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In some cases but coming from someone who played MUDs back in the day on a monochrome display and dial-up I know I would have been very interested in playing one with NPCs powered by an LLM had they been available back then. The NPCs as they existed were generally just furniture and the interesting part was playing with and talking to other people.
It doesn't really matter what the system of government is, power-hungry psychopaths will always attempt to game the system in their favour. The history of governance is just a long arms race of inventing new systems to thwart them while they do everything they can to corrupt those systems and concentrate power in themselves. It's like fending off griefers in an online game, there's an endless supply of them, they don't care about the rules or the game, they just want to dominate other players for their own perverse enjoyment. The only lasting solution would either be some form of genetic modification to remove that trait from humanity entirely or some perfect way to identify them but you'd have to be extremely careful that they didn't gain access to and corrupt those things before they were completely eliminated.
That's not a unique attribute of democracy nor is it guaranteed. Any system of government that hasn't succumbed to corruption and factionalism will have clear rules of succession. Even an absolute monarchy can go on for many generations without bloodshed.
Your explanation should be common sense for anyone who has been around long enough and I agree that it seems to be fashionable to claim that ads have a nefarious, hypnotic effect on The Masses. The thing that does seem to have an outsized effect on how people think is their desire to be seen as part of a group and they tend to signal this by repeating arguments they've heard members of that group make. That's where advertising/propaganda has a real foothold in everyone's psychology. If you form a parasocial bond with an influencer or a group it does have a strong effect on your behaviour since you want to be liked by them so you will say and do things you think they'll approve of and agree with what they say and do. No one is really exempt from this since being exempt involves complete isolation and/or extreme disagreeableness. The only real remedy is having strong bonds with other people who aren't hopelessly beholden to outside influences. No small task since it only takes one member of the group to act as a channel.
"I have a vague recollection, which may not be accurate, that we talked about flying saucers and the obvious statement that the flying saucers are not real. I also remember that Fermi explicitly raised the question, and I think he directed it at me, ‘Edward, what do you think? How probable is it that within the next ten years we shall have clear evidence of a material object moving faster than light?’ I remember that my answer was’ 10–6.’ Fermi said, ‘This is much too low, The probability is more like ten percent’(the well known figure for a Fermi miracle.)”[0] --Edward Teller
"York believes that Fermi was somewhat more expansive and 1‘followed up with a series of calculations on the probability of earthlike planets, the probability of life given an earth, the probability of humans given life, the likely rise and duration of high technology, and so on. He concluded on the basis of such calculations that we ought to have been visited long ago and many times over. As 1 recall, he went on to conclude that the reason we hadn’t been visited might be that interstellar flight is impossible, or, if it is possible, always judged to be not worth the effort, or technological civilization doesn’t last long enough for it to happen. ” York confessed to being hazy about these last remarks."[0]
The recollection of the conversation by all the parties present is fragmentary and disagrees on exactly what was discussed but the gist of it appears to be about the feasibility of interstellar travel, not colonization or percolation or whatever you want to call it. The whole question of "where are they" doesn't make much sense when you think of it in terms of one off events such as permanent settlement of a planet using generation ships or other feasible means of slower than light travel simply because you would always miss each other in time. Either we wouldn't be here because they settled Earth first and interrupted our development or they're not going to show up for another million years.
I'm not contending that Fermi necessarily believed that the theory of relativity was wrong or incomplete but that the essence of the Fermi Paradox is that either interstellar travel is impossible due to distance + time required or there is some way to overcome the restrictions of distance + time which during this informal discussion over lunch seems to have supposed faster than light travel as the solution. Based on the recollected pieces of the conversation I'm pretty sure Fermi's napkin math didn't involve fudging the likely duration of a technological civilization up to millions of years, the likelihood of that happening is certainly less than Einstein's theory being incomplete.
Honestly, the argument as it is proposed today should be attributed to Hart since it conforms exactly with what he proposes so from now on I'm going to call this form the Hart Paradox.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/%22Where...
Brother, it takes several hundred years to recover from a political collapse of a civilization. A few thousand is in the ballpark for a 90% reduction in population coincident with a similar loss in knowledge. A 99.99% reduction would be more like tens of thousands of years.
It's not just that we need to have people living on another planet, we need a fully self-sufficient civilization on another planet which is at least 200+ years of sustained effort probably more because it took that long under the relatively ideal and easy conditions of simply settling another continent. Then factor in that their civilization would be even more precarious than ours and face many more dangers.
Tell that to the Romans or the Chinese or the Ottomans or the Egyptians or the Greeks or the...
No cohesive civilization on earth has been able to continue uninterrupted for 1000 years, our chances aren't as good as you think they are especially since our current civilization is showing all of the signs of being over the hill and accelerating in its decline. Technological advances can be lost and the capacity of a civilization to accomplish far reaching goals can stall and degrade and eventually cease all together. Anyone who doesn't think we're on a ticking clock is either hopelessly optimistic or ignorant of history, probably both.
