Doesn't sound exceptional to me. Most of the authors I have some personal knowledge of manage through exactly that: spouses, grants, book sales, residencies and teaching creative writing.
Compared to the postal workers, accountants and insurance agents named in this article they can count as exceptions too, save for the creative writing teachers.
I think Don DeLillo quit his job before his first book and never looked back.
Surely only economists get excited by the revelation that consumers have to have money to buy things. I'd say domestic service is going to make a comeback. I do think I'd make an excellent man servant. Eke out my later years being ever so slightly superior to my employer without ever being openly insolent. Hang on...
If this scenario comes to pass, then the class war in labor markets will have been won by capital. That would spell the end of the promise of non-violent resistance. What other leverage would ordinary people have if their labor is worthless?
Blue collar work is somewhat insulated so long as humans are cheaper and less fickle than robots.
We have seen in Gaza and to native americans what capital/power does to populations deemed surplus. It's not pretty. of course, that kind of violence happens once their land is desired, before that they are simply repressed.
I think if the superintelligence hypothesis really does happen, we will need to have a rapid accommodation for the bulk of the population or things will get quite out of control.
I was at a restaurant last night with a group, and it was the first time I heard people actively organizing on how to block new data centers in the area. It felt like being in a scene in a sci-fi movie.
I do think if these feedback loops happen too quickly of white collar displacement, there might be some real violence against data centers.
That seems possible, but if people are severely displaced for a significant duration, damage to property is going to seem quaint if there is no New Deal.
Better at reading yes but not necessarily better at comprehension which is what I believe people are getting at in these discussions. I read and listen. Initially my comprehension and memory while listening was inferior, but you can learn the skill of deep concentration on audio (or some may have it natively).
I loved Starlight but I'm not sure it was procedural world generation. I mean there was a map of stars printed with the game so they weren't changing. There was a small bit of variation in terms of what one found on planets and so on...the key was it felt like an open world because it was big enough and there was nothing stopping you from doing what you liked and when (except resources).
It was procedural at least in the sense that you couldn't store the data for all the planets in memory (or even store it on disk) on the 1980s systems it ran on. So you needed a way to generate the data on the fly.
yeah but you're dismissing the fact that this was just a pregen table of data back then. They made a map based on that, sure, but from that table came... everything else and you can't store all that data on floppy.
Similar techniques apply today. Pregen like 100,000 stars. Give them names and locations in the galaxy, treat them as your "locations of interest" with a seed. The rest can just be another cloud of particles with no interest and if the player visits, you can RNG whatever based on the seed. No two systems can share a seed. They can, however, share a branch.
They bragged about it being procedural in interviews.
What I was never clear on was the degree of cherry picking they did. There were 800 worlds on something like nine disks, each unique and peppered with minerals and artifacts.
Star Control 2 (which takes many Starflight influences and also hired Greg Johnson) also used a lot of procedural generation. It has around 500 stars and 4000 worlds with minerals and lifeforms. I recall the SC2 lead programmer Fred Ford saying they used a fixed seed, and they went through many seeds until they found one that looked good. I presume Starflight was of the same mindset.
Procedural generation can use a fixed seed, it's not too uncommon. For instance, Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall's map was procedurally generated, but is the same for every player.
Some instinct, waking at these memories, stronger than education or piety, quickened within him at every near approach to that life, an instinct subtle and hostile, and armed him against acquiescence. The chill and order of the life repelled him. He saw himself rising in the cold of the morning and filing down with the others to early mass and trying vainly to struggle with his prayers against the fainting sickness of his stomach.
The Bunkers. My father told me the story many times as a child and he warned me sternly never to buy Silver. There's always more Silver he said. People will be dredging it out of old cupboards.
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