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Comment by te | Hacker News Reader

Is that an autostereogram?

That is a Snow Crash. A condition I saw frequently learning 68k asm on a Mac. It sometimes looked like that if video memory was overwritten.

DON'T LOOK AT THAT IMAGE!!!

I wondered this briefly as well, but can assure you that it is not. They resolve almost instantly for me, so I fortunately don't have to spend 10 minutes wondering if something is just noise.

That image makes sense in the context of the book. In particular, in the book skilled hackers are able to discern meaning from what otherwise looks like binary noise just by looking at it.

That's why I thought it should be an autostereogram. I hadn't tried to focus on one in 20 years, but I relearned it with a little practice. I couldn't get this image to resolve either, but I did feel like I was seeing something in there. I'm pretty sure it's not pure noise.

Anything you feel like you're seeing in there is probably nothing more than pareidolia.

I've read the book, so I knew that it shouldn't be an autostereogram. But checking is kind of an automatic procedure when I see an image like that.

>In particular, in the book skilled hackers are able to discern meaning from what otherwise looks like binary noise just by looking at it.

Erm, that's not really what the image is a reference too. The noise is what the titular "snow crash" looks like when you use a particular digital "drug" (well not exactly a drug, but, spoilers you know). I don't recall anything about hackers being able to read binary code by looking at bitmaps, and I'm pretty sure that statement is contradicted by Hiro's skepticism that the binary code in the Snow Crash drug could actually have any effect on a human brain simply by entering the visual cortex.

So I didn't want to include too many spoilers, but one element of the book was the ability of hackers to intuit meaning from binary because of their level of familiarity with computer code. That is, show them a hex stream and they should be able to read the ascii it contains. That's not wholey unreasonable, I can look at the data I'm currently writing tools for and pick out the time by connecting 12 bits split up and spread over 84 bytes.

The book takes it to the point that binary images, static to non-hackers, to hackers contains meaning (though not consciously), permitting the information contained (subconcious memes/instructions) to be spread via images, rewriting their minds. The images to everyone else look like static or the "snow crash".

The whole thing lacks seriousness. A character named Hiro Protagonist is the protaganist of the adventure. It's filled with action/pulp goodness, not a serious treatise on the capabilities of interstellar memes and the effect of language on the human mind. Some magical incantation in a language no one in the present has ever heard, but that is apparently genetically programmed into our minds, permits anyone to be controlled by commands in the language. If that's allowed, why not let static convey it as well? And the language/commands returned in the form of signals from space?

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