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Quite an interesting read, thank you. I particularly liked: "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature". I don't entirely agree that n

Quite an interesting read, thank you. I particularly liked: "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature". I don't entirely agree that nature is efficient by our definition of the word. It takes A LOT of wrong turns, it's just that it has infinite time to correct them. A side note on the CSS of your site: I found the text entirely too dense. I had to zoom in to 175% and then go into the CSS and manually change the line-height from 1.15 to 2 to make the text readable. (And I've OK vision.)

shandor 5y ago
I got the feeling from the styling of the text that the author had purposefully chosen a presentation that closely mimics that of a dead-tree book. I thought it was a nice touch, and fit well with the overall atmosphere of the piece. ...but yes, it was also rather heavy on the eyes on my 4K display.
georgestrakhov 5y ago
Thank you so much for your kind words. To be clear, I stole the "indistinguishable from nature" thing from Karl Schroeder, as marked in the footnotes. You should check out his talk, it's great. Also sorry for the css and readability. I just used the default Google docs html export formatting which is a bit shit... Will try to get something better next time.
_Microft 5y ago
I have to do the opposite on some pages that are posted here. This page looked so much better than most others on the iPhone and still ok with Firefox on Windows. Are you familiar with reader mode by the way? In Firefox it is available via an icon that resembles a text document in the address bar (or if it is stubborn and does not show the button, by directly going to about:reader?url= + the url you want to view). The customizations are available from an unobtrusive menu on the page and include font-size, line height, serifs or not and light, dark and a sepia mode.
blamestross 5y ago
"sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature" Yeast, Chickens, and Dogs are the most developed technologies we have. (Brassica oleracea gets a runner up) Everything else we have is an unsustainable fad by comparison. Should something even count as technology if it can't reproduce almost without bound in the care of the average person? (settlements and factories count as reproducing technology!). I worry that production of computers is too complex and requiring of rare resources to be long term sustainable, but then I think the same of everything invented past the Bronze Age.

shandor 5y ago

I got the feeling from the styling of the text that the author had purposefully chosen a presentation that closely mimics that of a dead-tree book. I thought it was a nice touch, and fit well with the overall atmosphere of the piece. ...but yes, it was also rather heavy on the eyes on my 4K display.

georgestrakhov 5y ago

Thank you so much for your kind words. To be clear, I stole the "indistinguishable from nature" thing from Karl Schroeder, as marked in the footnotes. You should check out his talk, it's great. Also sorry for the css and readability. I just used the default Google docs html export formatting which is a bit shit... Will try to get something better next time.

_Microft 5y ago

I have to do the opposite on some pages that are posted here. This page looked so much better than most others on the iPhone and still ok with Firefox on Windows. Are you familiar with reader mode by the way? In Firefox it is available via an icon that resembles a text document in the address bar (or if it is stubborn and does not show the button, by directly going to about:reader?url= + the url you want to view). The customizations are available from an unobtrusive menu on the page and include font-size, line height, serifs or not and light, dark and a sepia mode.

blamestross 5y ago

"sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature" Yeast, Chickens, and Dogs are the most developed technologies we have. (Brassica oleracea gets a runner up) Everything else we have is an unsustainable fad by comparison. Should something even count as technology if it can't reproduce almost without bound in the care of the average person? (settlements and factories count as reproducing technology!). I worry that production of computers is too complex and requiring of rare resources to be long term sustainable, but then I think the same of everything invented past the Bronze Age.