I'm rooting for this general class of technology as a platform for sensory augmentation for the blind. I don't know exactly what sonic encoding of spatial information is exactly ideal — I suspect it's something echo-like, only slowed-down — but it's going to be a hell of a lot easier to develop it and support it on commodity hardware. Please no Meta login, though.
> He argued that Modern Chinese has become “lazy” by forgetting how to use its own verbs. instead of “researching” (研究, yanjiu), speakers “conduct research” (进行研究, jinxing yanjiu)
Flash created a medium. The particular genius of the authoring tool gave rise to a whole style of animation and game and thing-in-between that only existed in its time and could have only been created with the tool at hand. Software should aspire to this.
My word count has hovered around 100k for most of my three years of writing and revising. This does sometimes run up against limits on Claude (or recently, with Opus 4.5, compaction) but in the past the whole thing has fit just fine as a plain text file.
Yes. I am a novelist and I noticed a step change in what was possible here around Claude Sonnet 3.7 in terms of being able to analyze my own unpublished work for theme, implicit motivations, subtext, etc -- without having any pre-digested analysis of the work in its training data.
Yes, it is. And yes, except that it wasn't. A SWF is about building common wealth inside the systems that finance capital built (in the same way that the 401k replaced the pension) rather than turning back the clock on them. How you acquire those assets can vary wildly:
- Maybe you just decide to invest some public money
- Maybe you have some natural resources that are collective-by-default (minerals wealth on public land)
- Maybe there's a bailout of an industry that is financially broken but has become too big to fail cough and the government presses its leverage
- Maybe a president just wakes up and decides that he wants the government to own 10% of Intel, and makes that deal happen on favorable terms.
This sounds a lot like a sovereign wealth fund. The government obtains fractional ownership over large enterprises (this can happen through market mechanisms or populist strongarming — choose your own adventure) and pours the profits on these investments into the social safety net or even citizens' dividends.
For this to work at scale domestically, the fund would need to be a double-digit percentage of the market cap of the entire US economy. It would be a pretty drastic departure from the way we do things now. There would be downsides: market distortions and fraud and capital flight.
But in my mind it would be a solution to the problem of wealth pooling up in the AI economy, and probably also a balm for the "pyramid scheme" aspect of Social Security which captures economic growth through payroll taxes (more people making more money, year on year) in a century where we expect the national population to peak and decline.
Pick your poison, I guess, but I want to see more discussion of this idea in the Overton window.
I would like a non-native speaker to weigh in, but I gloss it as "there are ONLY a few and this is ONE OF them" and have never found that confusing or contradictory.
It's a stereotype of his political opponents as adrift in selfishness, hedonism, and "gender stuff".
When you find your thought patterns flowing through tropes this way it is a good sign to consider logging off for a long while, as the author is doing. I wish him peace and perspective.
On one hand, I wonder if a gradual transition would work. Spend enough time over the years mirroring your conscious patterns onto a computational substrate, and they might get used to the lay of the land, the loss of old senses and the appearance of new ones. There might not be an ultimate "stepping in", but something like you might be able to outlive you, on a substrate that it feels happy and comfortable on.
On the other hand, the idea of "simulating your consciousness" raises questions beyond just cognition or personality. A mechanistically perfect simulation of your brain might not be conscious at all. Spooky stuff.