Chapters 51-54: bravo! Some of the best writing so far. My new favorite line from the fic: "it was a down payment on everything that Harry meant to accomplish with his life". I immediately had to rewatch the training montage from the 2008 film "Wanted" that starts at about 46:00 to get more of the same emotion.

Chapter 54: why don't Harry and Quirrell cast Somnium on Bellatrix instead of deceiving her? (The deception requires Quirrell to tell Harry the Death Eater password, among other things...) Why does Quirrell talk to Bahry so confidently while Bellatrix can hear him? Why does he follow his whims to play-duel and then kill Bahry instead of quickly subduing and memory-charming him, if they planned to pull off the perfect crime? Why is he so vulnerable to Dementors that he drops immediately when Harry's Patronus vanishes, even though Bahry's Patronus is still there successfully protecting Bahry and Harry? (Or am I misunderstanding the reason for his screaming? It's very similar to Harry's screaming when he first encountered a Dementor. If the screaming were caused by Quirrell's spell coming in contact with Harry's - brother wands or whatever - then Harry should've felt a symmetrical effect, which he didn't.)

Also, am I the only one stupid enough to only now realize that the professor's name is Quivering Squirrel?

Ch. 54: If Harry and Quirrell discussed the possibility of an Auror seeing them, Harry should have told Quirrell that AK is out of the question- no sense in killing one innocent person in the course of saving one innocent person.

And it's a pretty big miscalculation of Quirrell not to anticipate Harry's intervention at the key moment. He really should have seen by now that Harry's light side is that strong.

Unless, of course, that was the real gambit somehow.

ETA: Loved the writing, though- I was on the edge of my seat.

Has anyone dealt with bargaining games where different pure solutions cannot be linearly combined (i.e. a non-convex solution space)?

Me too, but I think resurrection without a backup should be seriously considered given the possibility of superhuman AI. That is, a simulation based on modelling the behavioural patterns of the person copied, attempting to predict their reactions to a given stimulus. If there are enough records of the person and by the person plus their DNA, given sufficiently powerful AI, such a beta-level simulation might be sufficiently close so that only a powerful posthuman being could notice any difference compared to the original. I'm not sure if Reynolds was the first person to consider this, I doubt it, but I deem the term beta level simulation adequate.

Resurrection without a backup. As with ecosystem reconstruction, such "resurrections" are in fact clever simulations. If the available information is sufficiently detailed, the individual and even close friends and associations are unable to tell the difference. However, transapient informants say that any being of the same toposophic level as the "resurrector" can see marks that the new being is not at all like the old one. "Resurrections" of historical figures, or of persons who lived at the fringes of Terragen civilization and were not well recorded, are of very uneven quality. -- Orion's Arm - Encyclopedia Galactica - Limits of Transapient Power

You forgot the most optimistic of all: 7. I could do absolutely nothing, get cremated and the eventual Friendly AI will still be able to reanimate me, via time-travel or equivalent.

Questionable Content mentioned the singularity in passing circa last night. The phrase "according to the Internet" made me think that there was some particular exaggerated article or press release making the rounds that it was referring to, but I couldn't find it and I was encouraged to refrain from asking directly.

Ch. 49. The throwaway reference to Tenorman Family Chili is awesome.

I know, but my guess is that LW members are skeptical or ironic about these "songs of praise" (and I deliberately left out their counterparts in contemporary politics, but I hadn't forgotten about that.)

I have a favorite of my own.

Too many SMBC comics to get all of them in one post, but here are four recent ones:

#1 The Fermi Paradox is resolved with reference to wireheading.

#2 About mind uploading.

#3 A different kind of singularity, and (naive) Fun Theory.

#4 Making fun of aging singularitarians.