Tag: books

A toaster from scratch

considering it took this writer 9 months to make a toaster from scratch, the maker movement has very far to go. i am a 3d printing fanboy as much as anyone, but really the state of the art allows little beyond toys / frivolous things. actually useful things remain out of reach, probably because of their inherent complexity.

Hello, my name is Thomas Thwaites, and I have made a toaster.” So begins The Toaster Project, the author’s 9-month-long journey from his local appliance store to remote mines in the UK to his mother’s backyard, where he creates a crude foundry. Along the way, he learns that an ordinary toaster is made up of 404 separate parts, that the best way to smelt metal at home is by using a method found in a fifteenth-century treatise, and that plastic is almost impossible to make from scratch.

Cutting out publishers

publishers and tv networks are some of those middlemen we no longer need.

Book publishers should be scared. After multiple major publishers played hardball with Amazon over the price of eBooks in the Kindle store, Amazon could very well woo away big name writers with promises of big digital sales and a huge marketing push through the Kindle. That could also translate into lower prices for books for consumers, given there will be less mouths to feed if they were to cut out the middleman.

Bullshit jobs

The paradox is this. A job seeker is looking for a well-defined job. But the trend seems to be that if a job can be defined, it can be automated or outsourced. The marginal product of people who need well-defined jobs is declining. The marginal product of people who can thrive in less structured environments is increasing.

See also zero marginal product workers what fraction of the economy is pretend work, appearing to be busy?
2013-08-20: On the predicament of ZMP (0 marginal product) workers:

Huge swathes of people spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul.

2014-11-21: When the revolution comes, this will be very useful to smoke out people.
2018-06-07: A New Yorker take

Bullshit, like paper waste, accumulates in offices with the inevitability of February snow. Justification reports: What are these? Nobody knows. And yet they pile up around you, Xerox-warmed, to be not-read. Best-practices documents? Anybody’s guess, really, including their authors’. Some people thought that digitization would banish this nonsense. Those people were wrong. Now, all day, you get e-mails about “consumer intimacy” (oh, boy); “all hands” (whose hands?); and the new expense-reporting software, which requires that all receipts be mounted on paper, scanned, and uploaded to a server that rejects them, since you failed to pre-file the crucial post-travel form. If you’re lucky, bullshit of this genre consumes only a few hours of your normal workweek. If you’re among the millions of less fortunate Americans, it is the basis of your entire career.

2018-09-20: Scott Alexander looks into the topic

I write a note saying: To whom it may concern: I am a psychiatrist treating Mr. Smith. He tells me that he has chronic back pain (“lumbago”), and asks to be allowed to bring in his own chair to work. Yours, Dr. Alexander It’s too soon to have a good sample size. But it seems to usually work. I think it works because there is nobody at Mr. Smith’s workplace – maybe nobody in the entire world – who’s really invested in preventing Mr. Smith from bringing a chair into work. Someone wrote up a procedure for employees using special chairs, so that they’re not the sort of cowboys who make decisions without procedures. Someone else feels like they have to enforce it, so that they’re not the sort of rebel who flouts procedures. But nobody cares.

2021-03-06: It’s surprising that it took so long to automate extremely low value work like copying & pasting, and somehow requiring a college degree:

they do the dull-but-critical tasks that someone named Phil in Accounting used to do: reconciling bank statements, approving expense reports, reviewing tax forms. […] She’d known that her job was straightforward and repetitive, making it low-hanging fruit for automation. The experience was a wake-up call. She had a college degree and was early in her career.

2023-01-17: The race between bullshit jobs and automation

We escaped the original Malthusian trap with the Industrial Revolution, expanding capacity faster than the population could grow. A sufficient lead altered underlying conditions to the point where we should worry more about declining population than rising population in most places.

Consider the same scenario for a potential AI Revolution via GPT-4.

Presume GPT-4 allows partial or complete automation of a large percentage of existing bullshit jobs. What happens?

My model says this depends on the speed of adaptation.

Nano futures

it has been 25! years since engines of creation. surprisingly little has happened in the meantime, but i am still looking forward to the next book by eric drexler.

