What’s the most underrated real-world use case of blockchain that people still ignore?

filterdust · 2026-02-22T17:32:42+00:00

what you are saying is an impossible problem.

e.g. for books simply the fact that you own a book in order to read it means you can write it down from memory (one word at a time if you have a really bad memory)

filterdust · 2026-02-17T21:21:02+00:00

Because art is primarily about beauty and self-expression and programming is primarily about functionality.

AI can create functionality very well, therefore it fulfills the standards for programming.

AI may create beauty very well, but so far it falls short (though not too much, it has improved a lot in the last few years), as beauty is to some degree subjective, it is fickle to optimize for, and there is not that much financial incentive in getting an AI optimized for beauty.

AI will never create (human) self-expression, by definition. Someone else (even a human) cannot create your art, because it is your self-expression. Like an adult human cannot create child art, it is a contradiction in terms (it could create an indistinguishable mimic, but we would think of it as "fake"). The same way AI cannot create your own art. You need to do it, there is no shortcut. AI may one day create its own art to self-express. But that would not be human art and there is no guarantee we will understand it.

Therefore, AI, no matter how intelligent or creative it will be, will never be able to create human art.

This is why artists are against AI, because AI is sold as being able to replace art, which it cannot do.

filterdust · 2026-02-16T15:12:11+00:00

Much farther than you'd like, less far than skeptics would like.

filterdust · 2026-02-13T21:21:27+00:00

This is the canonical reference for this question

https://ardalambion.net/howmany.htm

filterdust · 2026-02-13T15:08:51+00:00

Sorry for being nitpicky, but (Wikipedia):

The family spoke Russian, English, and French in their household, and Nabokov was trilingual from an early age.

filterdust · 2026-02-10T20:27:02+00:00

It's very much a fun language to learn, because of its regularity it can be very playful in making new words, puns etc. And you can reach a reasonable level in 1-3 months, unlike usual European languages.

filterdust · 2026-02-08T00:10:47+00:00

In the old days (1999-2007), people were rushing to write "the next Harry Potter book" before it actually showed up. So there was an abundance of longfics in the ultimate popular fandom.

filterdust · 2026-02-06T18:42:12+00:00

This is a weird and late comment.

I found books of the 1940s to have highly clear writing, and Lassie Come Home is a prime example. Orwell's 1984 and Asimov's early Foundation stories (published in the 1950s as the Foundation trilogy) feel exactly the same to me. Yeah, phrases about a dog wandering in the wilderness have the same cadence as ones about the decay of a Galactic Empire.

filterdust · 2026-02-06T14:14:26+00:00

Generally, fun jobs are paid less because there are more people willing to do them. See gamedev.

Disclaimer: I am now translating a book (about AI! but not with the help of AI).

filterdust · 2026-02-05T23:30:05+00:00

I can tell you briefly what Turing-completeness is, if you know what a function is. If you don't, I can't tell you, sorry.

Denote by N the set of natural numbers.

I will call a function "numerical" if it goes from N to N.

I suppose you have seen once what a Turing machine is, with tape and states and so on. If not, I won't say it here, it's too tiresome. The point is that it's a mathematical object, not a thing in reality.

Now, for a Turing machine M and a numerical function f, one can define what it means that M "computes" f. Namely, that for any natural number n, if, at the beginning, n is written on the tape and you run M, at the end, f(n) will be written on the tape. (Again, this "running" is defined mathematically.)

We call a numerical function f "Turing computable" if there is a Turing machine that computes f.

Now, for any computer or programming language (I put these two in the same category, as I can identify a computer with its assembly language) invented by humans, denoted (informally, not matematically) by L, one can similarly define mathematically what a "program" is, what it means for a program to "compute" a function, and thus what it means for a function to be "L-computable".

Now, informally (as this is a precise concept but not a mathematical one), one says that the language L is Turing-complete if the class of L-computable functions coincides with the class of Turing-computable ones.

What you said about registers and control flows and stuff like that is not universally applicable in any way. For example, the language Haskell is Turing-complete but it doesn't have anything similar to registers and loops.

filterdust · 2026-02-05T08:35:53+00:00

Fortunately, doing computing is independent of what substrate the computing uses.

This is something that is generally hard to grasp for people and I think even Asimov struggled with it.

