Links for June 6, 2024

•  Ben Southwood at Twitter: 
  

  In the 2000s we discovered an amazing tool to literally bring inventions from the far future forward to the present, or near future. Despite its huge power we have barely used it since. So Works in Progress has produced a practical easy-to-follow guide that anyone could copy. 🧵
  ... This mechanism to buy inventions from the future is called an 'advance market commitment'. Basically, you say you'll buy something if companies or scientists can invent it and produce enough for you. It's part of a broad range of 'market-shaping mechanisms'

Linki z 6 czerwca, 2023

• Ebenezer Rojt, Baal Szem Tow i cuda chasydyzmu
  

  Prości Żydzi chętnie czytali historie o życiu i cudach Baal Szema ... A cuda te były wielkie. Czasem - o czym zaświadcza Księga ku chwale Baal Szem Towa - nawet góry słały się Besztowi pod nogi. ... A tego, że Beszt wstąpił do niebiańskiego pałacu Mesjasza, wprawdzie już nikt nie widział, ale ponieważ on sam o tym opowiedział, i to ze szczegółami ("Gdy nasz sprawiedliwy Mesjasz zobaczył mnie z daleka, powiedział: Nie krzycz tak"), to rzecz musi być pewna, bo jakże zarzucić kłamstwo świątobliwemu mężowi, który osobiście rozmawiał z Mesjaszem ...

•  Gazeta.pl: Restauracja pełna gości, a za ścianą strzelanina. "Wieczorami przychodzili policjanci, balowali z gangsterami"
  
  

  Przestępcy przychodzili do właściciela lokalu i proponowali ochronę. Kto z tej propozycji nie skorzystał, mógł stracić życie, a na pewno spore pieniądze. Zresztą, jak skorzystał, też je tracił. Tak wyglądała kiedyś przerażająca gastronomiczna rzeczywistość w Polsce.

  A jak to się skończyło? 

  Ale właściciele lokali na warszawskiej Starówce nie zamierzali się tak łatwo poddawać. Gdy gangsterzy bezkarnie demolowali ich puby i restauracje, a policja udawała, że nie widzi problemu, ogłosili protest. ... Bezsilni restauratorzy postanowili, że nie otworzą lokali, bo liczyli na międzynarodowy skandal. Stare Miasto latem 1994 roku było bowiem pełne turystów. I choć przełom w ściganiu gangsterów nie nastąpił od razu, po raz pierwszy oficjalnie przyznano, że to mafia wymusza haracze. Koniec gangów był już tylko kwestią czasu. 

Links for June 2, 2024

• The simplest productivity advice. From @OrphicCapital, on Twitter

my capacity to follow through on the goals/intentions I set increased exponentially the moment I started writing "what's the smallest next step I can do right now?" on top of my goals list

• How much of what 'everyone knows' is fake? @Gwern at Twitter: 

If you ever feel confident about what you 'know' about the Islamic medieval period bc you "just love reading Wikipedia", you may want to know that in 2010, a crazy person spent 2 years falsifying hundreds of claims of Islamic invention, everything from p-n junctions to capitalism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Jagged_85/Evidence#Edit_pattern

He was banned in 2012, but it's unclear how many falsehoods were left, whether he was using any other socks or anon IPs, why, what he has spent the past 12 years doing, or how far his claims have been carried by citogenesis or fellow Islamic ideologues ...

• Nir Shafir, "Forging Islamic science", Aeon
  

  Fake miniatures depicting Islamic science have found their way into the most august of libraries and history books. How? 

    There aren’t many books left in the old booksellers’ market in Istanbul today – but there are quite a few fake miniatures, sold to the tourists flocking to the Grand Bazaar next door. ...

  Some images, on occasion, state that they are modern creations, with the artist signing off with a recent date in the Islamic calendar. Others are more duplicitous. The forgers tear pages out of old manuscripts and printed books, and paint over the text to give the veneer of old writing and paper. They can even stamp fake ownership seals onto the image. ...

  With these additions, the miniatures quickly become difficult to identify as fraudulent once they leave the confines of the market and make their way on to the internet ...

Links for June 1, 2024

 Some reading material about improvements to our lives:

• Sally Mitchell, Daily Life in Victorian England. Quoting @norvid_studies on Twitter:
  

  ... probably the most viscerally alien part of it, relative to current fabric of life, is how much more everyone worked. people would work sunup to sundown, 6 days a week, to barely make enough wage to buy food for themselves

  
  Further posts in the thread include excerpts from the book. 
  
  
• Gwern, My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s
  

  So here is a personal list of small ways in which my ordinary everyday daily life has been getting better since the late 1980s/early 1990s...  

  Count your blessings. 

• Rachel Laudan, The daily grind (Works in Progress, Issue 02)
  

  Before grinding mills were invented, the preparation of flour for food was an arduous task largely carried out by women for hours every day. How did it affect their lives and why does it remain a tradition in some places even today?

• Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power -- the chapter on the arduous life in rural Texas before electrification: excerpt 1, excerpt 2, excerpt 3

• @MamanLunettes on Twitter: 
  

  I'm following an insta acct who interviews elders from remote Romanian villages.Every single one of them speaks of how we now live in a God given infinte abundance so good that compared to their childhood &youth, they feel now they have more desire to live longer
  
  It's not even "I can order things online get them at my door in one day" More like: Bread at every meal! We can BUY clothes and dress as rich as boyars! Grandchildren can drive to visit us! We can carry water in unbreakable plastic bottles! Drought doesn't mean we might die!

Links for May 31, 2024

•  Gwern, Review of Crumb:

Review of the 1994 documentary Crumb about the underground comic artist Robert Crumb ...

 

... I conclude that while Crumb is technically skilled & prolific, his work lacks depth and meaning, because they are literally thoughtless: the outpourings of his unconscious after a LSD-triggered psychotic break ...

 

... But they are analogous to AI art, and so deeply unsatisfying to anyone to has spent much time with AI art; Crumb’s success was a product of the unique cultural context of the 1960s, particularly psychedelic art, with its low standards for meaning.

Worth reading, even just for the parts about AI art and the importance of "depth" in art. 

• Killed by a Pixel, City In A Bottle – A 256 Byte Raycasting System

Today, I have something amazing to share: A tiny raycasting engine and city generator that fits in a standalone 256 byte html file.