And what makes you think we haven't got those still in store? The island of our knowledge and the vast coastline of our discovery is still insignificant compared to the vast sea of our ignorance and the oceans of possibility we have yet to travel.
Whimsy is in short supply, but it's not because the world lacks magic. It's more because of choices made by people who chose to be dead inside, and shaped the world in their image. I'm not asking you to stop demanding more whimsy, far from it. This old grey bearded man is asking you to form a party, accept a quest and perhaps one day lead the charge of an army in pursuit of returning the whimsy to the world.
I really don't understand what magic you think we don't have? Chances are you typed this question on a slate of crystal and wire that allows you to see and hear across the planet in nearly real time. There are people who, with the right tools can summon fire at their fingertips, unleash arcs of lightning, draw water from thin air, and make rocks that talk. We are surrounded by forces that both well mapped (at least locally) and are completely incomprehensible to the best of us. While we have not mastered the veil between life and death, we have certainly learned to draw it back.
You are, I fear demonstrating the old adage that familiarity breeds contempt. You're confusing the comprehensibility of the world with mundanity. We are living in a world full of "magic"... It just doesn't look like the magic you read about in old fairy tales, and importantly, it's not shared equally to everyone.
How do you know that proprietary code is secure? Open source at least has a collective self interest in finding and patching flaws. There is no such natural mechanisms in software development by giant corporate conglomerates.
This. AI and more generally algorithm dependence is an addiction and watching him struggle with it the past few years has been heartbreaking. Watching him try to bargain and rationalize an objectively misanthropic technology that grew out of a sphere that he was a major role in and did begin as an objectively beautiful attempt at building community and healthy dialogue is very disappointing. I don't hate or judge him. He tried to do something beautiful. He just didn't understand the Faustian bargain he made in the process. The systemic forces turning his work into poison.
I don't judge him for wrestling with it. I'm sad for him. I'm sad for a lot of us. We're all working in a system that's slowly killing us to some degree or another. There is no ethically clean life in a system predicated on greed, gluttony and lies. His optimism may have slipped into delusional, but it beats the crushing cynicism that comes with naked realism.
I don't think that we should lose hope, but the future can't look like this. His Icarus moment shouldn't be the end of his journey. I hope he finds himself and begins planting new seeds even if none of us ever live to see the shade of the trees that grow from them.
Honestly, the US looks like absolute madness for a lot of us. I have friends and family in the US and I am terrified for their safety every day. I don't blame all Americans, obviously, but there's a lot of deeply sick and deeply deranged people down there and it makes me furious watching their bloodbath leak over the border into my country.
History is repeating itself at ever grander scales. It really is a shame that we always end up led by sociopaths (governments and businesses alike) because humans are terrible about misidentifying confidence as competence, only to discover the guy with zero shame has no idea what he's doing and is happily marching us into the fires of hell.
But the mega-rich don't want to make their concessions. So they spend billions trying to convince average persons like you and me that the transition will be too burdensome FOR US, so we should be opposed to it. For example, the villainification of "carbon tax".
You forgot the part where they will make us pay the sacrifice for them if we press the issue. In blood, without the least bit of shame or scruples.
That's probably fair, but I would also worry that anything coded in Finnish would be trying to find a way to kill me for not respecting its personal space.
No, what you need is something that can facilitate coordination and communication between many moving parts, inspire confidence in the team, create stability, and sell a vision to generate investment, and those functions do not necessarily all need to be one person. You do not "need" a leader, you want a leader because it's easier to conceptualize a relationship with a figurehead. Much like the rump English monarchy, the executive is a vestigial appendage and an artifact of of an aristocratic era of patronage. Locking in a coherent direction does not require a "decider", there are other ways to achieve that. By designing companies to minimize personal liability and accountability, they have also designed themselves out of a useful role.
You ever hear the saying that if you gave an infinite number of monkeys and infinite number of typewriters at least one of them would likely produce the stage play of Hamlet by pure chance from slamming the keys? That's not exactly how this works but it's close. The reality is co-operative power always exceeds what any individual can do, but co-operative power requires co-ordination. Usually these systems start out with well meaning people coordinating groups of people to build a house, raise a barn, build a wall, found a city, organize a farming district, found a nation, start a multinational corporation. Unfortunately the guy co-coordinating the team, tends to get a little full of himself over time, starts taking bigger shares for himself than is truly justifiable, and then their kids do the same thing and the system starts to decay.
