Public Books

From your comments I feel like you gotta be familiar with Kim Stanley Robinson's novel SF _Red Mars_ (if not you'd like it), but here's how he tries to make you feel better about your NASA budgetted job, while agreeing with your basic analysis on things like terraforming and many other things you've said (the plot of his earlier novel notwithstanding, he's partially doing penance for it).

> However, even if slower, terraforming Mars remains a great long-term goal; but long-term meaning like ten thousand years. Which means we have to get our relationship to our own planet in order for anything interesting to happen on Mars…

> The main project for civilization now is creating a sustainable way of life here on Earth. That’s the necessary first step; anything beyond would rely on that succeeding, so exploring space is less important now. That said, space science is an earth science. What we learn around the solar system can often illuminate the project we have here of keeping this planet’s biosphere healthy. So I like the space program, and feel it is not funded out of proportion to its importance. Robotic missions are already doing a lot of what we need done, but humans are better at many things than robots, and it’s more exciting to see humans on the other planets than it is to see robots. So, on balance, I’d like to see more investment in space science and less in areas like weaponry. Our taxpayer bailout of the banker gamblers who lost their bets in 2008 cost us about ten…

I don't have a "problem" with AI being used in this fashion. That being said, this article (and others on the blog) sound quite generic. They're characterized by the staccato, "I wanted this. Then this. Also this" sentence structure and headings like "The Problem" and "What it Does" etc.

The thing about an editor is that if you're not careful, your voice is lost. That's fine if the publication you're writing for has a distinctive voice or you have a specific style in mind; this article [1] describes the "New Yorker" voice as an example:

>The New Yorker sort of voice—or rather, the New Yorker voice I was using—is one that sounds on top, or ahead, of the material under discussion. It is a voice of intelligent curiosity; it implies that the writer has synthesized a great deal of information; it confidently takes readers by the hand, introduces them to surprising characters, recounts dramatic scenes, and leads them through key ideas and issues. The voice narrates the material in the first-person and describes the researcher conducting the research, encountering people, reacting to situations, thinking thoughts. The voice is smart-sounding. It is an effective voice for a lot of long-form journalism...

The "default" LLM voice isn't one that I find particularly appealing. For lack of a better term, it has these "zingers" every third or fourth sentence that, if you were writing a spammy piece, would be bolded/italicized. It also reads like the LLM has no faith in the reader's…

Reminds me of a section in The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt:

I said What I mean is, though I believe the [Rosetta] Stone was originally a rather pompous thing to erect, it was a gift to posterity. Being written in hieroglyphics, demotic and Greek, it only required that one language survive for all to be accessible. Probably one day English will be a much-studied dead language; we should use this fact to preserve other languages to posterity.

You could have Homer with translation and marginal notes on vocabulary and grammar, so that if that single book happened to be dug up in 2,000 years or so the people of the day would be able to read Homer, or better yet, we could disseminate the text as widely as possible to give it the best possible chance of survival.

What we should do, I said, is have legislation so that every book published was obliged to have, say, a page of Sophocles or Homer in the original with appropriate marginalia bound into the binding, so that even if you bought an airport novel if your plane crashed you would have something to reread on the desert island.

More on the book:

https://www.publicbooks.org/b-sides-helen-dewitts-the-last-samurai/

Not really. Putin's favourite game/sport is judo, not chess. Judo is a game of opportunity and technique: one takes advantage of their opponent's weakness or distraction to attack. The rest is continous defense and harassement to get your opponent distracted and create opportunities for attack.

He doesn't think in terms of Biden or Trump, but in terms of opportunity. You should really think of Russia as a modern feudal state where Putin shares the country's resources with the oligarchs. The only difference is that it isn't farmland, but oil and gas. He doesn't need to appease them. He can run a show trial, have them shot on a bridge, poison them, just like he did with Khodorkovsky, Litvinenko, Nemtsov, Skripal, Navalny and others.

Vladimir Sorokin once said that the basis of modern Russia was set by Ivan the Terrible.

https://www.publicbooks.org/dress-up-games-with-russian-history/

One should read post/modern Russian literature in order to understand modern Russia. It's also very good. I love Russian literature.

Both this article and the non-tech companion article [1] skip over talking about why the author wants privacy. The failure to outline her objections makes the countermeasures seem untethered from any motivation; I think that is why so many comments here react negatively to the valuable anti-surveillance work she's doing here.

This could be a issue by issue analysis. For example: "I don't want targeted ads -> prevent collecting targeting data -> use a privacy credit card". This is the easiest way to argue for privacy and can cover a lot of ground, however I worry it's too limited. This gives us the world of the "opt out" button which can fix a specific issue but somehow still leaves a really nasty taste about the surveillance world we are in.

I'd love to see more writers make on-the-principle arguments for privacy. This author clearly has that depth of feeling so it's a real missed chance.

[1] https://www.publicbooks.org/data-free-disney/

For convenience, here are the RSS/Atom feeds for some of the publications mentioned in this thread:

Quanta
https://api.quantamagazine.org/feed/

Noema Magazine
https://www.noemamag.com/feed/

Aeon
https://aeon.co/feed

Nautilus
https://nautil.us/feed/

The Point Magazine
https://thepointmag.com/feed/

Asterisk Magazine
https://asteriskmag.com/feed

Symmetry Magazine
https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/feed

n+1 Magazine
https://www.nplusonemag.com/feed/

Harpers Magazine
https://harpers.org/feed/

Low←Tech Magazine
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/feeds/all-en.atom.xml

Public Books Magazine
http://www.publicbooks.org/feed

The New Atlantis
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/feed