No offense, but you are just aren't that well read if you are mentioning Godel, Escher, Bach as proof of how much you are going to learn.
This post is irony at a base level.
You ultimately have to sift through a lot of books to get past popular books like Godel, Escher, Bach and on to something like Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience.
I gain the most by reading books from about 1920 to about 1979.
What I don't bother reading anymore is a non-fiction, New York Times bestseller that always has the form of something like "Robustness - The new science of blah blah blah".
There is always a better book on the topic that goes much deeper and that form is the dumb version meant to sell books.
I love books and audiobooks and I experience absolutely no difference between the two but that is contingent on liking the voice actor's voice.
This year I have really moved to listening to all books read by the synthetic af_heart model. I love that voice so much. #1 Robertson Dean, #2 af_heart.
I understand what you mean but there is a depth of thought that is hard to capture outside a book.
The main problem is that so many books are really just essays or papers that get stretched to 300 pages because that is what the publisher wants. A great book I don't think has this problem.
I don't see a separation though between books, LLMs, papers and audiobooks. I would add youtube lectures in there too. They are all valued friends in learning to me.
China is constrained on this by near certain mutually assured economic destruction.
Even the food supply in China would basically be destroyed unless you believe that the population is going to just go back to a diet of largely rice with meat being a luxury.
20-30k ballistic missiles at Taiwan would cause a global depression that dwarfs the great depression. There would be almost no way the CCP survive this. That is why this subject is mostly people talking nonsense.
Reunification has to happen politically, persuasively, over time and without firing a shot.
I mean it is the company that changed names to "Meta"verse, have this incredible piece of technology in the Quest but then didn't bother to do almost anything inside the actual "Meta"verse that they changed the company name to.
I can see my Quest 3 on the shelf next to me. Something I really love but don't put on much because it is like entering into a giant virtual empty park with a couple of pieces of half finished play ground equipment.
Pointless AI image generation on Instagram seems completely on brand to me.
I love my parents but I don't think either of them have read a book in 50+ years now.
My mother kept a type of year book that each year I would say what I wanted to be when I grow up. I think in 5th grade I said physicist.
You know how they nurtured this curiosity? They did nothing. I don't think either of them even know what a physicist is beyond something to do with science.
I think in 6th grade I wanted a microscope that I eventually got but had no guidance on what to do , what to look at. I don't think I even knew there was this concept of "biology".
A huge number of kids have this same experience as I did right now.
What is even worse is life is ultimately a path dependent process with a huge part of the outcome based on the deterministic chaos of initial starting conditions.
No shit I would rather have my father be a particle physicist and my mother a librarian with a passion for reading non-fiction to kids.
My parents did the best they could but they are not intellectuals in the slightest and neither is the average person now. Claude would have been a god send to me in 5th grade.
This post is irony at a base level.
You ultimately have to sift through a lot of books to get past popular books like Godel, Escher, Bach and on to something like Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience.