A furry living in Berlin
Ben (Berlin)
Karma: 113
Wittgenstein was wrong
This circle can be squared:
Those who walk away from Olemas, are all those who make this exact mistake, those whose minds reject the possibility that it might be a real utopia, those who must believe there is a suffering child to balance out the good.
(When discussions like this come up, I tend to go with the original author, so in this case Le Guin, but this alternative reading seems like at least a possibility?)
Ben (Berlin)’s Shortform
New year system suggested at micro-post-LWCW meet-up:
Ante-Covid/Dopo-Covid, or AC/DC for short, with the zero point in Dec 2019.
Plus points:
+ Everyone can agree that this happened, and wasn’t just religious fan-fiction taken too seriously
+ Everyone can agree when this happened, not arguing about which random astronomical event was mistaken for a star or which of the various Kings Herod was around for the events
+ Has a year zero
+ Doesn’t mix up two different languages like AD/BC does
+ Alphabetical order: AC comes before DC, instead of the silly inverted order of putting BC before AD
+ Obvious choice for music in New Year celebrations
+ Saves space by allowing return to 2-digit years
Minus points:
- No longer has all of the first four letters of the Latin alphabet
- Making dec-ember the first month is even weirder than it being the twelfth
[Mood: silly]
Aye.
The one I notice the most is people saying “cows will still have to be milked”, without having realised automatic milking machines arrived in the early 90s.
Cross-posted from my blog on github: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2025/06/22-13.21.36.html
“It isn’t magic”
Related anecdote:
In my 20s, but not before or since, I noticed sometimes experiencing an altered state if I was awake too long — not reliably when awake too long, but only when.
It wasn’t tiredness, at least not as I otherwise experience it, but rather it was as if everything ceased to be real and me part of that reality, that there was no longer a “me” watching the Cartesian theatre of the mind, that the Cartesian theatre was playing to an empty house. I was able to notice this and comment on it to others while in this state, and obviously form memories.
And then I was back to normal in the morning.
(…Assuming free markets, and rule of law, and AGI not taking over and wiping out humanity, and so on. I think those are highly dubious assumptions, but let’s not get into that here!)
Assuming all is correct, isn’t the answer therefore: “at least one of these assumptions must be false”?
(Personally I have long suspected that free markets are a gross oversimplification, but I’m not an economist; and even if I was, with those three options I’ve got reason to wish for that specific option)
I wish I’d thought of that with my mother’s dementia; I noticed a similar effect on the scale of minutes (hers was already quite severe by the time of the diagnosis), but I didn’t plan anything and I didn’t take enough notes at the time, so all I have for this is the anecdote.
Yes, but “the foreseeable future” is now quite short thanks to the geopolitics.
In normal times, the EU would not be even attempting “digital sovereignty”, and while I can’t even guess how effective the present attempts will be, the foreseeable future in this regard is now perhaps 2-3 years. This is also in response to sanctions being used by the US directly against EU government figures and ICC judges.
On 2+ year timescales, the location of any current hardware doesn’t matter, what does matter is where the new hardware gets made and installed. I believe (not certain) that NVIDIA only designs in the US, but manufacturing is (all? Mostly?) outsourced. There is a lot of room for US foot-guns here.
That said, I’m not sure the EU even wants an AI data centre. There does seem to be quite a bit of skepticism of the whole thing, and even if there wasn’t, the basic cloud compute dependencies have to be solved before that. And by “have to”, I mean my understanding is the EU dependency on US cloud compute is seen as a potential existential threat to the EU given Trump’s behaviour, compared to that present AI is merely “nice to have” (and present is what matters given the skepticism).