Halfway between the final score and the play-by-play, there are questions we can ask about a basketball game that tells us much about how it was played: Did a single team dominate or did the lead go back and forth? Were the leads large or usually close? Were there long one-sided point streaks?

This is a database of NBA games from 2010 to whenever I last updated it where you can check these parameters for any game you want and see them in context.

(Originally posted on my blog.)

“Given enough computational power all magic tricks are shallow,” my father used to say, and then dedicated his life and his death to proving himself wrong. He was often like that: Hegelian. He never cheated on Mom but his only true love was magic. He read to me every night like a loving father. I don’t remember the words, just the joy in his eyes. And then there were the injections and the machines. He was always learning, exploring, testing. It was inspiring and monstrous in equal measure but not equally known to the world. If he realized there was a difference I don’t know. He had strong principles that weren’t those.

He was both the most famous magician in the world and the most caustic skeptic. Every time he performed a major trick he’d invite the AI companies to analyze the recordings and try to figure out the methods behind his earnestly mocking theatricality. There was some disappointment mixed with his sneer when he called them wrong. Nobody thought he was lying when he did although he always refused neural polygraphs.

For his last trick he locked himself inside a chamber built by the engineers working on the Jupiter probe and had it dropped right down the Mariana Trench promising to return with no external help exactly a year later. At his request the Chinese navy monitored his descent with deep sea drones. I marked my twentieth birthday by watching a live feed of my father being crushed by the ocean’s pressure. I don’t think it surprised me. I don’t think I believed it. Few people in the world did, not at the beginning, but the Chinese were adamant that there had been no collusion or interference and even my father’s skill had to have some reasonable limit.

It’s been almost a year since then. I’ve received many condolences I accepted with the grace of somebody who doesn’t believe they are needed. Don’t ask me why. Or ask me tomorrow, after my twenty-first birthday party, when I’ll inherit control of my father’s fortune and everything I programmed into my son — every memory, every skill, every plan, every angle of the illusion we call the self — will finally unlock and he’ll realize he’s now me and I’m back.

Ta-da.

(Originally posted on my blog.)

To a first-order approximation the economy ~ AI: there’s no doubt that sci-fi has moved from being our culture’s concept of the future to being a major factor in investment portfolios. But sci-fi goes beyond AI, and the sci-fi component of markets is deeper and older than today’s frenzy. I’ve put together here a set of time series showing how often different “sci-fi terms” have been mentioned in 10-K filings over time. Look at the history, remember the fallen, and if you dare try to figure out what will be in this list tomorrow.

(Originally posted on my blog.)

There’s a murder of cyclopean crows spiraling above you. You look up to one you know hates you. Behind his eye there’s a black hole. The black hole winks salaciously.

You wake up with a strangled scream. Before you can breathe more than once the woman sitting next to you touches your shoulder and you tell her your dream without looking at her too understanding eyes. She gives you a pill you know it’s a placebo but works anyway. You fall asleep almost at once.

There’s an anthill inside your bones. You sit very still in a plastic chair somewhere, not because it will do anything but because it’s the only thing you can do. You try not to scream.

You wake up and your insides itch. You tell your handler your dream while staying very still. You take the pill eagerly.

You stand in front of a gigantic plastic castle, hollow and repellent. Something catches fire. You run through the maze garden that surrounds the castle but every path leads to the same fire. There are little mechanical matchboxes keeping everything alight and when you try to step on one your foot crumples.

You wake up smelling burnt plastic. She puts a pen in your hand and you draw what you remember of the maze.

A long-dead cousin you don’t remember sits next to you on a bus. He gives you a newspaper printed on red and smiles with red teeth.

The shape of the chess piece on your hand is familiar and inappropriate. The board in front of you is thin and long and across it there’s a mirror. You play a long careful gambit fully aware that the other player is aware of it. The pieces when they are taken. You notice you’re about to checkmate yourself and in a flash of shame you stand up and throw a piece at the mirror. There’s a crack and you realize with a shudder you’ve killed yourself.You’re alone on a boat lying down on the deck. The dome above you is dotted by black stars in a beige sky. The boat whispers to you under the white noise of the waves.You wake up smiling and a different handler is sitting next to you. He says you have to wake up screaming for it to count and then bends over you.

The eggs are too fresh and when you boil them they whimper. You take them out and put them under running water apologizing as softly as you can but you can hear the beating of wings the slithering under the floor the smell of rotten meat coming from behind you.

You wake up and your handler gives you the other pill, the one that makes you sleep without dreams. You know it’s a placebo and it doesn’t work.

You’re hanging upside down from a very tall lamppost and as the wind turns you around a woman standing below you takes photos. Just outside the lightcone her bosses look in eagerly and you close your eyes to pretend you don’t see them.