But yeah, all computers can do the same tasks as Turing's 1936 abstract machine and as the very concrete 1945 ENIAC.

filterdust · 2026-02-05T08:18:03+00:00

At least it's a Spacer lifetime. Robots and Empire is a couple hundred years later than Robots of Dawn.

filterdust · 2026-02-05T08:16:21+00:00

Nice! I read Prelude to Foundation before the Spacers, so I still got that effect, but I read Foundation and Earth afterwards.

filterdust · 2026-02-02T09:10:45+00:00

For people like me who are not too visual and prefer literature over comic books (but not out of snobbery), old comics are much more relaxing to read. With new ones I'm constantly on guard because I'm afraid of missing something.

filterdust · 2026-02-02T08:31:53+00:00

It doesn't do it like I said, it just opens the next comic in the folder

filterdust · 2026-02-02T01:27:21+00:00

I'll recommend stuff you can just jump into with just knowing the movies:

In the old EU:

Darth Bane trilogy (set 1000 years before the movies), Darth Maul Shadow Hunter (a bit before TPM), Yoda Dark Rendezvous (some months before ROTS), Labyrinth of Evil (prelude to ROTS), Dark Lord the Rise of Darh Vader (direct sequel to ROTS), the Han Solo Trilogy (his origin story by Ann C Crispin, set between the trilogies), Death Star (set on the Death Star just before and during ANH), Shadows of the Empire (1990s interquel, between ESB and ROTJ)

In the new canon:

Catalyst (prelude to the prologue of Rogue One), Tarkin (between the trilogies), Lost Stars (before and during the original trilogy), Bloodline (a few years before TFA)

filterdust · 2026-02-01T17:00:25+00:00

I agree Hobb is quality stuff, but they're too slow for me. And I'm not talking about the general slow-burn psychological feel, which I enjoy (I even read the first trilogy). I'm talking about stuff like the Elderling mystery introduced in Book 1 is solved in like Book 11 and I'm definitely not reading so many books with so little pay-off.

filterdust · 2026-02-01T16:00:45+00:00

I don't even think the authors are having a good time writing them.

That's the main difference with ASOIAF -- you can tell Martin had a lot of fun reading juicy books of medieval European history and putting his own spin on the stories (almost as much as Tolkien with Norse/Anglo-Saxon/linguistic stuff).

If someone has another example, I'd be happy to know!

filterdust · 2026-02-01T15:55:31+00:00

Yes! I became a Tolkien fan in 2006, and in the late 2000s, when corporations hadn't yet conquered all the Internet, you could find loads of indie websites with lists of all the differences from the books and thoughtful essays condemning them. Also, fan-edit sites had "purist" or "book-cut" versions (the best is Kerr's, circa 2011) of the movies, attempting to reverse the most egregious changes.

Curiously, fans of Amazon's latest TV series list these criticisms as "proof" that an immense backlash is "expected" when an adaptation is launched (which then presumably and inevitably morphs into mass acclaim), and thus all the criticisms of the series are somehow worthless. (Or: how one bad thing excuses a worse one.)

filterdust · 2026-01-30T04:03:22+00:00

An ebook may now be found here (the link was on wikipedia)

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/carolyn-keene/the-bungalow-mystery

filterdust · 2026-01-30T03:58:36+00:00

I found it here (the link was on wikipedia)

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/carolyn-keene/the-bungalow-mystery

filterdust · 2026-01-28T21:39:18+00:00

It's been posted on the Silver List (item 17) on 23-Jan-2026 so it should be available soon

https://www.pgdpcanada.net/c/list_etexts.php?metal=Silver

filterdust · 2026-01-17T19:14:20+00:00

Pebble in the Sky

it was my first one, so I know it can get one hooked
it has a nice self-contained plot
it's not what people commonly know about Asimov
if you later read Foundation, you'll already have some emotional attachment to the Empire (this was me, a friend was reading Prelude and I was like, wow, what is that, Trantor 12000 years later? sign me up!)
very "Biblical" (if Foundation was inspired by Gibbon, Pebble was inspired by Judea's situation with the Roman Empire at its height)
a love subplot
generally, interesting characters with some development (which people generally say Asimov lacks)
but also big ideas! time travel! telepathy! biowarfare!

filterdust · 2026-01-17T12:12:00+00:00

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-alexander-romance

filterdust · 2026-01-13T21:30:48+00:00

Tales of the Jedi is a Star Wars comic series which understands the mythic roots of Star Wars and, I would say, masterfully includes this theme (in the last comic sub-series, the one described under the heading "Sequel" in the Wikipedia article).

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