I love Benjamin's writing, but looking back after the better part of a century, I don't think that his theses hold up well; he would reject as Not Art much of the latter 20th century's output, which is an appealing position for a curmudgeon, but not a very practical one.
I've come to believe that the only useful notions of Art are either the Supreme Court definition ("I know it when I see it") or the wildly all-encompassing ones; "anything arranged or interpreted according to aesthetic principle," is more or less my working definition. Any other definition either ends up rejecting vast swathes of things that clearly are art or setting you up for reductio ad absurdum.
So yeah, I think it's art. Now we can move onto more interesting questions, like "who is the artist?"
Note: anyone interested in this stuff should absolutely read Benjamin!
So what's the "aura" in this case, how do we measure it? Is it something that some humans ("artists") can produce but other humans ("non-artists") can't? Is it something that can only be created by something with mitochondria or which processes information using serotonin?
thanks for this reference, I am surprised that this is the first time I've heard of the book... I had an art history professor in college that was adamant that photography is not art, and I have to agree even though there are beautiful photographs out there.
I read for a full 5 minutes and the author had not said anything substantive, just their own thoughts about pigeon love based on some pigeons he saw in his backyard once. Ok.
> I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing
You're reading too much into Sam's quote. This is almost certainly because East Asia has zero PC culture (homogenous populations; nothing in history), so he doesn't feel those particular pressures there that he's reacting against here. That's all.
I think I read it pretty much at the surface level. I'm not interested in reading into what he meant, his choice of words is plenty to interpret.
'PC culture' is not a thing. what you call PC culture is free speech working as designed...everyone has an equal right to free speech, free action, and free thought. What you call PC culture is in reality nothing more than a group with power demanding their thinking be privileged above critique.
The fact that a person with extreme financial and social power feels 'freer' expressing their point of view in a totalitarian regime than in a place where someone with lesser power might have their own free speech rights is a demonstration of how free speech fails not how it thrives.
Fetishizing rights, as is becoming common in the US, is an impediment to equitable access to the power those rights give. It confuses the issue and is nothing more than a recuperative act[0] designed to reinforce existing structures of power.
Ya. I mean, Trump has far more overt supporters in Zhongguangcun than Silicon Valley. Nothing is off the table for discussion, though you only talk about Chinese politics in smaller groups.
I think fact that you get fired if you bring up biology at your company's brown bag on diversity (a la Damore), means, just maybe, that you can't actually say some of those things.
Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. Damore made some factual statements (this is OK), but then attempted to draw some non-factual conclusions from those statements that made his continued employment impossible (what if he was part of a promotion or hiring committee for a female employee? his prior statements would be pretty damning)
Read Damore's treatise and replace every mention of gender with one of race, and see how it reads.
You know Sam, if you stopped censoring controversial positions or posts from hacker news I might take you seriously.
Coming from someone who is now almost automatically moved to the bottom of threads or the ridiculous "See More" section you all implemented, who as a result just doesn't post much anymore.
Sam doesn't do any of that. I do, so you should take it up with me.
"Censorship" and "moderation" sometimes refer to the same thing from different points of view. The basis of HN moderation is not ideological agreement or disagreement, but the site rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Most of the time when people complain that they've been censored/moderated because of their "controversial positions", they're unaware or don't want to admit that they broke the site guidelines. Of course we also make mistakes.
Maybe someday I can persuade you that it's a harder problem than it seems. But my point was that the things people post on HN no more represent YC, let alone Sam, than YouTube comments represent Larry and Sergey.
I understand taking leadership to change a culture is a difficult task. But when you have the actual means and influence to do it and choose not to do so, you do hold some responsibility for the results.
HN does in fact reflect on YC and Sam, whether you want it to or not. It's their site. And in a different way than Youtube is Larry and Sergey's site (something I at least hope you understand), though even they don't escape responsibility for what shows up there.
The effects of vehicular pollution? If sitting in your garage with a running car kills you, obviously being surrounded by traffic all day in the cities we live in must be absolutely terrible for you.
"For older women, breathing air that is heavily polluted by vehicle exhaust and other sources of fine particulates nearly doubles the likelihood of developing dementia, finds a study published Tuesday."
You're still extremely optimistic about the 'intelligence' of state of art data driven approaches, even if they aren't general intelligence. I'm not sure where that optimism is coming from.
The chess example... "They were wrong about AI never beating grand masters, they're going to be wrong about X". Well, if you make the board bigger, there won't be an AI system that can beat a human.
Play Dota 2, but introduce a random variable that can't be known beforehand by anyone, like things in the real world, and the AI will always be beatable.
Great for specific domains, obviously, but your optimism about doing more advanced stuff, perhaps doesn't seem so grounded.
> Play Dota 2, but introduce a random variable that can't be known beforehand by anyone, like things in the real world, and the AI will always be beatable.
I wonder about a board game that randomizes the rules in simple ways. A human could understand the rule changes and adapt. To what extent can software be trained to do that?
People have already put work into finding chess-like games, or variants of chess, that humans can play well (especially if they have some familiarity with chess) but that computers will struggle with.
Arimaa -- where computers did eventually reach the point of defeating humans -- is an example of this. Arimaa tried to attack both "opening books" and move-tree searches, by allowing the initial position to vary every game and by having each turn consist of up to four individual moves by potentially multiple pieces. The official challenges also required that computer Arimaa systems run on commodity hardware, and did not allow for modifying the computer "player" in between games of a challenge. It got through twelve yearly human-versus-computer challenges before the humans finally lost.
Sounds like you're talking about general game playing[0], where a computer is programmed to take, as input, the rules to the game, and then compete. Looks like competitions are against other computers, but this isn't an area I'd expect humans to dominate in, long-term.
Out of curiosity, we would need ~500 of these stations in their current form to offset a typical coal power plant (7.5 thousand tons co2/ year, a claim from Climework's about video, v. 3.5 million tons co2 / year), or about 5-6 million stations to offset global co2 yearly emission (40-45 billion tons co2/ year).
...at the current efficiency levels. Note that this is only their second installation, so don't expect any miracles. The technology will improve, I'm sure.
Wow really? That seems like a small number. Given that aroun 70+ million cars were sold in 2016, we probably have the industrial capacity to offset the yearly emissions.
I wonder how cheap these will get and if they can be deployed en masse easily
They also mention that it is considerably more efficient to capture carbon at the source. The CO2 concentration is about 200 times higher at the plant (10% vs 0.04%). They state that it costs about 1/10 as much to capture at the source.
So extrapolating from that, then the the plant they built in Switzerland, which 900 tonnes/yr directly from the air, could potentially capture 9000 tonnes/yr and would handily manage a coal power plant.
WeWork basically parodies itself.