You wake up and very carefully don’t scream. Your contract stipulates at least fifteen hours a day scrolling through social media but that’s not why you start before your memory catches up.

(Originally posted on my blog.)

Every statement of this type needs almost as many asterisks as it has words: Who do we count as an athlete? How do we define best, over what span of time? Pick your definitions and you pick the winner.

I’ve built and deployed a small dashboard using 2026 results of various athletic and swimming disciplines — the ones where individual performance is mostly measurable and the problem is the comparisons between different events and sports — and used statistical analysis to come up with scores that can be compared across disciplines.

The tool is here (in an early beta version). As of making this post the three best athletes in the world among the more than 10,000 in the data are Gretchen Walsh, Summer Mcintosh, and Ziyi Yan, and Walsh is so far ahead of the rest that she’s almost in a category of her own.

(Originally posted on my blog.)

I’ve uploaded here a simple web app that can be used to play around with the concepts I wrote about in Relative superintelligence and competitive dynamics: between collapse, progress, and breakthroughs. It’s mostly an educational toy, but I make so often the argument that the impact of AI depends on the supply/demand characteristics of each market that I think it’ll be useful to have this at hand.

It’s a very early beta mostly for personal use. Issues to be expected, feedback always welcome.

(Originally posted on my blog.)

The Garden was many things. Each of them was a barrier that required its own unique key. It was an island surrounded by depth drones waiting patiently to kill whatever dared to move above. The cryptographic code that granted safe passage, and that for a single night and a single day, was thought to be impossible to fake. The Garden was also a rabidly self-protective ecosystem-organism. Everything in it carried a specific molecular signature derived from the DNA of a dead girl; everything in it — from the smallest dormant virus to the giant tactical networks of fungal predators — would kill anything that didn’t carry the genetic shibolet. The man I was going to meet had sent me something to inject me with that would give me a temporary facsimile good enough to make me acceptable to the Garden for a day or two. Or so he had said.

Of course I knew I was taking a risk.

But the Garden was above everything a mausoleum built by a genius who had been broken by her daughter’s death into something even more deeply bent and sharp, equal parts cognitive augmentations, wealth, and grief. Even a journalist wouldn’t go into such a place without an invitation and the son of the Garden’s builder, the younger brother of the world’s most famous dead girl, had given me one.

It was a clear night and the gazebo-like hollow tree where he was waiting for me was illuminated further by surprisingly bright bioluminiscent fruit. There were no artificial lights in the Garden, no electronics installed or carried by hypothetical visitors. No guns, explosives, poisons, or biological weapons of any kind either. The Garden had dozens of senses evaluated by a thousand different types of mind, all of them built for ruthlessness and incapable of hesitation. I felt exposed and weightless without any of the machines we all live with as I sat in front of my interviewee. The man was even more private than his reclusive mother. I hadn’t seriously attempted to research him until he sought me out and after he did all I could find were vague commonplaces about a grief-striken handsome young man lost in tragedy, his family too wealthy for reality to pluck him out.

Sitting close to him I began to update my internal profile. He was handsome, surprisingly, but you had to look for it. What you saw first was the pain. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve seen much worse things than the death of a single child no matter how horrifying the mechanics of the bioware accident. I’ve talked with witnesses and survivors whose plain words gave me screaming nightmares. He was still just a rich man haunted by a single personal tragedy. But he had the familiar air of somebody who’s not just grieving an event but still trapped in it. In his mind his sister was still screaming and her flesh was — I didn’t want to continue that thought. Not in a place where everything, even the tree where we were sitting and the insects buzzing somewhere afar, carried in memoriam some of her DNA.

I had asked myself why he wanted to meet on the island and I had been sure seeing him would help me understand. Now that I had it made less sense than before.

The first thing he said was “I can smell her.” Then he raised a hand in a gesture that offered clarification. “I remember her smell. I have eidetic memory for all senses and some interoceptive modalities. What I mean is that her genetic signature has a minor but detectable effect on the metabolic byproducts of certain species. If your senses and analytical capabilities are acute enough you can smell the difference in the patterns. I’m sure Mom used an early sample from long before her death but if you ask me it’s closer to how she smelled during her last few hours.”

“I see,” I said. Most of the rest of our conversation went like that. I don’t have his mind but I’ve done this all my life so I can quote it more or less verbatim — and I won’t. This is all I will quote of what he told me.

Three reasons.

The first reason is that he accused his mother of horrible crimes. No, that’s not the right to say it. He described brilliant and deliberate atrocities that had been the background rhythm of his life. He explained why he could do the things he said he could do and many more he wouldn’t or couldn’t tell me about. He told me why his sister had been in that laboratory; his story had no proof but was much more plausible than the official one and much worse than the rumors. There were things he said and things he implied, and things I don’t think even he was aware of but I could sense moving inside the void of what neither one of us knew. After the first fifteen minutes I was sure he never slept a night without nightmares. After the first half hour I knew I never would. A while later I learned he did not sleep at all. So, yes, I remember everything he said. And his mother… His mother can buy any lawyer and most governments. I’m not afraid of lawsuits but that’s not all she could do and I’m not the only person she could do it to.