Public, private, capitalist, socialist, doesn't matter what the goal or structure of the organization looks like, it always rots from the top. And then it falls apart, we rinse the blood off, and repeat with a slightly different version. This is not new, Plato had a very good description of it in 375 BCE (approximately). And every new attempt we try to build it a little bit better to prevent someone (or their great, great grandson) from eventually deciding they're a demigod and entitled to do whatever horrendous idea pops into their head. We even built systems that kick you out of the top seat every once in a while to see if people still trust you to be in charge. Unfortunately we forgot corporate governance is also governance, creating a wealth class which became modern aristocracy, and yada yada here we are. Turns out our current system is also vulnerable to corruption. So are all the rest we've tried too though, and we have at least 10,000 years of attempts at it. It's a hard problem.
We get better, we still fail, we try again, repeat infinitely. How do we do good things like abolishing slavery, age of consent and minimum wage? We got better. Why are there still evil, greedy, pedos in charge? Well, they didn't start that way, but they did end up a blood sucking fiend, sometimes after generations of rot, sometimes in one lifetime. You can't really turn a vampire back to human though, so we do what we have to do. We'll hopefully find a better solution on the next go around, trying to figure out how to work together to achieve a good life for everyone without the people facilitating the project turning into monsters.
The reality is no one person is qualified to "run" a multinational megacorp. Not a single human being knows enough for this level of complexity, but the only reason any of them can justify the ungodly amount of marginal return they take is to pretend they're super-geniuses while relying on 'consultant' teams to do the actual thinking, and also keep it quiet that they're no more competent than the janitor they're making 1000x the salary of (all in stock options of course, but 1000x nonetheless).
All of this would work better if the "bosses" could accept they aren't demigods, that the domain expertise to make collective decisions is within their existing org charts and they just need to step down off their high horses and remember they are just a cog in a much bigger machine that makes its own decisions with or without their input. They're self-important sales reps, with just enough of a grasp of finance to be dangerous to themselves and others. I'm sure me and my 10 closest colleagues would also be inclined to say we do a billion $ of work every day if we were writing our own bonus agreements. We just wouldn't have the hubris to convince ourselves it's true.
I know, but a different dialect is still one language. We are mutually intelligible to each other. There's less variation between us than there is within the UK, so I don't think we can argue it isn't the same language even if they are sloppier with it.
Disclaimer: I am not a vet, this is not medical advice, seek professional guidance before taking advice from the internet.
Technically, kind of. It's extremely rare, but cats can develop Fel D1 sensitivity, resulting respiratory issues. Usually not to their own antigens, but another cat's. I think technically that would be considered an autoimmune condition if they were allergic to themselves. Probably would present as something similar to pemphigus foliaceus.
It spooked them. Think of them like stunted teenagers who think they'll live forever and have no concept of consequences. Suddenly being faced with the potential consequences of their largess, and the potential for coordinated, distributed, non-hierarchical response, as well as the recognition of their own mortality sent them into a state of existential panic. Their retrenchment and consolidation in response to this panic has only accelerated the damage they're doing. They fully expect a mad-max style social collapse, and want to be sitting on a little slice of Eden when it happens.
The fact that we could avoid all of the necessity for recreating the most horrific dystopias mankind has ever envisioned by them simply... not being so damn greedy seems to have missed them entirely.
Arguing that racial animus towards whites doesn’t count as racism helped Trump get elected!
That's pretty damning in itself isn't it. A few minor semantic differences and half of America is ready to vote for the living embodiment of the 7 deadly sins? A convicted felon, a rapist, a monster. A hateful, incompetent, malignant joke of a human being. Perhaps this is what we needed. Someone to cut open the thin veneer of civilization and show all of us just how unfit America is. To break the illusion that our neighbours are good people.
And what makes you think we haven't got those still in store? The island of our knowledge and the vast coastline of our discovery is still insignificant compared to the vast sea of our ignorance and the oceans of possibility we have yet to travel.