I don't think they were wrong about that. I think what they were wrong about is that we could maintain our civilization at the same level they experienced long enough to make significant progress. We dropped the ball in less than two generations and it's yet to be determined if we can pick it back up.
The corruption of the Fermi Paradox is a personal bugaboo of mine. Somewhere along the way everyone started getting it completely wrong, interpreting it as being about galactic colonization and the spread of intelligent life throughout the galaxy. I don't know where this came from but I deeply wish people would stop calling it the Fermi Paradox and give it its own name.
Fermi's contention of "where are they?" was predicated on two things 1) the probability that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the galaxy and 2) that faster than light travel is possible and would be discovered by a technological society.
The napkin math that Fermi did was essentially what we now know as the Drake equation. One important variable in this is the duration of a technological civilization. I personally believe that Fermi would assign the probability of a civilization existing for "geological timescales" necessary to colonize the galaxy using slower than light travel at zero which is a clear resolution to this Not-Fermi Paradox. His paradox is only so because he thought FTL would be discovered in the not very distant future which makes the duration required for a technological civilization quite small and allows them to visit many worlds quickly, with or without a galactic empire which in this interpretation could realistically exist for a normal timescale and not the frankly ridiculous millions of years that the Not-Fermi Paradox always seems to take for granted.
tldr; if it doesn't involve FTL it's not the Fermi Paradox, choose a different name
This is just a repackaged argument against SaaS and cloud infrastructure. Every business could be using subscription free spreadsheet software and storing all of their data on prem and employing an IT team to manage the servers and data but the majority choose to pay a third party to handle all of that. Hell, they could even go so far as to do it all manually with written records and filing cabinets. All of those workflows still exist in varying degrees scattered across the myriad of businesses, the existence of SaaS doesn't eliminate the others. AI seems to be playing out in a very similar way with the big providers, local models and die hard human programmers.
True, it would need to accelerate somehow. Maybe there could be some kind of on board propulsion that would be enough once it's in space. Solid rocket motors could be fabricated as part of the process but the timing and control systems would pose a problem. Maybe something clever could be done mechanically that leveraged temperature or pressure changes.
I'm not sure what you're talking about, my initial comment was a (sort of silly) idea about building a mass driver on Titan that uses native materials to launch payloads on an inward bound trajectory, not to ferry them back and forth with a rocket.
That's not really a problem if the supply is continuous. Think of the last time you drank a 12-year scotch, that distillery had to be set up and start producing at least 12 years ago for them to label the product that way but they've continued production constantly since then which ensures there is a steady supply to be delivered to stores.
They have lower crime rates, more modern infrastructure, plentiful housing, lower cost of living (especially electricity), they're the place to be if you want to manufacture anything, affordable childcare, incredibly well educated doctors, many of the most incredible leisure and entertainment events in the world and they don't ban air conditioning.
So yeah, if I had to choose to live in a country where I had to toe the party line and bite my tongue when it came to political expression it would be China. At least they would be providing a high quality of life and a secure and peaceful society in exchange even if I had to deal with the negatives of being a minority in their country.
Given a choice between China and the EU at this point I would choose to live in China.
It's much more of an oligarchy where even though the members of the elite are elected the body of them as a whole appears to have enough influence over new members to force them to act in accordance with an ongoing plan. It seems like any real change would require a very large super majority of new members to be elected at the same time in order to change course. Even a country like the UK seems to still be under their influence after leaving the union which speaks volumes about the amount of backroom dealing that must be going on.
The inner solar system was what I was thinking, returning to Earth like you said is a bit pointless but even a slow trajectory with a constant supply would be useful to have fuel and feedstock already in orbit near Mars and Earth.
I wonder if you could design a plastics production plant, injection molding system, propellant plant and an extremely large potato canon in order to launch large canisters of hydrocarbons and oxygen on a slow return trip.
I'm sorry those other things haven't worked for you and I can understand the struggle of giving up on pursuits like that. I was hoping to communicate through what I wrote that you don't need to do things the traditional or recommended way. If you like exploring trails then by all means just explore trails, you don't need to do it as a gateway to exercise or meditation, just do it because you enjoy it and if you get other benefits out of it then so much the better.
This feels like a marketing ploy to sell the book.
I did say that starting with something active may not be the best introduction if you want to improve your general ability to control your attention. That said, it does work for many people including myself since I became aware of the ability to train my attention through both programming as well as weightlifting. Funnily enough doing bicep concentration curls is something that has all of the aspects of a meditation practice for me and where I can really find a complete and singular focus and exclude all other thought and distractions. Building mind-muscle connection naturally leads you to focus solely on the muscle you are working, the sensations of adduction and abduction, the proprioceptive sense of maintaining the same path for the weight to travel and keeping the muscle under tension and flexing it fully. If you're doing it right then you are focusing on nothing else, you're not thinking of anything else, you have no inner monologue other than counting reps and sets and it becomes a flow state.
