First time watching Star Trek in Tunisia in the early 1990s. It was a very hot summer, and the air-conditioned basement of my friend’s folks contained every episode of The Original Series and The Next Generation, and a computer with games like Rogue, as well as American junk food like sour cream and onion chips and cherry-vanilla ice cream, so we spent quite a bit of time there :D
Star Trek TNG’s optimistic view of humanity overcoming its primitive base instincts.
Videogames and VR as nascent versions of the holodeck.
Jokingly speaking in stentorian English, like a captain, while riding on a boat. A young person asks me where I learned to speak like that. Answer: Watching Jean-Luc Picard in TNG, and reading some VVilliam The Spear Shaker!
> “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, and we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.”
> “Seize the time... Live now! Make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again.”
Thanks for this summary. Very useful and informative.
After the 2026 heat wave in Europe and elsewhere, and expectations of things getting hotter with global warming and El Niño, it’s already past the time to prepare, but better late than never.
Will governments have to subsidize solar/inverter/battery/heat pump systems to keep people going?
What are people doing to get ready for a “hot house Earth” future around the world?
> As long as there is the desire to gain, to achieve, to become, at whatever level, there is inevitably anxiety, sorrow, fear. The ambition to be rich, to be this or that, drops away only when we see the rottenness, the corruptive nature of ambition itself. The moment we see that the desire for power in any form — for the power of a prime minister, of a judge, of a priest, of a guru — is fundamentally evil, we no longer have the desire to be powerful. But we don't see that ambition is corrupting, that the desire for power is evil; on the contrary, we say that we shall use power for good — which is all nonsense. A wrong means can never be used towards a right end. If the means is evil, the end will also be evil. Good is not the opposite of evil; it comes into being only when that which is evil has utterly ceased.
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> So, if we don't understand the whole significance of desire, with its results, its by-products, merely to try to get rid of desire has no meaning.
> If, however, prose is LLM-generated, this social contract becomes ripped up: a reader cannot assume that the writer understands their ideas because they might not so much have read the product of the LLM that they tasked to write it. If one is lucky, these are LLM hallucinations: obviously wrong and quickly discarded. If one is unlucky, however, it will be a kind of LLM-induced cognitive dissonance: a puzzle in which pieces don’t fit because there is in fact no puzzle at all. This can leave a reader frustrated: why should they spend more time reading prose than the writer spent writing it?
> This can be navigated, of course, but it is truly perilous: our writing is an important vessel for building trust — and that trust can be quickly eroded if we are not speaking with our own voice.
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