Whimsy is in short supply, but it's not because the world lacks magic. It's more because of choices made by people who chose to be dead inside, and shaped the world in their image. I'm not asking you to stop demanding more whimsy, far from it. This old grey bearded man is asking you to form a party, accept a quest and perhaps one day lead the charge of an army in pursuit of returning the whimsy to the world.
Do you accept, traveller?
I really don't understand what magic you think we don't have? Chances are you typed this question on a slate of crystal and wire that allows you to see and hear across the planet in nearly real time. There are people who, with the right tools can summon fire at their fingertips, unleash arcs of lightning, draw water from thin air, and make rocks that talk. We are surrounded by forces that both well mapped (at least locally) and are completely incomprehensible to the best of us. While we have not mastered the veil between life and death, we have certainly learned to draw it back.
You are, I fear demonstrating the old adage that familiarity breeds contempt. You're confusing the comprehensibility of the world with mundanity. We are living in a world full of "magic"... It just doesn't look like the magic you read about in old fairy tales, and importantly, it's not shared equally to everyone.
I'll take reincarnation with my mind intact.
How do you know that proprietary code is secure? Open source at least has a collective self interest in finding and patching flaws. There is no such natural mechanisms in software development by giant corporate conglomerates.
It's a reasonable question though. Is it wrong to let people die when you've beaten out of them every reason to live?
This. AI and more generally algorithm dependence is an addiction and watching him struggle with it the past few years has been heartbreaking. Watching him try to bargain and rationalize an objectively misanthropic technology that grew out of a sphere that he was a major role in and did begin as an objectively beautiful attempt at building community and healthy dialogue is very disappointing. I don't hate or judge him. He tried to do something beautiful. He just didn't understand the Faustian bargain he made in the process. The systemic forces turning his work into poison.
I don't judge him for wrestling with it. I'm sad for him. I'm sad for a lot of us. We're all working in a system that's slowly killing us to some degree or another. There is no ethically clean life in a system predicated on greed, gluttony and lies. His optimism may have slipped into delusional, but it beats the crushing cynicism that comes with naked realism.
I don't think that we should lose hope, but the future can't look like this. His Icarus moment shouldn't be the end of his journey. I hope he finds himself and begins planting new seeds even if none of us ever live to see the shade of the trees that grow from them.
Honestly, the US looks like absolute madness for a lot of us. I have friends and family in the US and I am terrified for their safety every day. I don't blame all Americans, obviously, but there's a lot of deeply sick and deeply deranged people down there and it makes me furious watching their bloodbath leak over the border into my country.
History is repeating itself at ever grander scales. It really is a shame that we always end up led by sociopaths (governments and businesses alike) because humans are terrible about misidentifying confidence as competence, only to discover the guy with zero shame has no idea what he's doing and is happily marching us into the fires of hell.
You forgot the part where they will make us pay the sacrifice for them if we press the issue. In blood, without the least bit of shame or scruples.
That's probably fair, but I would also worry that anything coded in Finnish would be trying to find a way to kill me for not respecting its personal space.
Hold on now... No... No actually the birds are bastards too, carry on.
No, if you flip the labels that's Soviets. There's a difference.
No, what you need is something that can facilitate coordination and communication between many moving parts, inspire confidence in the team, create stability, and sell a vision to generate investment, and those functions do not necessarily all need to be one person. You do not "need" a leader, you want a leader because it's easier to conceptualize a relationship with a figurehead. Much like the rump English monarchy, the executive is a vestigial appendage and an artifact of of an aristocratic era of patronage. Locking in a coherent direction does not require a "decider", there are other ways to achieve that. By designing companies to minimize personal liability and accountability, they have also designed themselves out of a useful role.
You ever hear the saying that if you gave an infinite number of monkeys and infinite number of typewriters at least one of them would likely produce the stage play of Hamlet by pure chance from slamming the keys? That's not exactly how this works but it's close. The reality is co-operative power always exceeds what any individual can do, but co-operative power requires co-ordination. Usually these systems start out with well meaning people coordinating groups of people to build a house, raise a barn, build a wall, found a city, organize a farming district, found a nation, start a multinational corporation. Unfortunately the guy co-coordinating the team, tends to get a little full of himself over time, starts taking bigger shares for himself than is truly justifiable, and then their kids do the same thing and the system starts to decay.
