Sapere Aude
Month: February 2012
those event horizons are coming on fast these days.
If it works as promised, the MinIon is so vastly better than existing machines that the comparison is hard to make. biological technologies are improving at exceptional paces, leaving Moore’s Law behind. In fact, we should expect biology to move much faster than semiconductors.
minecraft is an ok game, i guess.
There is a script in my life that repeats itself over and over again: I tell someone, a friend, colleague, family member, that I don’t want to have kids and with rare exception, I hear the following, “Oh no, you have to have kids, you’d be a great father! You’re just saying that now, but you’ll change your mind.”
every childfree person gets the sort of proselytizing described in this article by countless assholes.
i have been looking for a great video game to play for some time. there were several problems:
i won’t buy a dedicated gaming rig, be it a PC or a console
i don’t have the patience to learn the controls enough to stop running into walls
i don’t have the time to set aside for a really serious effort like WoW
i am very quickly bored by running around and shoot at things games
i am interested in games because i understand that they are one of the greatest cultural artifacts of our time, and have profound impacts.
turns out there is a solution for me: playthroughs! enjoy all the cinematic suspense and the story arc of a game without any of the work. i found myself skipping some slow moving parts. still, the whole thing is an epic 30h long.
the startups mentioned in this piece are giving me hope that finance can move from a model where scammy idiots play with your money while you get to wait in line every saturday at their temples of mediocrity to perform banal transactions, to one where algorithms provide you with advice and opportunity.
on the occasion of the nascar idiocy going on tonight
In September 2009, after admitting to my parents that I was atheist, I was abruptly woken in the middle of the night by 2 strange men who subsequently threw me in a van and drove me 200 mi. to a facility that I would later find out serves the sole purpose of eliminating free thinking adolescents.
more mundane singularity happenings:
There are whole species of other bots that infest the Amazon Marketplace, pretending to have used copies of books, fighting epic price wars no one ever sees. So with “Turing Test” we have a delightful futuristic absurdity: a computer program, pretending to be human, hawking a book about computers pretending to be human, while other computer programs pretend to have used copies of it. A book that was never actually written, much less printed and read.
this kind of work could offer a meaningful employment to the masses obsoleted by technology. most white collar jobs aren’t that hard to automate and will be soon, so the question has always been, what do you do when only 5% of the population has a job? creating artisanal products and getting really good at it, like the japanese, would fill the week with something interesting to do, and your local community would appreciate the results.
The transition to an increasingly craft-centered economy will not be without agony. Woehrle and Premo succeeded because both had access to investors and the innate ability to segue from the salaried confines of corporate life to a much riskier, entrepreneurial world. A craft economy is far less stable: those who succeed this year may fail the next, as their once-unique products become commodities made cheaply overseas. Still, this new world seems, to some extent, inevitable. Instead of rolling our eyes at self-conscious Brooklyn hipsters pickling everything in sight, we might look to them as guides to the future of the American economy. Just don’t tell them that. It would break their hearts to be called model 21st-century capitalists.
background reading:
Are we seeing the beginning of the end of work?
What will the economy of the future look like?
Gregor J. Rothfuss 