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.