Public, private, capitalist, socialist, doesn't matter what the goal or structure of the organization looks like, it always rots from the top. And then it falls apart, we rinse the blood off, and repeat with a slightly different version. This is not new, Plato had a very good description of it in 375 BCE (approximately). And every new attempt we try to build it a little bit better to prevent someone (or their great, great grandson) from eventually deciding they're a demigod and entitled to do whatever horrendous idea pops into their head. We even built systems that kick you out of the top seat every once in a while to see if people still trust you to be in charge. Unfortunately we forgot corporate governance is also governance, creating a wealth class which became modern aristocracy, and yada yada here we are. Turns out our current system is also vulnerable to corruption. So are all the rest we've tried too though, and we have at least 10,000 years of attempts at it. It's a hard problem.
We get better, we still fail, we try again, repeat infinitely. How do we do good things like abolishing slavery, age of consent and minimum wage? We got better. Why are there still evil, greedy, pedos in charge? Well, they didn't start that way, but they did end up a blood sucking fiend, sometimes after generations of rot, sometimes in one lifetime. You can't really turn a vampire back to human though, so we do what we have to do. We'll hopefully find a better solution on the next go around, trying to figure out how to work together to achieve a good life for everyone without the people facilitating the project turning into monsters.
The reality is no one person is qualified to "run" a multinational megacorp. Not a single human being knows enough for this level of complexity, but the only reason any of them can justify the ungodly amount of marginal return they take is to pretend they're super-geniuses while relying on 'consultant' teams to do the actual thinking, and also keep it quiet that they're no more competent than the janitor they're making 1000x the salary of (all in stock options of course, but 1000x nonetheless).
All of this would work better if the "bosses" could accept they aren't demigods, that the domain expertise to make collective decisions is within their existing org charts and they just need to step down off their high horses and remember they are just a cog in a much bigger machine that makes its own decisions with or without their input. They're self-important sales reps, with just enough of a grasp of finance to be dangerous to themselves and others. I'm sure me and my 10 closest colleagues would also be inclined to say we do a billion $ of work every day if we were writing our own bonus agreements. We just wouldn't have the hubris to convince ourselves it's true.
I know, but a different dialect is still one language. We are mutually intelligible to each other. There's less variation between us than there is within the UK, so I don't think we can argue it isn't the same language even if they are sloppier with it.
Shhh... we don't talk about the atrocities... the fact that "Cajun" is just "Acadian" said with a very heavy accent is a happy accident.
Remember the motto. "It's not a war crime the first time."
Disclaimer: I am not a vet, this is not medical advice, seek professional guidance before taking advice from the internet.
Technically, kind of. It's extremely rare, but cats can develop Fel D1 sensitivity, resulting respiratory issues. Usually not to their own antigens, but another cat's. I think technically that would be considered an autoimmune condition if they were allergic to themselves. Probably would present as something similar to pemphigus foliaceus.
It spooked them. Think of them like stunted teenagers who think they'll live forever and have no concept of consequences. Suddenly being faced with the potential consequences of their largess, and the potential for coordinated, distributed, non-hierarchical response, as well as the recognition of their own mortality sent them into a state of existential panic. Their retrenchment and consolidation in response to this panic has only accelerated the damage they're doing. They fully expect a mad-max style social collapse, and want to be sitting on a little slice of Eden when it happens.
The fact that we could avoid all of the necessity for recreating the most horrific dystopias mankind has ever envisioned by them simply... not being so damn greedy seems to have missed them entirely.
Your double-standard with regards to who gets permission to revise the language is duly noted.
That's pretty damning in itself isn't it. A few minor semantic differences and half of America is ready to vote for the living embodiment of the 7 deadly sins? A convicted felon, a rapist, a monster. A hateful, incompetent, malignant joke of a human being. Perhaps this is what we needed. Someone to cut open the thin veneer of civilization and show all of us just how unfit America is. To break the illusion that our neighbours are good people.