A song of ice and fire, or possibly its adaptation Game of Thrones.
There is a character named Arya who goes to assassin school where they brain wash students to become " no one". In the books this grant the ability to pretend to be someone else, and with some magic they can also change their looks. In the TV series it's that plus Kung Fu fighting. The books were better (Hollywood can't compete with the power of your imagination)
I really like her version of the "first we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin"-song.
I think when most people say a culture product was good, they mean that they were entertained. I found it entertaining way back when. Looking back at it now, I'm not sure why. It is objectively awful.
Thinking about it, I think it's a combination of:
I also think stories happens to a very large part in the mind of the reader/listener/watcher/player. So the story as perceived by me of ten years ago, or sailor's coworker, doesn't have to have much connection with what was actually written. That is also what I have noticed trying to re-read some of the sci-fi I read as a kid. The stories I remembered was much better than the ones in the books.
I am not an expert, but I did take a couple of semesters of history, and I find him rather annoying.
Somebody who should have been infuriated was Manuel Eisner, who wrote the paper Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime. It's a really good paper, and I have seen Pinker misquote it, so he can't claim ignorance.
Eisner's argument, which I find persuasive, is that it was not the state power increase as such that decreased private violence. Because if that was the case, southern Europe wouldn't have lagged as much as it did. Rather it was the transformation of the nobility from personally very violent knights and lords, to officers and bosses who wields state violence. And that happened at different times, matching the decline in private violence. With the nobility no longer needing personal violence, it goes down. Quite different from Pinker's take.
And then there is the question of where that state capacity for violence was wielded. I don't think Pinker includes Queen Victoria in his rouge gallery, yet the famines in India killed about as many as the ones in the Soviet Union and Communist China, and those are usually counted as state violence.
On the rise and fall of violent crime in the west during the 70ies and 80ies, there has been many candidates, but most fall away because they can't explain it both in western Europe and the US. One good candidate is leaded gasoline leading to lead poisoned babies growing up and becoming more violent in the crucial young adult age. It matches, but I haven't seen any proper attempts to really test it, by for example comparing cities to the countryside.
A Danish ad company made a Google interface that they called "impersonal me" which searched Google with no personalisation. And not only was it better than Google search, it found things that normal Google just didn't show. In particular old comments I had written and lost track of. In the impersonal search they were easily found, in the normal search they weren't way down on the list, they weren't in the list at all.
Fascinatingly bad.
Sounds like something autocomplete would make up. Are we sure that is a real person this time?
Machine made t-shirt, with extra fingers.
Besides, isn't most clothes just made by poor people in poor conditions instead of being made with machines? Just like AI.
I don't have a dog in the race and I always think the bubbles will burst before they do. But with that caveat, shouldn't the interest rates be a factor?
My reasoning is that part of a bubble is that as long as line goes up there are assets which can be used for collateral for loans for new money to push the line up. With a low interest rate the new money is cheaper, with high interest it's more expensive. So all else equal, the boom should burst quicker with higher interest rates.
From what I have read, it can be a support as long as:
Of course, it cannot be better than the best radiologists around. So the question is if it is worth it, compared with for example hire more staff.
Good article. Captures the bubble growth and the lack of profit growth, with lots of examples. And that the capacity growth of AI is limited by non AI works, so no growth into functionality.
Good one to hand to people who needs to understand the nature of the bubble (and that it is a bubble).
The Golem and The Golem at large are two excellent little books about how science and technology actually works. History of science, so heavy on examples (as the historical subjects tend to be) and light on theory. Several examples of what today would be pseudo science but was treated seriously at its time, because they didn't know what we consider basic knowledge (and you can't get it from first principle...)
Good for anyone interested in science or technology, but perhaps particularly useful for the cultists (if they can be persuaded).
If you wait some time the book series will be done. Any decade now...
And then when you have waited, read the books and seen the tv show, this 3 minute youtube will be hilarious.