Interesting. I didn't know they moved the Siegessäule. Reminds me of what I read about the approach to the Vatican and the way Mussolini obliterated bits of (messy) historic city to achieve a suitably scenic and impressive vista.

Microbrewery? ;-)

The blind leading the blind and both shall walk into a transparent wall.

Neither has to be blind to walk into that one. Just distracted.

(I too walked into a trasparent wall once, in an office I was unfamiliar with. How I cursed the people who kept it so clean it was invisible.)

The Monty Python custard pie lecture is also hilarious.

Perfect example of great physical comedy with no risk of death.

For a look at just how hands on early motoring was, check out this article about Kipling and cars (he was an enthusiastic "early adopter"): http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_steamtactics_kipearly.htm Reading this really does sound like the early days of computing (or as I imagine from reading about it).

Part of the politics is that the Republic of China still officially claims to be the legitimate government of the whole of China. So it really is recognize one or the other. Politics within Taiwan have so far prevented declaration of Taiwanese independence from China in any form, and the One-China policy that everybody agrees to prevents recognition of the PRC and establishment of two-state relationships. Until either of these political realities change, the formal fiction of unrecognized statehood is unlikely to change.

The RoK and DPRK each claim sovereignty over all of Korea, which both sides legally view as one country. That hasn’t stopped the rest of the world from recognizing them separately.

Taiwan’s partial recognition is due to pressure from China, not any logical impossibility of recognizing two different countries that officially claim to be one.

This is not very true. Taiwan, Republic of China, has made attempts to change its name, only to be met with the threat of war from the People’s Republic of China if they perform a name change to Republic of Taiwan.

I think it’s about time China gets the chance to make good on this promise, or gets defanged when it turns out they don’t have the stomach for it (they have a good thing going, shame to let it be ruined by war).

Everyone is tiptoeing around them for fear of waking the dragon.

An uneasy peace is miles better than war.

To a point. I’m not saying we should have a war. I’m saying we should stop tiptoeing around China.

When was this?

I guess this is why I have free to play games sitting on my phone but never play them. They take me through a tutorial full of tasks and menus and resources and I subconsciously feel intimated by all the work.

Yeah, I've tried a few and after a while they feel like they're mainly aimed at returning players - you get pummeled by notifications, events, login bonuses, all kinds of terms that as a new player you're not yet familiar with. But that's the new player experience which they can just optimize if they choose to do so.

I learned that from Tony Robinson's "Worst Jobs in History"

http://www.unofficialtonyrobinsonwebsite.co.uk/pages/worst_j...

The quotes in the Wired article are all kind of the opposite though. For example:

"Today, 99.9 percent of humanity cannot beat the best commercial software at blitz chess. Within the decade, it's likely the machine on your desk will know how to play chess better than any human has played the game since its invention in AD 600."

I suppose that really just makes your point though. Even in 1995 we were only really trying to delay the inevitable. If playing chess is ultimately a mechanical process and baking bread is ultimately a mechanical process, then ultimately we should be make able to make a machine that does it better than we can.

> Even in 1995 we were only really trying to delay the inevitable.

Do people do this? Are there really people out there that are resistant to believing that machines can or eventually will outperform humans in any discrete task? I can see a reasonable doubt about general intelligence, but other than that surely every mechanical advance since the plow paints a clear trajectory.

These kinds of articles always strike me as absurdist handwringing. I suspect that it's just fear mongering for views. Is anyone here[0] actually in doubt about machines performing better than humans? I mean despite all of recorded history.

[0]I mean you, the reader yourself. Not speculation of other people's doubt, because I'm not sure these people exist.

Fair assertion. One I mostly agree with too.

But, what's the point then? I mean, if there's no point in pursuing anything because a machine will always be better and no one is going to appreciate anything handmade anymore... What's the point? To... eat, sleep and die?

I personally don't understand why a good portion of the population nowadays is okay with the idea that humans will be obsolete.

The point is simple: to paraphrase Marie Kondo, does it spark joy?

There are many things a human is better at, for example creativity and art. Maybe a computer will eventually be a better painter, but it's impossible for a computer to be a human. A work of art draws its power from how it speaks to the human experience, as such I don't think a computer will ever make good art in that sense.

Even speaking to something more concrete, just because a computer can play chess better than I can (as can the vast majority of humans), doesn't mean a game of chess with a friend is worthless. It's about the conversation, the challenge of matching wits, pushing your mind to see new things, all those things have meaning.

That's the point.

Musicians and artists have been co-creating with machines (including AI) for about 50 years. We play with the machines. Look at any artist working with AI and you will see that the human artist does a lot of process, experimentation, editing and presentation. I think it's a weird personification to declare that computers will do everything themselves.