It starts as a kind of okay near-real alternate history of early computing in the Silicon Prairie, and ends with some really powerful storytelling about the fragility of humanity.
It captured a bit the feeling of being at the start of the computer boom in 60s-70s. The partnernship between the 2 male protagonists was central till the end of show (evolving through different phases). The show was great, it went in very unexpected directions later on.
The blockchain hype bubble should probably be pretty near in memory for most people I would suspect. I thought that was a wild, useless ride until Ai took it over.
- My wife is Korean, and a lot of Korean food is fermented, preserved, or otherwise kept using a traditional pre-refrigeration method. There are a number of really beautiful traditions that come from the logistics of keeping stuff around for months, or even years. The idea of things being diverted off at various stages of fermentation for different uses was a massive revelation to my American mind.
- That being said, my Korean relatives are completely blown away by some old Western methods of fermentation especially around land mammal meats -- various sausages, smoked meats, salted meats -- and fermented milk products like cheeses.
- The best restaurant in the world, I think in Norway, featured a dedicated fermentation R&D lab as part of their core restaurant menu development process.
- The global trade in alcoholic drinks in based on truly beautiful and sophisticated battles between various micro-organisms.
- My friends in the bio-world recently (in the last few years) have taken an interest in fermentation as part of the thinking on long-term food sources for space habitability. Nothing produces the incredible complexity in microbiology, specifically ones good for food sources for humans, creates anything close to the complexity of fermentation. The thought it using stages of fermentation to produce all of the feed material needed for complete human nutrition. But it's perpetual.
Bonus - you might also divert some parts of the process into fuel, air, and other required processes. It's incredibly compelling, highly technical (informed by modern AI models) research.
Vanilla beans are also fermented before use. They start green, before they are processed and ultimately fermented, giving rise to the delicious aroma and flavor we're all familiar with.
Examples, other than kimchi and probably some fish sauces? Don't know much about Korean food, but I liked what I tried, the few times I ate at a Korean restaurant.
The fermentation traditions around soybeans are particularly interesting. The starting point is called meju [1] which are blocks of open air fermented soybeans in blocks.
From there you can continue to process and ferment them to produce a variety of sauces, pastes, soup bases, and so on - soy sauce is the most famous in the west, but the rest of the products have honestly mind-blowing, highly complex, tastes.
There's also a broad tradition of preserving and fermenting various seafoods, from the corvina to fermented skate (hongeo) [2].
Something I learned on HN years ago was the principle that often something that is riding to the top of the hyper curve is usually not a good product, but a good feature in another product.
At CES this year, one of the things that was noted was that "AI" was not being pushed so much as the product, but "things with AI" or "things powered by AI".
This change in messaging seems to be aligning with other macro movements around AI in the public zeitgeist (as AI continues to later phases of the hyper curve) that the companies' who've gone all-in on AI are struggling to adapt to.
The end-state is to be seen, but it's clear that the present technology around AI has utility, but doesn't seem to have enough utility to lift off the hype curve on an continuously upward slope.
Dell is figuring this out, Microsoft is seeing it in their own metrics, Apple and AWS has more or less dipped toes in the pool...I'd wager that we'll see some wild things in the next few years as these big bets unravel into more prosaic approaches that are more realistically aligned with the utility AI is actually providing.
Before I moved to where I live now, I had a doctor's office open in my neighborhood I could walk to. At first I thought it was amazing and I started going there. It was a really fancy place, state of art, loads of diagnostic equipment and a limited on-site lab, almost a hospital. But pretty soon I realized I was almost always seeing Nurse Practitioners, or Doctors so fresh out of medical school they were still wet behind the ears.
Even worse, they were almost always wrong about the diagnosis and I'd find myself on 3 or 4 rounds of antibiotics, or would go to the pharmacy to pick up something and they'd let me know the cocktail I had just been prescribed had dangerous counterindications. I finally stopped going when I caught a doctor searching webmd when I was on my fourth return visit for a simple sinus infection that had turned into a terrible ear infection.
My next doctor wasn't much better. And I had really started to lose trust in the medical system and in medical training.
We moved a few years ago to a different city, and I hadn't found a doctor yet. One day I took sick with something, went to a local walk-in clinic in a strip mall used mostly by the local underprivileged immigrant community.
Luck would have it I now found an amazing doctor who's been 100% correct in every diagnosis and line of care for both me and my wife since - including some difficult and sometimes hard to diagnose issues. She has basically no equipment except a scale, a light, a sphygmomanometer, and a stethoscope. Does all of her work using old fashioned techniques like listening to breathing or palpation and will refer to the local imaging center or send out to the local lab nearby if something deeper is needed.
The difference in absolutely wild. I sometimes wonder if she and my old doctors are even in the same profession.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you don't like your doctor, try some other ones until you find a good one, because they can be a world difference in quality -- and don't be moved by the shine of the office.
Yes, I've found the more financially motivated doctors in the higher end "concierge" type centers are not as skilled or experienced or overall motivated as the ones who seek out the patients with difficult cases at government reimbursement rates. The irony...
This engineering is so incredible, but engineering of this class is constrained by use-case and more importantly money. It makes one wonder, if we lived in a post-scarcity society, where money was no longer a constraint, in what other areas could humanity build?
What if there is no such thing as a "post scarcity" society in the sense of a clear boundary and categorical difference, just a long, fairly consistent, gradient of increasing productivity and efficiency and increasing abundance?
Under this lens we have endless examples of answers to your question today. Hobbyists with CNC machines, high school students sequencing DNA, satellites and drones monitoring for forest fires, a good portion of HN posts about open source hobby projects, all the art people produce, etc.
We also have a lot of sci-fi which presents many ideas, some of which may come true, some of which have come true, and some which will probably never happen.
But my guess is this is all missing the spirit of your question, and I don't want to come off as curmudgeon, so I will do my best to answer in good faith:
If we truly have abundance and all needs are met, and there is no longer a need to be productive:
- I am a curious person so I will say experiments to advance understanding. Building more and more complex simulations to understand illusive aspects of reality.
- I am a creative person so I will say art, more impressive and expansive installations which serve no purpose other than to express and inspire.
- and I am a realist, and although it is not a motivation if mine, I expect it always will be of some others, so I will say social status. Ever more weird and complex ways to infer social status.
In other words, if we no longer need to engineer for economic productivity then perhaps we will engineer more for things that are not directly economic productive.
But I think it's more likely that the free energy principle applies at all levels of abstraction and we will always have some forcing function that biases resources towards increasing economic productivity, with some small percentage (with ever increasing absolute magnitude) left over to play with.
Money is just a form of potential energy for getting jobs done, and the more productive we are and the more money we have the more ambitious jobs people will want to get done.
A true pioneer who helped popularize computing in so many ways. Computer Chronicles absolutely helped catalog so many things that happened in computing, and in itself captured the changing computing culture of its era.
Suits, ties, combovers, oh my! But it also helped put faces and voices to names, introduce and show video of computing in action, trying to solve real problems, and showcasing businesses trying to figure out how to carve a niche for themselves in an emergent market.
It's also some of the best TV ever made, snappy, restrained, strangely calming.
Totally worth a watch.
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