johngossman

Machiavelli. Not just the Prince but his other works. He reads remarkably modern. There are many "Machiavelli Readers" that will provide a curated selection.

Cicero and Plato.

You might reconsider when your richer neighbor paid the politician to block you or build an asphalt plant next to your new condo. It's a slippery slope. Or how about when the fire department starts asking for a little something to keep your condo "safe"

Tolkien and Lewis came by their luddism fairly, having both survived the horrors of trench warfare.

Yup. I've had Gemini create fake citations to papers. I've also had it hallucinate the contents of paywalled papers, so I know I can't trust anything it writes, though I am getting better at using it recursively to verify things.

This verification problem is general.

As an experiment, I had Claude Cowork write a history book. I chose as subject a biography of Paolo Sarpi, a Venetian thinker most active in the early 17th century. I chose the subject because I know something about him, but am far from expert, because many of the sources in Italian, in which I am a beginner, and because many of the sources are behind paywalls, which does not mean the AIs haven't been trained on them.

I prompted it to cite and footnote all sources, avoid plagiarism and AI-style writing. After 5 hours, it was finished (amusingly, it generated JavaScript and emitted a DOCX). And then I read the book. There was still a lingering jauntiness and breathlessness ("Paolo Sarpi was a pivotal figure in European history!") but various online checkers did not detect AI writing or plagiarism. I spot checked the footnotes and dates. But clearly this was a huge job, especially since I couldn't see behind the paywalls (if I worked for a Uni I probably could).

Finally, I used Gemini Deep Research to confirm the historical facts and that all the cited sources exist. Gemini thought it was all good.

But how do I know Gemini didn't hallucinate the same things Claude did?

Definitely an incredible research tool. If I were actually writing such a book, this would be a big start. But verification would still be a huge effort.

I find they are good at identifying interesting topics and writing articles that don't deliver. They remind me of Omni magazine (which I subscribed to at one point). The articles aren't even wrong.

And reading a history book while you're in the place makes both the book and the place more interesting.

One more source to consider, if you find non-fiction dry (and if you do, I'd start by trying a different history book) is novels. Novelists like Rushdie, Heller, Solzhenitsyn, and a surprising number of sci-fi writers include a lot of history in their books. Clearly, these are not unbiased sources and can't be relied on as your only source, but often make for easy insightful introductions and/or immersive supplements. I'm not even talking about "historical fiction," though some of that is also good. For example, the book "The Killer Angels" about Gettysburg, is sometimes assigned reading in history classes.

I wish I could upvote this multiple times. However, I hope nobody takes away from this that all history is purely biased and therefore worthless. Reading a history book should be like having a conversation with a well-informed friend: you should expect them to get most things right, talk with others, and feel entitled to your own opinion. But you shouldn't ignore them because they might be wrong or stop talking to them because you differ with them, and definitely not assume you're smarter and more clear thinking than the expert.

Are you seriously suggesting that one can't learn Roman History without learning to read Latin? That it is better to be ignorant of history than read a few books?

While I agree with the list of recommended podcasts, you may be a reader. It is easier for me to make notes and backup and review when reading. A good history book is a story book as interesting as any novel, with the added benefit of being about real people and events. Fortunately, there are a lot of good popular history authors, but unfortunately there are a lot of bad ones too. I looked at Goodreads and this list is pretty good:

https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/world-history

For someone not wishing to be an expert or read source material, like the OC, facility in languages is absolutely not necessary. And history absolutely is valuable and can be accessible to everyone.

As I age, I look on these happy, productive seniors, people like Dick Van Dyke (100), David Attenborough (99), and Mel Brooks (99) and keep my fingers crossed.

That's not a bug, that's a feature

Whether or not the Republic ever reflected Plato's ideas about government, James Romm's recent book "Plato and the Tyrant" makes a compelling case that Plato changed his mind after trying to teach virtue and create a Philosopher King in Syracuse. His last book instead advocated for the rule of law (and was appropriately titled "The Laws")

I just re-read Canticle after decades. It's startlingly well written, at least the first two parts. Head and shoulders above most 50s pulp. A masterpiece really. It was assigned reading in my high school. I wonder if anyone under 40 reads it anymore

I speculate that a lot of sci-fi reflects the cutting edge of science and technology at the time it is written. For well over a century a lot of that frontier was transportation: and we got "Around the World in 80 Days" and "20000 Leagues under the Sea" and then a lot of books about space. We also got "Canticle for Leibowitz" and other post-apocalyptic books out of the age when nuclear weapons and energy was top of mind. Then, in the 70s and 80s computer technology became the center of innovation and we got cyberpunk and a lot of sci-fi turned inward to virtual worlds and the like. Given we're in a new space age, maybe sci-fi will start to follow? I'm certainly seeing a new wave of AI centric fiction.

My sympathies. I've had to track some of those sorts of things down and sometimes you wonder about your sanity.

I've been building computers for my friends and I for 25 years and the two worst "random stability" issues I had were high quality but aging PSUs.

Posting some code that reproduces the bug could help not only Apple but you and others.

There are true stories that don't involve asteroids but are just as compelling. Anything by Irving Finkel, such as:

https://youtu.be/LUxFzh8r384

I do something similar but also cooy the most interesting of these into Obsidian. Doesn't take long and the activity of sorting helps me remember. It's amazing how often when I skim these that I find something interesting/profound/useful that I've forgotten.

Especially when they're based on eyeballing it on Google Maps

Go look at Bangladesh (or the whole Ganges valley). Extremely dense population outside of urban cores. Tiny area compared to the US but a lot of people...maybe 500 million between India and Bangladesh.

I doubt this explains the world-wide phenomenon, but regionally sure. I remember in the 90s when studies brought the Nigerian population estimates down this triggered a drop of growth forecasts across sub-Saharan Africa.

Edit: changed world-wife (which sounds interesting demographically) to world-wide

You are conflating known and unknown unknowns, otherwise known as Knightian uncertainty. As the article says, many countries have not run censuses in many years and/or manipulate the numbers.

"I have a map of the United States... Actual size. It says, 'Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile.' I spent last summer folding it. People ask me where I live, and I say, 'E6."

Steven Wright

Though it's not as funny without his delivery

Your memory is correct. Once compression was applied, the size on the wire was mostly a wash. Parsing costs were often greater but that's at the endpoints.

It depends on who and what you read. Since they became controversial, I notice them more. Charles Dickens used them both regularly--most pages seem to have both.

Virginia Woolf's writing has the most semi-colons I've seen and almost as many em-dashes. It fits her stream of consciousness style where there are very few hard stops.

Jack Vance used semi-colons in almost the opposite fashion to increase the tempo by having short clauses without using conjunctions. His action scenes are sometimes almost staccato.

Just today I'm reading Patricia McKillip and noticed she also used a lot of em-dashes.

Imagine you were expecting one of those and read the other!