The second reason I won’t tell you what he said is because it made it obvious he wasn’t quite sane and I don’t want him to be judged through those words. He wasn’t delusional or a sociopath; I’ve talked with both types and he was neither. But he wasn’t normal. How could he be, being who and what he was? He was abnormal in a literal not a pejorative sense. His faculties were the opposite of damaged and his judgement not impaired at all. That was the problem. He had gone through Hell with open eyes and a mind too perceptive not to be broken by what he was seeing. No, sorry, he hadn’t gone through Hell. He was still there psychologically and that night he was there physically and I was there with him. As he talked I couldn’t stop myself from looking at the Garden with a new awareness of the obscenity of its symbolism and purpose. It wasn’t just his experiences what had driven him at least half insane. The Garden was eating at him every day no matter where he was. It would do the same to me, I knew.

The third reason. That’s personal. I wouldn’t even tell you there’s a third reason but the forensic analysis will make it obvious if it hadn’t already that we kissed. We had to, well, fuck it, we had to exchange fluids, what a time to have an excuse to use that phrase with justification, for the two halves of the viral weapon to combine. You know it worked because he’s dead and the Garden is dying and I, and I think he tried to avoid this but not as a priority, don’t feel so good either. I just told you he wasn’t sane and you know what I didn’t know then, that he had used me to smuggle past the Garden’s defense systems the other half of a weapon he could use to kill it, so you might think he did something he didn’t.

Near the end he told me everything. Some of it personal and that’s part of my silence. Did I pity him? Sure. I felt too a share of the anger he felt. I also think I saw parts of him he could never see. I said things too and those are really really private. That conversation I’m taking to my grave. Let’s just say that at the end he was too hurt and unsure, too guilty I guess, to just kiss me. What happened later isn’t your business except for the side effects — what you’ll call bioterrorism but it’s something else — but if anything of this story sticks I want it to be that. He tricked me into going there fully knowing he was making me complicit in a crime and that there was a good chance I would die. That was a shit move (Am I writing differently? Is that a symptom? I feel it is) but I got a killer story out of it so I’m not really mad.

But let it be clear. At the end, when I knew what had happened since her sister was on the drawing board and I knew what would happen next, I leaned in and I kissed him.

(Originally posted on my blog.)

“We perform autopsies to kill ghosts” said the forensic pathologist to her apprentice during the last night of his training, and it was the first non-technical observation he had ever heard from her. She gestured to him to continue his smooth disassembly of the dead man they were working on. “People worry about diseases or fear murderers but they are only truly haunted by what they don’t understand. We cut up corpses to find an explanation that can be understood and accepted. We pull apart and file away death so when people bury their dead they don’t come back.” Her apprentice nodded without understanding. She had selected this corpse for his final test. After this he would be qualified to work on his own. Why he had chosen this job he had never needed to understand either.

“Why do you think I picked this case for tonight?”

The apprentice frowned. “I don’t know,” he said, for he was honest about professional matters. “It seems like a clear case so far. Am I wrong?”

“No, you’re not. What is this?” The forensic pathologist pointed at a feature inside the opened-up corpse. The apprentice answered with puzzled clarity. “Yes. And this?” Another obvious feature, another obvious answer. One distracted by something persistently tugging at his attention from near the base of the corpse’s skull.

“And this?”

The apprentice’s eye focused where his intuition had been screaming at him to look at. “I don’t know,” he said. His teacher contradicted him with a look. “Alright, I know,” he said. “But it’s impossible.” The apprentice looked at her. “Is this some sort of hazing?” Somehow that felt even more impossible, coming from her, than what was inside the corpse.

“No,” she said. Activating the voice recorder, she described something that was not what they were seeing. He had heard and read similar words many times. Never while looking at what he had assumed they were describing.

The forensic pathologist turned off the recorder. “We give people explanations that can be understood and accepted,” she said again, looking at him with eyes he knew missed nothing. There were next to her hands things that weren’t, technically, knives.

He sighed. How could he be so tired, he wondered, when he began his true career a few minutes ago? He pointed at the voice recorder. “We bury what would haunt them.” After a few seconds of silence. “What about us?”

“Mostly? We work alone and live alone,” said the forensic pathologist to her colleague. “And,” nodding to the corpse of the forensic pathologist lying on the autopsy table, a suicide that hadn’t been a suicide and would be reported as a third, different thing, “we are there for each other when we die.”

(Originally posted on my blog.)

