I am surely not alone in having family over the weekend hitting me up asking "should I be worried about extinction?" As a response, I have found that my anti-Doomer talk from @monktoberfest.com 2023 (three very long years ago!) remains current and accessible:
no, I don't think AI will keep me from hitting any of these anniversaries as a working writer, unless it triggers the apocalypse, in which case we have other problems.
Rather than thinking of this set of preferences as incoherent, or merely the expression of a sectional petty bourgeois interest, it makes more sense, surely, to view it as a coherent set of anti-systemic views.
Humans are humans are are shockingly simple, you know, uh, if you think about the experience you have with somebody that's just trying to cross the street, if, uh, you know, if the light doesn't turn, you know, doesn't say they can walk fast enough, they'll just keep hitting that button. That's the same experience they have on the internet.
the most powerful actors for whom this is the biggest concern if these guard rails or the constitution or whatever is getting in the way that will just get steamrolled and so the constitution will only be you know hitting the everyday man rather than hitting governments.
common failure mode is picking the tech that gives you the fastest early ramp, riding that steep curve, feeling like you're winning, projecting that, you know, steep slope into the future and feeling like the sky is the limit, and then hitting the plateau, and discovering that the technology path that you picked actually flattens out way before the performance that is required by your product.
It surely does not “produce” one quarter of world culture or intellectual activity (if the latter is defined as influential books, of fiction and non-fiction, politics, history; films, plastic arts, music, theater etc.)
If you accomplished everything you set out to accomplish, people, you know, you're sandbagging. you're not trying hard enough. You're not risking enough. You didn't learn anything over the course of the six months.
The deal was always simple: search engines had permission to crawl sites because they were going to be sending users to those sites. If they're hitting your site half a million times for every one user they send to your site, all they're giving you is higher costs.
And a thousand experiments by itself, like if you just did that, but you didn't learn, you didn't make an impact, and that's kind of a waste of time, right? The whole point of setting a goal is that you can have conversations about what would need to be true to actually hit that goal.
Perhaps that Goldman makes, at times, too strong a case for the importune of the Nomonhan war, but the conflict surely deserves much more that the oblivion into which it seems to have been consigned by political historians.
His thoughts on human psychology and the way he crafted his stories are why I liked this book. I have to admit, there is a lot in it that I need to absorb. I'll surely be re-reading this one sometime soon. It's one of those books that one ought to read multiple times in life because I'm certain that every time we read it, it will offer something new.
This is my list of the 10 best nonfiction books. These are the pillar books that have helped shape my thinking and approach to life. In my opinion, these are 10 nonfiction books everyone should read.
Adam Rutherford and Hannah Fry, The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything – just delightful, wide-ranging stuff from the surely best science-communication double-act in the world. The perfect gift for the nerd in your life.
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