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How Airbnb is being supplanted by the twentieth-century relic known as the hotel is a good lesson in capitalism. In particular, it’s a reminder to ignore perennial promises that new market innovations will reform capitalism so that it works equally for corporations and everyone else. … But crowd-based capitalism, as it turns out, is just…
Zvi provides a complete rundown of current AI news, as neutral just-the-facts reporting. He covers more detail than most people would want—I just skim it—but he highlights the most important stuff… Arvind is in the “much less powerful than hyped, but with potential for dire misuse” quadrant. He combines skeptical takes on current AI technical practice (like…
These are twenty lessons from the twentieth century I published seven years ago, first as a kind of online declaration, and then, with historical examples, in a pamphlet called On Tyranny. They were written in advance of the first Trump presidency, and have been used since in the U.S. and around the world. For those who…
NASA’s Ingenuity has racked up important milestones since it detached itself from the Perseverance Rover’s underbelly in April 2021 and got to work. On April 19th, 2021, it became the first aircraft to complete a powered, controlled extraterrestrial flight. Since that day, it has blown away expectations and completed 70 flights. Its most recent flight…
Chinese agencies are funding projects to use the Five Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) to conduct searches for alien signals. The Far Neighbour Project (FNP) was launched in 2023 and uses some interesting observational techniques to hunt for technosignatures from advanced civilisations. They are targetting nearby stars, exoplanet systems, local globular clusters and much…
As a culture, we’ve thus reached an impasse. On the one hand, the meager amount of data that has been declassified or leaked isn’t enough for us to derive any firm conclusions regarding the nature of the phenomenon. On the other hand, enough has been begrudgingly but officially acknowledged that we can’t dismiss the phenomenon…
Last week, NASA’s Juno spacecraft performed a scintillatingly close flyby of Jupiter’s moon Io — the closest in over 20 years — and captured breathtaking new images of its evershifting surface that could further scientists’ understanding of one of the most volcanic worlds in the Solar System. If Juno had pulled off the maneuver around our planet…
Dave5 