The iron-red night rain was kind to nothing, least of all my long-distance surveillance drones. I was burning favors by the second piggybacking on other people’s surveillance feeds. Come dawn I would be owing equipment, work, and information to an assortment of annoying people. Better to owe them than to owe the Nosferatu Casino more than they wanted you to. Nobody owed them less than that. The night’s gig would halve my tab and put extra cash on my wallet. The casino’s offer had been generous — I would have done it for free and they knew it. When they asked for a favor the or else was left to your imagination. I knew for sure of three people they had had killed because they had said “no” and two more that had killed themselves less than two months after being banned from both buildings and apps. Not every kind of gambling addiction could be fed elsewhere. My own compulsion wasn’t that sophisticated but that was one dice I did not care to throw.

The little disk embedded behind my ear pinged and spoke softly through my skull. Some risks it was safer to take than to avoid and on a hunch I had sent an image of the woman currently having moderately nasty sex with the casino director to a friend’s discrete face recog service. Another favor owed but this one had bought confirmation of what my gut had already been sure of. The woman was a high-level zombie, a VP in one of the neurotech companies trying to muscle into the local eduhealth racket. With the top-notch circuitry deep in her brain she didn’t need anybody in her bed to have sex the unaugmented could only dream of. Maybe it was a weird addiction. Everybody had one and having wealth and power only changed the menu and the price. But maybe it was business and I was pretty sure it was. Despite its name, Nosferatu Casino was neutral territory between the zombies and the wet biotech companies that insisted people call them vampires. It was a convenient go-between that had found a fertile niche it had chosen to exploit for as long as it could. As insurance they continuously collected so much ugly dirt stored in digital vaults locked tighter than their bank accounts that it was high on everybody’s OKRs to keep the director alive. The casino fucked with nobody and nobody fucked with the casino. That was one of the few rules.

Not what my feeds were showing. Literally and figuratively.

I expanded my surveillance radius feeling my favor balance plunge to chthonic depths. At the frontier of my data’s resolution there was a semi-autonomous sniper. A whisper of an inference rather than a clear signal, I wouldn’t have picked it up if I hadn’t assumed it would be there, aiming at the hotel window waiting for the casino director. Or the zombie, in theory, but that wasn’t the game.

The true game was the vampire security team that located and disabled the sniper a minute after I found it and twenty-five seconds before the director had crossed in front of the window butt-naked and not shy. Not because he and the zombie were finished. The fucker had probably had one of the casino’s geek hives figure out timing and probabilities and he had waited for the most exciting moment to chance it out. Russian roulette by assassination attempt.

I wasn’t judging and I wasn’t paid to. The guy had found the game he would play until it killed him, and that’s what made sisters and brothers of us all. I encrypted my recordings and sent them to the casino’s dead drop, then I recorded myself destroying my copies and sent that to a second one.

I left the rented apartment leaving my flashed-out laptop behind for the owner to steal. The rain had become a storm but a voice behind my ear had told me that I had a courtesy invitation to go have fun at any one of the Nosferatu Casino’s physical locations. With any luck by morning my tab wouldn’t be higher than it had been yesterday but only idiots believe in luck.

(Originally posted on my blog.)

The Witch of the Future was the company psychologist. She had access to every sensor in your office, under your mattress, below your skin. She knew what you watched and read what you wrote. She couldn’t see your dreams but her inferences of them were sharper than your memories.

So when the Witch of the Future told Harry in the iron-god-and-law-clad privacy of his session there was a seventy-three percent chance he would misuse company resources to try to commit a crime he would have believed her even if he hadn’t been half-planning it already. But he hadn’t been sure that it was something he wanted to do until the Witch of the Future told him.

Ninety-four, said the witch to the closed door when he left.

The Witch of the Past was the AI interface to the company archives. There was little it couldn’t answer if you had the right questions and your title was fancy enough. Harry had designed his questions to help him plan his future crime by understanding how similar crimes had been committed in the past. Over many midnight sessions with the witch Harry learned that people very similar to him had attempted very similar crimes with the neurotic regularity of a corporate function. Not the same person but close enough. Not the same crime but close enough. Always caught before the public could be harmed. Always to the benefit of the company’s reputation and internal security’s ever-increasing budget.

The Witch of the Present was a voice inside Harry’s head. He had made it up a few years after joining the company to help him deal with the stress. He had thought he had made it up a few years after joining the company to help him deal with the stress. It was her who had first suggested the crime.

You don’t know for sure that you don’t have a chance Harry heard in the witch’s voice sitting alone in his big office. And if they pushed you to it and you pull it off anyway then the payoff will be even sweeter.

Harry was certain that none of the witches had ever lied to him. If he asked they probably would tell him what they had told the other men who had done what he found himself doing before having decided he had made up his mind.

(Originally posted on my blog.)