Jens > Recent Status Updates

The current part is examining what it means to have generative systems, what their attributes are, how they interact, etc. Interesting stuff, but so far it's mostly set-up for the rest of the chapter.

Page 96 concludes the animal rights section, which seems very uncontroversial to me overall, but I suppose on either end of the debate spectrum this rather down-to-earth point of view is ludicrous.

Next chapter is on marriage.

"If the PC ceases to be at the center of the information technology ecosystem, the most restrictive aspects of information appliances will come to the fore."

He called it.

While this is about the Internet, it might as well be written about today's web.

So far, the TL;DR version is that the last decade since the book was written hasn't really improved things.

I didn't read it back then, but it seems pretty relevant today.

The chapter concludes that three types of damage must be recognized by policy, and one of those is overemphasized today. Short-term hedonic damage tends to get too much attention, while long-term hedonic damage receives too little. At the same time, capability loss isn't really in the focus of policy at all, because the system is based around assessing hedonic damage.

Next up: animal rights. Off to a good start.

The discussion on hedonic damage (the impact on your enjoyment of life) vs. capability damage (loss of a capability) is interesting.

I can see that hedonic damage gets misjudged a lot. The book contrasts chronic pain to the loss of a limb. The former has a daily impact on your ability to enjoy life, while the latter - in most cases - becomes "part of the furniture" after some time.

Let's see where this will go.

So because I am reading a book on real life conspiracy theories, goodreads tries to recommend me novels about fake conspiracy theories.

No thank you.

Speaking of conspiracy theories, Nio discovers that a clone of Einstein was... no, that would be spoilers.

Too much The Zero Signal recently?

Well, if clones of Einstein don't interest you...

Slow progress on this one; it goes on to discuss how people misjudge the relevance of incidents, and what mechanisms exist to help them understand the truth better.

I had a couple of discussions recently where someone was massively overestimating the risk of something, and walking them through a proper analysis helped. So I get that.

It's tedious and difficult.

Anyway, good description of the issues at hand.

16 people voted Rick Wayne's Zero Signal up on the Best books of '21 list: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1...

That's about 5000 fewer than I would expect. Something is wrong here. Please fix.

So far, not much surprising. I'm not getting yet why this book was supposed to have been so disruptive.

That said, it is a very well written and concise description of the infodemic issues we've been facing for a while, with some ideas put forward on how to address them.

For the time being, I'm waiting for later chapters to be more revealing; this is, after all, just laying the groundwork.

I need to use this site more.

I want to like the goodreads app, but every time I try to use it, I die a little inside.

The party is rejoined.

Very nicely book!

Introduces you to figures of speech by demonstration. Which is definitely the best way.

Fun read, if you like language. If you know a little too much about rhetorical figures, it's probably not worth your while, though.

I have to amend my review again. It's an infuriating book, in some ways fantastically so, in some ways disappointingly.

Still a Traveller campaign. This time they split the party!

I feel compelled to write a mini-review after the first chapter. Goodreads doesn't have enough characters for that.

It's really fairly well written, and certainly easy enough to grok. But it's also kind of annoying that there's so much repetition, and also they repeat themselves and sometimes explain the same thing twice in different places.

So finally the politician character from the TV show turns up. That's good; I was afraid they'd just added her as yet another distraction.

So far, the books are so much better than the (still enjoyable) TV show, it's kind of sad. But also good :)