The optimist’s guide to the robot apocalypse.
Our generation has inherited more opportunities to transform the world than any other. That’s a cause for optimism, but only if we’re mindful of our choices.
Der Kohl und die RAF, das Rotkäppchen und der böse Sarazzin, oh my…
Die Treuhand, verständlich erklärt.
Wir bezahlen alles, also bestimmen wir alles.
Tourism Is Eating the World.
The inevitable rise of congestion pricing will be bad news for the emerging global middle class. It means that the dream of cheap globetrotting will never be for everyone -- at least, not if you want to go to famous places.
For a short amount of time I pondered the idea whether a more random method channelling tourists might be a better alternative – think of a lottery for those popular, famous or at least overcrowded places. But even if it would work in a usable, easy and transparent way, the systemic condition most likely would lead to a similar outcome: winning lots would be sold to the best bidder on a side / black market, a service industry managing the lottery participation for those who can afford would arise etc. Thus, the general problem of making bad things more expensive and thus only allowing the wealthy to “enjoy” them is deeply rooted in our cultural, political and societal framework named capitalism.
What the Superhuman Controversy Reveals About the Shifting Ethics of Software.
For years, Silicon Valley benefitted from tech reporting that was either breathless and laudatory or simply indifferent. Since the 2016 election, though, tech coverage has grown more skeptical, investigative, and serious—a shift from treating Silicon Valley as a novelty to seeing it as the power center it has become. The industry has been struggling to adjust to being the center of attention on outsiders’ terms.
some comics about guns.
The Serendipity Engine works just like an internal combustion engine and, like with a high performance muscle car, you need to feed it with the right kind of propellant.
In this analogy, the fuel is made of different activities, skills, and conversations. In my case I select them so that they are deliberately out of or tangential to my current professional domain. The engine also requires maintenance and fine tuning via iterations and changes to the activities or skills I become involved with.
Via kottke.org.
Mozilla SSL Configuration Generator.
Why are many humans so afraid of self-replicating, sentient robots, you ask? Well, here is my reply: humans pretty well know what a self-replicating, sentient being is capable of.
Is this tweet recursive? t.co
— Escher Bot (@mauritscorneIis) May 1, 2018
Our ideas about what early movies looked like are all wrong.
In particular, early 68mm film, which was less practical than 35mm film and thus used less frequently, delivered startlingly lifelike impressions of distant realities to early moviegoers.