Lena: 7/10

Short story in the form of a Wikipedia article about the first executable image of a human brain, its proliferation, and exploitation.

If You Are Reading This : 8/10

God, qntm's writing style is so good and it shines through in this post. Like a blog post or journal entry about a scientist meeting one of his childhood heros through an online friend met via game forum. The idilic scientist drops a bombshell about receiving a transmission from an alien civilization, and the details don't matter – instead qntm transforms it into a question about art and context.

The Frame-by-Frame: 8/10

Shades of Italo Calvino shine through in this story which anthropomorphizes the various components of a self-driving car as they work together to process data about an unknown object further ahead in the roadway, one milisecond slice at a time.

Difference: 8/10

Black-Mirror-esque turing test experiment. Man is/thinks he is trapped in a prison cell with access only to a terminal where participants in an ARG chat with him. He's convinced he's been kidnapped, and everyone gaslights him about being a chat bot

Gorge: 7.5/10

futuristic space exploration vessel discovers a completely smooth surface and sends some probes to investigate what they discover is a nanobot virus and they just sent it materials

Does anybody remember Google People?: 7/10

Twitter thread about a fake Google product where Google created shadow accounts for LLM/model bot accounts for users that became self-aware, but incomplete and thought they were real

Driver: 6.5/10

Another story like Lena about a SRE who is uploaded to manage instances of himself. The "haunting" part of this story is the "related articles" section

I Don't Know, Timmy, Being God is a Big Responsibility: 6.75/10

Scientists discover a hyper computer with infinite computing power and immediately simulate earth and observe themselves discovering a hyper computer and simulating earth. The infinite feedback loop causes them to realize they're also probably somewhere in the sequence of the feedback loop rather than at the top layer. Terrified, but unable to terminate the feedback loop

A Powerful Culture: 7/10

It's difficult to try to describe higher dimensions. Greg Egan does (and succeeds IMO) in Planck Dive, and qntm tries here with decent success. Higher dimension earth starts pumping higher dimensional waste into earth since they're a couple hundre years more advanced and lower-dimensional earth can't do anything to stop them.

Valuable Humans in Transit: 8/10

human scientists are pawns for self-preservation of a super computer which constructs nano-bots ad hoc to prevent immolation after asteroid impact

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