

Infrastructure

Thinking about Activity Pub

Quoting Henrik Karlsson “A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox”

Somewhat more specifically, we are looking for ways to work on distributed systems. Could be systems design, software development, or technical market opportunity analysis. Or something we haven’t found yet.

A decentralized social media service is one angle of approach; the Activity Pub protocol might benefit from some rethinking of the server implementation with the goal of enabling large scale. There’s a discussion of Takahē , which has different goals, and mentions of other server implementations here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33731739 This focus on Activity Pub is of course prompted by the dramatic changes at Twitter under its new master, and the consequent increase in users and server implementations of Mastodon.

Bruce Davie discusses what is meant by decentralization in this context “Mastodon and other applications in the fediverse are organizationally distributed. Each instance of a Mastodon server is run by a person or group who gets to make their own decisions both about how to run the service technically and on the policies that will apply to the instance.”

Quoting Kiernan Christ writing for Lawfare “Policymakers should be aware of the Fediverse, even though it currently has a much smaller user base than any mainstream social media company. Regulations developed to deal with the negative consequences of Big Tech may be ineffective or incompatible with decentralized services.”

Lawfare blog https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-earth-fediverse 9 May 22

Bruce Davie https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/01/mastodon_activitypub/

Guide to Mastodon https://github.com/joyeusenoelle/GuideToMastodon

Henrik Karlsson https://escapingflatland.substack.com

More about Mastodon https://tidbits.com/2023/01/27/mastodon-a-new-hope-for-social-networking/

On Mastodon

Edinburgh

Views in Edinburgh

We moved again at the end of October 2022 much closer to the city centre. Daily notes have been going into Blipfoto.

Gathering some of those views

https://www.blipfoto.com/entry/3045975706145130731

December 2022 From Corstorphine Hill, West of the city

https://www.blipfoto.com/entry/3044159536643443636

November 2022 Looking towards Fife at Granton

https://www.blipfoto.com/entry/3000306967081127692

November 2022 The Water of Leith, at the Shore in Leith

https://www.blipfoto.com/entry/3042711671236722909

July 2022 Shows three major bridges over the Forth Estuary; the railway bridge, the first road bridge, and the replacement, called the Queensferry Crossing (the one with three visible towers and the white cable)

Transportation

Micromobility in Edinburgh

Back in 2018 and 2019 I posted about ebikes and the FedEx delivery robot being developed. Now in 2022 FedEx has cargo bikes in operation in London, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Cambridge.

This is a EAV2Cubed 4 wheeled electric cargo bike, parked off the bicycle lane on Fountainbridge in Edinburgh. A more practical vehicle for Edinburgh weather than the 3 wheeled vehicle pictured in this press release https://newsroom.fedex.com/newsroom/fedex-express-continues-journey-towards-zero-emissions-delivery-as-edinburgh-glasgow-and-cambridge-become-the-next-uk-cities-to-welcome-e-cargo-bikes/

We moved from Los Altos, California, to Edinburgh, Scotland at the end of May and are temporarily living in this end of the city.

Delivery – FedEx

Delivery of things

Moving things