Hacker News Reader

Comment by vessenes | Hacker News Reader

Man, Quanta magazine is a gift. I love that there is a publication with a significantly higher reading level assumed than most pop science content, but not written for industry insiders, it’s just great.

I pitched them a paper magazine a few years ago, because I wish I could leave these around for my kids to flip through, but no joy yet..

View on HN

You now mentioned something important: older generations have left behind journals, magazines, books, all kinds of documents that represent their generation. When our generation is gone, there will be very little physical traces left. Someone will have to search archive.org or similar to find anything.

It's the function of historians to do the archeology and summarise for a broader audience.

It's the function of historians to do the archeology and summarise for a broader audience

Those summaries will be written in a similarly ephemeral format. A book in a library can sit there and be rediscovered in a hundred years. A scroll or an engraving in a thousand. But we create things that have evaporated in a mere decade.

I’ve been thinking of backing up a few dozen megabytes of my most important files in like QR codes or maybe something simpler like dual-parity data matrix with instructions in plain text and printed out FORTRAN code. Printed on long lived (waterproof?) paper with a laserjet. Along with plain text printouts of text and pictures.

Even thought of etching that on stainless plates or something.

Could be scanned with a smartphone or even decoded by hand (include an ASCII lookup table).

Maybe, but most people won’t have the equivalent of boxes in the attic containing their or their family memorabilia

We may be a lot like the much older generations that left behind only a handful of prized possessions.

I have a wedding photograph printed on non-biodegradable material (not intentionally for preservation, it's decorative), and perhaps that will eventually be the only tangible evidence of me in the same way that wedding photographs are all I've seen of some relatives born before 1900.

How many generations are even left before we don't have anymore humans?

I'd wager we're 20 - 30 years out from regenerative cloning, and 50 - 75 out from reproductive cloning. We could start that process today if we weren't so squeamish.

ML is coming to a head, and we'll potentially have machines that outclass us in basic tasks in 25 - 50 years. Within 200, I'd say the human experiment is at an end.

What then? Either we evolve along with our machines, we become one with the machines, or the machines take over.

We're living in the last stages of the human species right now, and not many people think to contemplate that and integrate it into their worldview.

Climate, space exploration, etc. is all incredibly human-centric. Fighting for resources, defining legacies, ... I mean, it's what we as humans do. One day it'll just suddenly end, and it's probably only a handful of generations until the pieces fall into place.

> ML is coming to a head, and we'll potentially have machines that outclass us in basic tasks in 25 - 50 years.

Just this line makes me skeptical of the rest of your thinking as well... what I've seen of ML application leaves me strongly convinced that every usage of ML will need human supervision and override control. Every case of "can't reach a human to get this corrected" is a call for boycotting / suing to force a human override channel for any automated system.

The "human experiment" is not an experiment, it is the fundamental reality, and no automation will ever truly replace human thoughts plus emotions plus inherent irrational priorities / preferences / biases.

Maybe, but one of the things that frustrates me is that I know picked up a lot of things because of the books my dad had on the shelves for example. Of course he showed me many of them, but I discovered many more myself because they were there in front of me.

My Kindle books etc. are not visible to my son in the same way. Spatial, in your face, visibility matters in transferring culture.

But you may be slightly sad that a newer generation, growing with shelves full of books right in front of their eyes, is never seen picking up and leafing through a single one of them. They were into some children's books on their way to being teenagers, but now they read and watch videos on their phones, and only read on paper for school.

Then you get over it. They're whip smart and doing things their way, trying to force them into yours probably would not work anyway.

Mostly over it.

It's not universal. I recently discovered that some weird behaviors in my kid were because he was emulating Richard Feynman, having discovered Surely You're Joking on the basement bookshelf.

The thing is, it's not about forcing it, but about creating the opportunity. Maybe it wouldn't happen, but it certainly won't happen if the books aren't there

That said, archive.org is accessible to anyone with an internet connection. This is good for those who don't have access to private libraries or family that have science magazine subscriptions.

Future generations will have a different experience than those in the past. Theirs will be slightly more fair

I'm trying to get rid of my news addiction (so far failing spectacularly...), And one of my plans would be to have a couple of sources that do not push a constant stream of crappy news, but occasional selected high quality articles. At the moment I have Quanta magazine and The Economist Leaders on my RSS reader news section. Does anyone have any improvements or additions to this list - the niche of the articles can be almost anything, as long as it is only a few per week and quality is top notch?

Some news sources on my Atom reader:

Aeon https://aeon.co

Undark Magazine https://undark.org

The Conversation https://theconversation.com/global

Curie https://www.tidningencurie.se/en/home/ (based in Sweden)

http://nautil.us (don't let their broken https fool you into thinking they're not excellent!)

Firefox's `dom.security.https_only_mode` disagrees with you. As far as it's concerned Nautilus doesn't exist. ;-)

Edit: actually it upgrades to HTTPS without complaint! Something might be wrong with your software/internet.

As of now, Nautilus redirects to https on Chrome.

Ahh, it seems something was going on on my side causing Firefox to complain about insecure elements.

> and The Economist Leaders.

That's fine but that will give you an extremely limited vision of the world. The technocratic, slightly anarcho-capitalistic, American-knows-best, social liberal world view.If you choose that way at least go to https://www.project-syndicate.org/, with a little wider spectrum (With actual good economists and not the stenographer of the day) Too bad the redesign is totally crap.

I think Quanta magazine is directly funded by Jim Simons, the billionaire mathematician who founded Renaissance Technology.

Yup. It’s affiliated with the simons foundation too I think?

Note that's not the breitbart funding Renaissance founder. That's the other one.

I agree wholeheartedly! If you don't know of it already, I also highly recommend http://nautil.us

While you can't get hard copy magazine issues, they do have anthologies of their works up to 2018 in book form [0][1].

[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0262536358/

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/026253634X/

Did you consider print on demand ? Some of them seem to have specialized on magazines?

> love that there is a publication with a significantly higher reading level assumed than most pop science content

Well I am not sure about that.As it happens with most pop-sci publications the quality has taken a nose-dive.

For example:

> A new thought experiment indicates that quantum mechanics doesn’t work without strange numbers that turn negative when squared.

I am not saying is a "bad" magazine per se, all I am saying is virtuable indistiguinshable from your SciAm, New Scientist and Discover. Some good articles and plenty of fluff.

The level you want is in other places like:

-https://www.ams.org/notices

- https://physicstoday.scitation.org/journal/pto (free access to the 73 year archive)

- https://inference-review.com/issues (Ignore the 2014 crackpot articles)

but he says that he enjoys this publication?

He can decorate his walls with printouts of the articles for all I care. The point I made is that the magazine is not longer a high-level general scientific magazine (what OP thinks about that publication), it has become a new Scientific American.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com