I absolutely adore Paul McAuley's writing, it's some of the best there is. And it's fun to see his peers turn up to support the launch. China Meiville looks exactly how I imagined him, as does Peter Hamilton.
Show me someone who admittedly seems to know a lot about Japan, but not so much about East Germany:
But the most efficient of these measures were probably easier to implement in the recently post-totalitarian East Germany, with its still-docile population accustomed to state directives, than in democratic Japan.
So... East Germany ceased to exist 35 years ago. Even if we accept that the people affected by the degrowth discussed in this article are the ones who grew up during the DDR regime, it doesn't rhyme well with the fact that East German states are hotbeds for neo-Nazi parties, which by all accounts should be anathema to a population raised in a totalitarian state dominated by the Soviet Union.
And if there's a population almost stereotypically conformist to the common good over the private will, isn't that the Japanese?
I'm open to input on either side, I admit I don't know too much about these issues.
This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats.
I think there’s a lot to say about the object level issue of how to deal with AI agents in open source projects, and the future of building in public at all.
someone on HN or LW posted a piece about how they'd tried to get chatgpt to design a machine part, and it had hilariously failed (impossible machine paths, too thin material etc)
some nimrod suggested skilled machinists be outfitted with pressure sensing gloves and cameras and patiently explain eahc machining step so the LLMs could take their jobs
I recently purchased a couple of decent red wines with the intent to age them appropriately. Vendor said 8 years was good, so I Sharpied "'34" on the label and felt really really old when I did so.
Anyway, 18 Jul 2034 is as good a date as any to uncork one of them to enjoy. Marked my calendar!
If you accept the imho insane idea that a Mars colony is worth building, using Luna as a stepping stone makes sense. You can debug a lot of issues with recycling, growing food, low gravity, slow resupply etc. with a faster feedback loop.
self-growing
the virile space men will have plenty of nubile females to pump out babies
The people who are worried that Moltbook is where agents are gaining self-consciousness forgot the part of Accelerando where all the AIs were basically scammers (the Slug)
Orwell had Julia working in the novel factory - where machines spliced together romance trash pablum for light entertainment. So he accurately prophesied LLMs.
(2022)
I was surprised that Sunak had any pull in the UK gov currently.