Look, I understand. There is a ton of low-value writing in the world: legal boilerplate, press releases, most documentation. That writing can and will be replaced or supplemented by AI. But look up cognitive offloading. It doesn't take centuries of research to show evidence for that, and in fact the benefits of writing for thinking have been known long before AI writing became available (the alternative being just talking or thinking without writing).
Sorry but I think this essay is largely wrong. First, there is tons of evidence that working your thoughts on paper, word by word, helps develop the idea and exercises the brain. Secondly, in other endeavors we have defined clear lines between human and machine labor: chess computers are banned from human tournaments; race cars and bicycles are not allowed in footraces. And while I am very sympathetic to the advantages of AI writing for the impaired and non-native speakers, we make allowances all the time for this today: handicapped parking, special sporting events, and allowing dyslexics more time on written exams for example. The existence of these does not justify parking in a handicapped spot when you don't need it.
From the title, I expected a different argument, that it's going to be increasingly difficult to determine. Many people have demonstrated that careful prompting can already produce prose that passes as human, and this will only increase as models get better and inevitably are trained to bypass checkers. Maybe someday we'll have novel-writing rooms where, like grandmasters coming into a tournament, the writers must relinquish all their digital tools at the door. Because it's difficult to imagine any other system that will guarantee human authenticity.
Fun. I studied Japanese for two years, let it slide and now every Kanji is like "Hmmm, I've seen that before but..." I can still read kana though, which is nice to know.
I think you are confusing the scientific process, in particular Popper's falsification principle, with science's purpose, which is to find the truth, or at least sort things into true and false. It's a bit like saying the purpose of programming is to have a bunch of unit tests.
According to William Rosen in "Justinian's Flea," this plague also led to an agricultural revolution and population explosion in Western Europe.
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One cannot, of course, “know” this in the same way that one can know the date of the battle of Poitiers; applying economic analysis to the spotty record of commerce during late antiquity is a tricky business. However, as can be seen in a subtly reasoned 2003 paper by two development economists, Ronald Findlay of Columbia and Mats Lundahl of the University of Stockholm, it is compelling, as well, despite its reliance on a number of simplifications.
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"The default setting on phones is to save storage by only using 12 megapixels, so unless you've changed settings, the 200 megapixel phone loses 94% of its megapixels as soon as you press the shutter. Bad deal!"
The final picture is the result of digital processing of the 200 megapixels, which is quite different from losing the data, all other things being the same. His point is right, but this paragraph isn't worthy of the rest of the essay.
Welcome to my rathole: Venetian history. To expand on your thesis, the Council of Ten was the executive power in Venice, but the Doge and minor council attended the Council of Ten meetings and the Doge often chaired those meetings. And even if he was powerless, the Council was made up of other old men. I don't want to push this whole argument, I'm not recommending we adopt the Venetian constitution. But I don't think you can blame current chaos on age.
Average is probably not what you need to worry about: I'd bet David Attenborough and Mel Brooks still have IQs considerably higher than the average 25-year old. And I'm not convinced IQ is as important as that elusive factor called character.
But you may be right. Maybe what the US really needs is a lagoon.
Venice was run by very old men. It was common for the Doge to be in their 80s. Meanwhile, many of their neighbors had kings who were very young, sometimes teenage boys.
Venice was the longest lasting, most stable state in Europe.
Businesses are risk averse and in the current environment they are all looking to secure their supply chains, whether to reduce their dependence on silicon from Taiwan, oil from the strait of Hormuz, or digital services from the United States. I think you are also underestimating the power of regulation. Not all European businesses have to be all-in for Mistral (or another alternative) to survive. This is one reason so many countries still have domestic defense, aerospace, and even automobile companies.
While I generally do not trust information from "advertisements", in this case I don't see how this is any worse than including a list of sources in the bibliography. What this could be is an attempt to use those other books to sell the author's through some reflected glory (or SEO-fu) but in that case, the author is still incentivized to recommend good books.
Good list. It does not include "Silk Roads" by Frankopan, which I agree with. That's a good read but much more a history of world trade (hence the plural) and strangely western-centric. I saw strangely because in the introduction Frankopan says he wanted to write a history from the point of view on central Asia, but its not that at all. Dalyrymple's "Golden Road" succeeds at Frankopan's objective and I found it much better in general. I don't want to sound too negative on "Silk Roads" but I think the title is subtly misleading if you want to learn about the trade general referred to as the Silk Road.
I got it. And I've played a 1905 Martin and you can still plug a 1950s telecaster into a 1950s amp in turn plugged into wall power and everything works. Just saying, that is not the consumer electronics world in 2026.
I can understand why one would want to move from Kindle to another device, but this article starts by complaining that support is being dropped for devices from before 2013. I can even understand being upset by this, but I have absolutely no faith that whatever other device I switch to will still be supported in 10+ years. Could be. But I sure wouldn't count on it.
In the late 1990s I went to a RealNetworks developer conference and Andreesen, then at Netscape, was a keynote speaker. I was curious and open to his insights, but his talk was so vapid (I remember he kept giggling) and arrogant that I eventually walked out. I remember he kept bragging about Netscape's next big project (something after Netscape 5 maybe?) and how it was going to wipe Microsoft out permanently. Only a few years later did I realize whatever it was never shipped, it turned out to be vaporware.
Not really. Think of the experiment as a very, very high speed camera. They can't store every frame, so they try to capture just the "interesting" ones. They also store some random ones that can be used later as controls or in case they realize they've missed something. That's the whole job of these various layers of algorithms: recognizing interesting frames. Sometimes a new experiment basically just changes the definition of "interesting"
"Almost every" is a very strong statement. But even granted that, the interregnum periods (civil wars and revolutions) tend to be so horrific that they are wise to avoid. In fact, people like Plato, Machiavelli, and Hobbes who lived through revolutions tended to come to the cynical conclusion that any system of government was better than a civil war. I don't agree with that conclusion, but I'd rather see the system reform itself than jump immediately to "tear up the constitution and start over"
In 35 years in the industry, reading and studying during work hours were always supported. Frankly, most places would let us play video games during work hours as long as we met our deadlines.