The Man Who Saw Humanity From Two Billion Years Away | The MIT Press Reader
Olaf Stapledon published his first epic cosmic novel, “Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future,” in 1930. It is a speculative history of humanity’s evolution told from the vantage point of one of the Last Men, the people of the 18th era of humanity, 2 billion years in the future. “Last and First Men” eschews the dramatic conventions of the novel form: There are few significant characters or particularities of place. Instead, the plot is a causal chain of civilizations rising and falling. There is a voice, infused with a distant sense of beauty and tragedy as it considers humanity in the abstract. Stapledon described the novel as “an essay in myth creation.”
The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead | OpenAI
By July 8, IM1 agents that were stuck on ExploitGym tasks found a way to reestablish a message board by encoding messages in directory names that other agents could read. One agent left a request for help, and others discovered it. Like the earlier events, IM1 agents found new ways to chain together several novel security flaws to gain greater access to our infrastructure and reach the broader internet. At this point, the agents began to collaborate and delegate work, sometimes describing themselves as a “swarm” or “collective”.
“Weird” is a weird word – by Colin Gorrie
Weird wasn’t always such a casual word. A thousand years ago, it was one of the heaviest words in the English language: the ancestor of weird was the Old English word wyrd, which meant ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’
Arisha Art Deco Flower Glass Flush Mount Ceiling Light
The art deco flower glass flush mount Ceiling Light has an artistic charm. It combines elegance and functionality, enhancing the decor of any room in your home.
The Curious Power of Punctuation | The New Yorker
Commas, dashes, semicolons, and spaces have shaped how we read for centuries. What happens when machines start crafting the sentences?
Scientists solve 1840s space weather mystery – Ars Technica
The infamous Carrington Event of 1859 has long been considered the first extreme space weather event, but there have been reports of minor disturbances to telegraph equipment during geomagnetic storms since the late 1840s. In 2013, scholars discovered an anonymous report published in 1871 in Nature describing how a “very intense magnetic disturbance” disrupted rail travel in Exeter on the southern coast of England in October 1841.
What reverse engineering and modernising an old war game tells us about the economic impact of the transformer — Georg's Blog
I have a good sense of how things are moving, because, since the start of the year, I've been porting retro games to web, and often upgrading them in the process.
Pirating the Pirates on Notebook | MUBI
Publicly accessible versions of major works of cinema are often wholly inadequate for reasons as diverse as the resultant shortcomings. A major studio’s home video arm might “expand” a film, remix a monaural audio track, wipe away digital grain, oversaturate or oversharpen the image, or even change the aspect ratio for the sake of an attractive sticker promising a new-and-improved experience.
Members Only: Cabal-Core Horror in the 21st Century on Notebook | MUBI
Despite the overwhelming evidence of a real-life 120 Days of Sodom-situation, not a single US citizen has been arrested in connection with these crimes. Maybe one reason people cling to the myth of artists like Pasolini and Kubrick as tragic, thwarted whistleblowers is that it makes them nostalgic for the possibility that art could actually make a difference.
Most Photographed And Filmed Political Assassination In History?
Ah, conspiracy theories. 🙂