georgefrowny

An interesting downstream effect of hypothetical highly-effective robotic AI labour would bring is the ability to strip, sort and test e-waste down to the component level.

She also has Icelandic citizenship.

What would a radar constellation look like that could see everything on earth to a metre or so resolution? Thousands and thousands of satellites all with big phased array radios and solar panels and batteries.

What do you need to distill a 24/7 stream of everything on Earth in roughly 1m^3 voxels into data like humans and vehicles? Bearing in mind the data torrent is gigantic and can't always be reliably downlinked: co-orbital AI.

All UK conveyancing solicitors are in this picture too. 90% of what they do is shuffle standard paperwork and chase other solicitors for their standard paperwork, all incredibly slowly. I would be entirely unsurprised if in a typical transaction, N clients' £1000*N of solicitors could be replaced by £10 of AI and a couple of hours of human time in total.

The thin line between them is also really tenacious (only the punk one dropped it)

I tried browsing bookstores on the mainland but found basically all the books are shrinkwrapped in plastic.

Very boring indeed (but the covers are nice I guess).

Is Taiwan similar?

I do actually like the "concrete jungle" style like the Barbican and Salk Institute (by all accounts a pleasantly human place to work despite the famously stark-looking courtyard).

I think the biggest problem with them is that the minute you stop maintaining things like gardens in contrast to the concrete and let it get dirty and scarred, it looks apocalyptic and stressful very quickly. Whereas even quite dilapidated neo-classical-ish buildings look innately reasonably pleasing.

My theory is they end up preferring buildings that are easy to draw in AutoCAD.

Akin's Law 38: "Capabilities drive requirements, regardless of what the systems engineering textbooks say."

Good, I'm not buying an X4 without either USB-C or a backlight, and it might already be too late relative to the Boox Picco (but CrossPoint support can pull it back).

Prosperity gospel for the non-religious, basically.

Why do the AliExpress ones lock the firmware? They have analytics in it or something?

Yep. Someone is surely going to do something at some point if we continue on this course. Hand-wringing from relative safety of above-sea level places at high latitude is cheap. If you're in charge of millions of people in peril, even if it's a horrible idea, if you don't actually know its a horrible idea, well...

Also it does annoy me when people say "well it went badly wrong in the Matrix/Snowpiercer/etc., therefore we should not even talk about it, as it is clearly stupid. It may be stupid, or it may not be, but that should be determined on its own (de)merits, not because fiction used the idea as a plot device.

And is on PNAS Nexus.