Continuations

We have had Full Self Driving (FSD) Beta on our Tesla Model Y for some time. I had written a previous post on how much the autodrive reduces the stress of driving and want to update it for the FSD experience. The short of it is that the car goes from competent driver to making beginner’s mistakes in a split second.Some examples of situations with which FSD really struggles are any non-standard intersection. Upstate New York is full of those with roads coming at odd angles (e.g. small local ro...

Elon Musk has successfully acquired Twitter. Many people seem convinced he will ruin it in short order. And while that’s of course conceivable, it is also possible that he will fix some long running problems. It’ s not like Twitter had been a well-run company. So now seems like a good time to resurface what I had tweeted in April.Restoring full API access would dramatically shift power back to endusers. We could run apps other than the official Twitter client for interacting with Twitter, whi...

Susan and I went to Burning Man this year for our first time. We had a wonderful experience together with our friends Cindy and Robin (who is an experienced Burner and acted as our guide). There are many justified criticism of Burning Man and the festival will likely to have to change substantially over the coming years (a subject for a future post).Today I want to write about the absence of prices at Burning Man. Once you get to Black Rock City, everything is free (well, not everything, as i...

I recently read Joseph Tainter’s outstanding book “The Collapse of Complex Civilizations,” which I recommend. It should be required reading for all politicians. Tainter’s theory is one of diminishing returns to bureaucracy, which we are clearly experiencing across many societies today. He also proposes one historic escape mechanism from such a collapse: a big energy unlock. We had a shot at that in the 1960s when we started building nuclear power plants, but then starting in the 1980s we inst...

For a long time there was a narrative that computers would only be good at automating routine tasks, leaving creativity to us humans. I never believed this because creativity isn’t some kind of magic but rather much of it is based on exploring variations either based on known rules or based on precedents. For example, I titled a post in 2016 “Machine Creativity: Possibly Sooner than Anticipated.” Also in my book The World After Capital, I have a section on the universality of computation that...

As humans we like to put things into categories. It makes communicating and thinking easier. Scratch that. It makes communicating and thinking possible. Categories go hand in hand with words as providing us with crucial compression of reality. Just like a 1:1 map is completely useless (it is the terrain itself), so would be a need to describe every detail of every person or object before being able to make a point. We would never get anywhere. Not surprisingly then, categories are everywhere....

Every 4th of July I like to reflect on what it means to be independent. Today I wrote nearly an entire post on production independence, starting with energy independence. But I have decided to post that another day because there is a different type of independence that I have decided is more important at this particular moment in time: independent thinking. It has never been easy to be an independent thinker but it has become considerably more difficult in our always online, always connected ...

Given the ongoing decay of our institutions and their utter failure to address the climate crisis it is not far fetched to ask whether we are headed for some kind of societal collapse. A highly relevant book is Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies, published in 1988. I had two key takeaways from reading it. First, there are way more examples of complex societies collapsing than I was aware of. I was of course familiar with the collapse of the Roman Empire and was also aware of M...

I had lunch the other day with a friend. He has a has a reasonably high paying job in consulting which he sort of enjoys but would rather be an artist. So the question he posed was “How much is enough?” – meaning how much money does he need to become an artist. We spent the rest of the lunch talking about different options for approaching this. Here’s a recap of what we have come up with so far: 1. Don’t wait, just start trying to sell some art right now on the side while going full steam wit...

I have been away from writing here for an entire month. It was a combination of travel followed by a health crisis that is now thankfully nearly over (a “routine” surgery that turned out to be anything but). But there is also an underlying frustration that makes it at times difficult to know what to say at all. We are living in times of the omnicrisis and yet so many people seem to just want to get on with their lives. They want to do their thing, whatever that may be, as if there was nothing...