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    Six Gutenberg Revolutions in a Row—Asterisk

    An interview with Ken Liu and Ada Palmer: The vast majority of computing power on Earth is human brains, and a huge amount of it is dedicated to worrying about where lunch is coming from tomorrow. If you want to free up computing power, solve poverty. adactio.com/links/22833

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    Tuesday session

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    Bad AI doesn’t smell | Clearleft

    The best way to avoid AI mistakes is to run research the old-fashioned way; get out there and run research in the field and complete your own analysis of the findings. It may take a little longer, but truly valuable research is worth the effort. adactio.com/links/22825

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    Twenty years ago today, I signed up for Twitter. Ten years ago, I wrote about the first ten years: https://adactio.com/journal/11436 I can’t say I miss it.

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    Palaces Of The Crow by Ray Nayler

    I really liked Ray Nayler’s The Mountain In The Sea . I also liked The Tusks Of Extinction . But reading those back-to-back gave me pause: At times it seems to relish in describing the worst that humanity is capable of. It starts to veer into misanthropy. I said: I hope that the next Ray Nayler book I read won’t tip over into wallowing in the worst of our species. Well, when I cracked open Palaces Of The Crow , my mind was immediately put at ease. And I mean immediately. Before the story even begins, the book opens with two quotes. One is the closing passage of Darwin’s On The Origin Of Species describing “the war of nature”, but the other quote is from Kropotkin: Mutual aid is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle. That sums up the themes of Palaces Of The Crow . On the one hand, we do indeed get the worst that humans are capable of. But on the other hand, we also get not only the best that humans are capable of, but non-humans too. As with The Mountain In The Sea , this is a terrestrial first-contact story. We’ve gone from cephalopods to corvids. And we’ve gone from the near future back to Eastern Europe during the Second World War. I’m always nervous of any piece of popular entertainment that attempts to feature the Holocaust, but I feel that here it’s done with respect. It never comes across as gratuitous. There are four main human characters; a Polish boy in the Soviet army, a Lithuanian Jewish girl, a young boy who never speaks, and a Roma girl. The narrative is set almost entirely within a forest. At times this book reminded me of The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff . Both stories feature a young woman trying to survive in the wilderness. But whereas The Vaster Wilds is ultimately a tale of the individual, Palaces Of The Crow is very much a story of the group. And whether that group comprises humans, crows, or both, the message is clear: Social animals are built to survive only among one another. There is a cautionary subplot involving another denizen of the forest who goes it alone. His fate is very different to that of the group. A story of four youngsters in a forest during World War II sounds like it should be a brutal survivalist tale. But Palaces Of The Crow has more in common with Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built In Hell and Rutger Bregman’s Humankind . Towards the end, the text sometimes can’t resist saying the subtext out loud, but this is a minor quibble with what is otherwise a beautifully constructed work. I’m not going to lie, Palaces Of The Crow is absolutely devastating in places. But it’s also life-affirming. I know that sounds trite, but this book is the opposite of trite. It’s visceral and unflinching and beautiful.