Quinn Wilton

Collector of Dead Languages @ Fission

Quinn is an applied researcher at Fission, where she spends her time at the intersection of programming language theory and distributed systems, while thinking about new ways to build and compose systems together.

Her specialty lies in bridging the gap between the historical context software is embedded in, and the ways in which an ever-changing world recontextualizes that software in new ways.

Talk:
The Tamagotchi in my Hands: Anarcho-transhumanist Biohacking with Nerves

Today’s world is one where all of our information is increasingly locked behind centralized services, and mined as training data for large machine learning models.

A better world is possible though, and we first glimpsed it in the mid 90s, with the release of an unassuming update to Microsoft Office that changed our conception of virtual assistants forever. His name is Clippy, and I have a copy of him loaded onto a computer chip embedded in my body.

Key Takeaways:

  • Through curiosity, imagination, and a little bit of DIY work ethic, we can build software in a way that trades off the complexity demanded of by highly-scaleable systems, in favor of locally-scaled, purpose built augmentations to our lives.

Target Audience:

  • Anybody who has ever looked at modern software and thought, “there’s no way it needs to be this complicated.