You can only tell people so much in words about how to maintain and train their attention. The better way is to learn by doing and it's easier for people to learn when it involves doing something agreeable to them rather than forcing them to do it the way you did. The original poster said they had tried the standard way many times even with help from a therapist and they didn't make any progress. That's why I felt it necessary to point out that there isn't just one dogmatic way to do it since your attention can and is applied to many different things and just like using your muscles and body to do many different physically demanding things you can train it in a variety of ways.
More of a Roman fort I'd say.
You should include the same advice that is given for exercise, it can and should occasionally be a bit painful but you have to discover your safe limits and only push yourself a little past them each time. You don't want to rack weights in 45lbs increments until you tear a muscle, you do it in 2.5lbs or 5lbs increments and practice for several sessions of work/rest at the same level for a while before making another small increment. People often quit both exercise and meditation because they just try to push through the pain and often end up with negative results due to injury or emotional and cognitive strain in the case of meditation.
It's all exertion, for both "meditation" and exercise.
I'm convinced that meditation doesn't work for a lot of people because it has too much dogma about what it's supposed to be, and maybe those aspects are valid for certain pursuits, but it obscures the core principle.
Take exercise as an example first. It's also a practice that is layered under heaps of nonsense and complexity or fluffed up with idealisms and systems. If you strip all of that away it's about one simple thing: strengthening the muscles and connective tissues of your body including organs like your heart and lungs. Muscle and living tissue only responds to repeated exertion and rest (rest includes nutrition). If you never exceed your current capacity, it will never grow or strengthen and will probably weaken. So exercise becomes simply pushing yourself a little beyond your current capacity and then properly resting afterwards. How you do that is up to you, taking a longer walk than you did last week, slowly mastering calisthenic poses, progressive overload weight training, becoming actually good at ballroom dancing or ballet, competing in field sports, the same principle applies and you get much the same results.
Now returning to meditation, the first thing we should do away with is the label because it is almost as much an error as calling all exercise bodybuilding. It should really be thought of as "attention training" where you are improving your control over and the capacity of your attention. Like with your body, your mind responds to exertion and rest. Both are required. How you train your attention is up to you, sitting without distraction is perhaps the most accessible but it's about as challenging as limiting yourself to doing prison cell bodyweight exercises. Walking without distraction is a very valid practice but is harder to manage since it requires isolation and freedom from interruptions that many people would find on a walking route. Many other techniques have been developed with many different aids and systems but the important thing to remember is that you are trying to do the same thing for your attention as you are for your muscles, push it a little more beyond your current capacity each week and giving it sufficient rest between sessions (including proper nutrition and sleep). If the usual things that are sold as meditation practices don't work for you then try things that seem more natural to you but which still stretch your attention. This could be viewing a piece of art for a set amount of time, finding a location with a fairly static view and doing the same, holding or placing an item you own in front of you and examining it, repeating a line from a book or a poem, listening to a single note repeated on an instrument or hummed. It doesn't really matter much what it is as long as it takes effort to contemplate it for a long duration and isn't so complex and changeable that it overwhelms your untrained ability to fully consider each part of it. Even more active practices can train your attention like writing, penmanship / calligraphy, painting / sketching, yoga, dance, martial arts and others but they are probably not the best place to start if you are fully untrained.
This dovetails into the point of the article, that programming is a form of "meditation" for many people. Really, it's something that you can infinitely stretch your capacity for and exert your attention on.
It turns out things are more complex than they may initially appear.
Core vim is around 300k lines of C89 code and it's just a text editor.
It's over a million lines if you include all the scripting, language features and tests.
I have experimented with that a bit but not in a rigorous way, it's good to know that there is value in doing it so I'll try to integrate it into my process. Thanks for the tip!
I've had the same experience and it has really put me off working on personal projects using AI quite a few times, though I keep coming back. My recent experience with Fable and the latest Sonnet have actually been very positive though. They seem to be capable of working for much longer stretches without constantly stopping and requiring further prompting to finish up large features. The place where I feel flow the most now is when I'm planning large feature sets and I use the Claude web app as a sounding board while doing this and prompt it to not write any code but focus only on asking questions and clarifying aspects that I haven't fully thought out. This results in a very detailed plan for implementation which seems to work very well with Fable or even Sonnet 5. I can then actually leave my computer and go do other things without the constant nagging feeling that I need to check if its stopped and needs nudging. After its done I review the changes and do QA and testing and then formulate a plan for the next set of tasks. It feels like this problem is getting solved, which is wonderful.
I think this is a really good insight. It's definitely the back and forth in Claude Code or whatever harness you use that breaks flow and leads to frustration. This seems to be what Fable is solving since it is capable of doing much larger chunks of work without needing input constantly. Having a much more involved planning session than just turning on plan mode and then handing that off to be implemented is a much better approach. It's sort of what I've arrived at by accident where I often start planning changes in the web app and spend a long time going into detail about my vision and then working through the details without having Claude write any code other than perhaps a few small exploratory artifacts to visualize certain things and then taking all of that and moving over to Claude Code for implementation.