Radical Abundance will integrate and extend several themes that I’ve touched on in Metamodern, but will go much further. The topics include:

  • The nature of science and engineering, and the prospects for a deep transformation in the material basis of civilization.
  • Why all of this is surprisingly understandable.
  • A personal narrative of the emergence of the molecular nanotechnology concept and the turbulent history of progress and politics that followed
  • The quiet rise of macromolecular nanotechnologies, their power, and the rapidly advancing state of the art
  • Incremental paths toward advanced nanotechnologies, the inherent accelerators, and the institutional challenges
  • The technologies of radical abundance, what they are, and what they will enable
  • Disruptive solutions for problems of economic development, energy, resource depletion, and the environment
  • Potential pitfalls in competitive national strategies; shared interests in risk reduction and cooperative transition management
  • Steps toward changing the conversation about the future

Bayes History

a historical account of the bayes theorem and how it changed the world. haven’t read it yet but it sounds worthwhile.

Bayes’ rule appears to be a straightforward, 1-line theorem: by updating our initial beliefs with objective new information, we get a new and improved belief. To its adherents, it is an elegant statement about learning from experience. To its opponents, it is subjectivity run amok.

In the first-ever account of Bayes’ rule for general readers, Sharon Bertsch McGrayne explores this controversial theorem and the human obsessions surrounding it. She traces its discovery by an amateur mathematician in the 1740s through its development into its modern form. She reveals why respected statisticians rendered it professionally taboo for 150 years—at the same time that practitioners relied on it to solve crises involving great uncertainty and scanty information, even breaking Germany’s Enigma code during World War II, and explains how the advent of off-the-shelf computer technology in the 1980s proved to be a game-changer. Today, Bayes’ rule is used everywhere from DNA de-coding to Homeland Security.

Locus Award winners

Science Fiction Novel
WINNER: Blackout/All Clear, Connie Willis
Surface Detail, Iain M. Banks
Cryoburn, Lois McMaster Bujold
Zero History, William Gibson
The Dervish House, Ian McDonald

Fantasy Novel
WINNER: Kraken, China Miéville
Under Heaven, Guy Gavriel Kay
Who Fears Death, Nnedi Okorafor
The Fuller Memorandum, Charles Stross
The Sorcerer’s House, Gene Wolfe

Molla Nasreddin

very courageous satire from central asia, a century ago.

Molla Nasreddin was revolutionary in many ways. In an era and a region where free speech wasn’t particularly encouraged, its authors boldly satirized politics, religion, colonialism, Westernization, and modernization, education (or lack thereof), and the oppression of women (Azerbaijan was surprisingly progressive on women’s issues at the time, granting women the right to vote in 1919—1 year before the United States). And with the majority of the population at the time illiterate, the magazine was a careful and clever blend of illustrations and text. And the text itself might be the most interesting of all: it was written in Azeri Turkish, rather than Russian, the language of their colonizers. The book’s editors had the unenviable task of sorting out the text: the Azeri alphabet, written with Arabic characters for nearly a millennium, was Latinized by Lenin in 1928, Cyrillicized by Stalin 10 years later, and returned to Latin following the fall of the Soviet Union.

1491

lots of lost history there

Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them. The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city. Mexican cultures created corn in a specialized breeding process that it has been called man’s first feat of genetic engineering. Indeed, Indians were not living lightly on the land but were landscaping and manipulating their world in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. Challenging and surprising, this a transformative new look at a rich and fascinating world we only thought we knew.

2022-11-23: Do We Have the History of Native Americans Backward?

Only in the late 17th century did the French and the English begin to push into the heartland, engaging complex configurations of Indigenous power in contending for control of the Great Lakes and the Ohio River Valley. Yet even then colonial gains were precarious and provisional. By the mid-18th century, Indian rebellions had rolled back European incursions; the Spanish, the French, and the English clung mainly to the coasts and rivers. The vast interior of the continent was largely unknown to them, and the tidy lines of the 13 colonies were more aspirational than actual.

2023-09-08: Nice visualization

The year is 1518. Mexico-Tenochtitlan, once an unassuming settlement in the middle of Lake Texcoco, now a bustling metropolis. It is the capital of an empire ruling over, and receiving tribute from, more than 5 million people. Tenochtitlan is home to 200.000 farmers, artisans, merchants, soldiers, priests and aristocrats. At this time, it is one of the largest cities in the world.

Today, we call this city Ciudad de Mexico – Mexico City.

Not much is left of the old Aztec – or Mexica – capital Tenochtitlan. What did this city, raised from the lake bed by hand, look like? Using historical and archeological sources, and the expertise of many, I have tried to faithfully bring this iconic city to life.