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A batch of the best highlights from what J's read, .
We have assumed increasingly over the last five hundred years that nature is merely a supply of ‘raw materials,’ and that we may safely possess those materials merely by taking them. This taking, as our technical means have increased, has involved always less reverence or respect, less gratitude, less local knowledge, and less skill. Our methodologies of land use have strayed from our old sympathetic attempts to imitate natural processes, and have come more and more to resemble the methodology of mining, even as mining itself has become more powerful technologically and more brutal.
The World-Ending Fire
Wendell Berry
This turns AI-"assisted" coders into *reverse* centaurs. The AI can churn out code at superhuman speed, and you, the human in the loop, must maintain perfect vigilance and attention as you review that code, spotting the cleverly disguised hooks for malicious code that the AI can't be prevented from inserting into its code. As qntm writes, "code review [is] difficult relative to writing new code":
Humans Are Not Perfectly Vigilant
Cory Doctorow
What is most conspicuously absent from the industrial economy and industrial culture is this idea of return. Industrial humans relate themselves to the world and its creatures by fairly direct acts of violence. Mostly we take without asking, use without respect or gratitude, and give nothing in return. Our economy’s most voluminous product is waste – valuable materials irrecoverably misplaced, or randomly discharged as poisons.
The World-Ending Fire
Wendell Berry
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
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