I think the parent is referring to agents as outward exploration that may come up empty-handed, but I see LLMs and agents as inward exploration, trying to define what is attention, knowledge, intelligence, consciousness, agency, etc. So in this case it is the terra incognita of the human "soul" that LLMs are exploring.
I listened to the audio book version of War and Peace. I think it was something like 25-30 hours. The audio format helped keep the pace going and also it helped with the names. Although for some things, the audio format made it harder to look up in the dictionary, like I kept hearing agitant instead of adjutant, so that part didn't make sense in a lot of the military scenes. I agree with the parent that the book was very engaging, parts even felt like I was watching a movie, e.g. the drunken party tying a bear to a police officer, the foxhunt scene, the duel, the battles like when Petya gets shot, and the burning of Moscow. I even liked the abstract ending when Tolstoy relates human history to calculus so that each individual person has an infinitesimal but real contribution to history.
Corsica to Marseilles has an overnight ferry, at least back in 2000, but I don't think it's has sleeper cabins, more set up like an overnight flight, but a big cruise ship form factor. Instead of cabins they had space for cars. They had the option of getting a ticket without a seat so you just roam around the boat and find an open space, including outside on the decks.
As a resident of MN I'm very proud of what fellow Minnesotans did to stop ICE's violent and illegal detentions here. Unfortunately the non-violent protest and anti-ICE techniques were met with violence from ICE, but the protests themselves were non-violent and well organized.
Fall, Or Dodge in Hell (Neil Stephenson) and The Waves (Ken Liu) are two other good stories about brain scanning and transhumanism. The first one is a ridiculously long novel about a future where the cloud is increasingly used for uploading souls of scanned brains, and the second one is a short story where people on a spaceship eventually evolve into noncorporal beings.
I just had a nice trip to Venice and I was curious about it's history. Supposedly, the Venice republic lasted almost 1000 years, basically from after the fall of Rome to Napoleon based on a weird lottery system for choosing the Doge.
At ECAI conference last week there was a panel discussion and someone had a great quote, "in Europe we are in the golden age of AI regulation, while the US and China are in the actual golden age of AI".
Actually if you want to find the origin of bell bottoms, according to a museum exhibit on men's clothing I saw, it was the sans coulottes in the 1700s. They protested the aristocrats, who wore high-legged pants, and eventually led to the French revolution and the association of bell bottoms with revolutionary/countercultural things.
Good discussion on this article. I went to a Vampire Weekend concert last night and they used the 45 minute encore to play covers that were requested by the audience. They got through about 10 songs (a verse or two and chorus), everything from Talking Heads, to Creed, Sublime, Beastie Boys, and Prince and Bob Dylan (the concert was in Minneapolis, so they probably rehearsed the last two). So basically the band knew/memorized the tune for hundreds/thousands of songs from the past couple decades and the singer knew/memorized the words. So I think that this example supports the authors premise that creativity comes from some form of memorization.
Actually I heard the opposite... I was a premed student and I did and internship at a hospital and one of the doctors said it's actually fairly difficult to kill someone by accident, ie you have to mess up very badly or the patient must already be gravely ill for an accident to result in death. Still, the comment implies that doctors do in fact make mistakes and it was one of the experiences I had in that internship that made me decided to switch majors.
grind saffron in a mortar and pestle, then add it to yogurt with some salt, pepper, and diced onions (maybe some thyme or coriander or other spices if you are feeling fancy). Basically get the yogurt to a nice color and flavor, slightly on the salty side. Then use the yogurt mixture to marinate the chicken, preferably overnight. Cook on a grill or bake and finish with broiling to brown it.
I went to a conference in Nara last year and at one of the receptions I told a Japanese attendee that I was sorry to hear about the assassination. I joked that my name is pronounced Abe like Abe Lincoln, not like Shinzo Abe. He kind of shrugged and said it would be kind of like if it had happened to Trump in the US, in that there were a lot of of people that didn't like him.
The article makes it seem like people discovered about the cult connections after the fact. I wish I had known more about it to ask more questions. If anyone has more insight about it, I'd be glad to learn more.
Ironically I was reading 1Q84 at the time, which is about a cult in Japan.