I’m reading The #DarkAges by #IsaacAsimov, and it turns out that it’s the text that is the original source material for a bunch of Wikipedia articles which I’ve perused over the course of spelunking down digital rabbit-holes for two decades.
In his deep-dives on histories of Egypt, Canaan, Babylonia, the Greeks, and Romans, #IsaacAsimov consistently refers to anything East of Asia Minor as “Asian.”
I think people forget what the “East” is referring to…
Tempo czytania książek od końca ciepłej pogody spadło do zera prawie. Mimo to znalazłem chwilkę na dokończenie "Fundacji" Isaaca Asimova ! Cieszę się ,że ta klasyka trafiła w moje ręcę. Odczuwam tu troszkę vibe jak przy Diunie ale oczywiście to totalnie inne dzieła. Z podobnych motywów autor zwraca tu uwagę na taki "bigger picture" ewolucji świata, społeczności, zależności pomiędzy wydarzeniami, nieuchronności upadku imperiów. No i oczywiście odpowiednik przewidywania przyszłości w postaci nauki psychohistorii. Takie sci-fi wydaje się być najprzyjemniej strawne dla logiki bo stanowi alegorie wydarzeń na świecie. Bardzo przyjemnie się to czyta . Zasłużenie uważa się go za jednego z mistrzów.
👀 “Trump signals intent to block testimony in Jeff Clark disciplinary proceedings..to shield key Trump ally from losing his law license over efforts to subvert election”
Looking to start new series for the coming year (second poll). Can you help me out #Bookstodon? Because you can only have for poll topics on Mastodon, this is the second poll asking for recommendations. I'll take the top two from both polls and do a final four poll. Go to the comments for a link to the first poll.
Gestern oder heute kam eine Meldung das "rogue programmers" LLM's umprogrammiert hätten - ohne "guardrails".
Die Menschheit ist kollektiv Dümmer als sich dies #IsaacAsimov im #TheCompleteRobot über viele Jahre hätte vorstellen können. Die Menschheit ist sogar Dümmer, als die einzige Spezie, die sich bislang global selbst die Lebensgrundlage entzogen hat: #Cyanobakterien im #GreatOcidationEvent...
REMINDER: ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and other large trained neural models are NOT "artificial intelligence", they're just stochastic parrots, remixing and regurgitating what they've been fed. There's no theory-of-mind involved, so no understanding: there's no "there" there. (A real live parrot exhibits more intelligence than this.)
Don't call it AI; call it parrot-tech. That way you'll have a better perspective on what it can (and can't) do.
I had guessed that Asimov came up with the plot element of "psychohistory" before the development of chaos theory. Asimov started using it back in the 1940s with chaos theory emerging in a concrete form 10-20 years later. He still stuck with it. He sort of analogizes/rationalizes that it as the impossibility of being able to predict the motion of one gas molecule versus the overall motion of a volume of gas. I think that might be some retconning in later years on his part. #IsaacAsimov#foundation#FoundationSeries#scifi
I only just recently watched season one of #Foundation. I was not expecting how good this would be. I, like others have said, didn't expect Apple to do Asimov well, but as far as the shows goes, it stands on its own. I still need to watch season two. It is a quite remarkable show and probably doesn't get enough attention. #SciFi#ScienceFiction
I only read 2 to 3 #Asimov books, but that was way back when I was in my mid-teens. I don't remember what I read, but nothing about the show seems familiar at all, so it is most likely I didn't read #Foundation. Once this show has completed, I will then read Asimov's Foundation. Naturally, I do expect the book series, or collection, to be even better than the show. I do, however, want to see how the show ends first. #IsaacAsimov
I’m enjoying the second series of #foundation but it would be more accurate to replace “based on the novel by #IsaacAsimov ” with “the novel by Isaac Asimov was somewhere in the house when the teleplay was written.”
TIL that it wasn’t Star Trek TNG that came up with the idea for a positronic brain for androids. Isaac Asimov used that terminology in I, Robot in the 1950s. I’m not sure if he was the first but that’s still decades before Commander Data was imagined into existence. #scifi#StarTrek#IsaacAsimov
I'm finally watching the Foundation series on AppleTV. I'm really enjoying it. Although I suck at reading fiction its making me want to read the books. However the CW is that the series is not much like the books. So I wonder how much I'd actually enjoy them. #Foundation#scifi#fiction#IsaacAsimov
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’.” #IsaacAsimov #democracy#Trump#maga