brian the gleeman

Makes sense. She usually has plans on January 6th.

The Strength of the Few: Hierarchy, Book 2 Amazon.com: The Strength of the Few: Hierarchy, Book 2 (Audible Audio Edition): James Islington, Euan Morton, Audible Studios: Audible Books & Originals

57. STRENGTH OF THE FEW by James Islington

First 30% super confusing (you'll see), but boy oh boy, what a fantastic story. I love Islington's complex plots and the way he weaves everything together, and the characters are memorable and fun! I can't wait for books 3 and 4!

amzn.to/4a6H4dA

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Crow Lore: An Anthology Crow Lore: An Anthology curated by Cassandra L. Thompson. A new adventure in storytelling, Crow Lore brings you select stories from the recently out-of-print anthologies published by Quill & Crow. Com...

Caw, caw! One of my proudest accomplishments as a writer was 'To Make the Devil's Blood Run Cold,' a story that twisted Romeo & Juliet into something alltogether nastier and darker. It's now been compiled in this anthology along with other dark stories. Order below!

Today’s afternoon read is @clclark.bsky.social’s “Fate’s Bane” ✨

@meekbarbarian.com happy birthday!!

I don't know why the "Piggy" thing is bothering me so much. It's one more unforgivable thing in a list of 20,000 unforgivable things, but I've been mad about it for like 12 straight hours.

Yeah. I mean I hope you’re right lol

I actually am making the case that the past 30 years of innovation is nowhere near as fast or consequential as the previous 70 years, so I’m not totally sure I agree with your premise

I don’t think you know how friendships work. If they don’t talk to me every day, then I’m a loser and they hate my guts.

Anyway. It's a fun thought experiment. Thanks for playing. :)

And my following comment about a ceiling was basically like "can that continue forever? is it guaranteed that the spike is always bigger?" because I don't think that's true in history, either. The Roman Empire had a bunch of big spikes, but the 500 years after the collapse did not.

I'm not saying nothing will change, nor am I saying it won't be consequential, but I am saying that if you plot it out on a line graph, there's a huge spike in the 1900s and the spike in the 2000s is likely to be smaller or shallower.

Your original assertion way back at the beginning was "If we break down each century, progress has always gone up."

My assertion is the *rate* of that line of progress was particularly steep in the 20th century, and that the line of progress in the 21st century is, IMO, unlikely to be that steep.

... I don't know that I'm convincing you at all. LOL

Movies and television haven't radically changed since 2000. The Wire is still on par with Breaking Bad is still on par with Chernobyl, etc etc. It's still a rectangle of video on a screen, just with more colors and HDR.

Books might be e-ink now, but...

I agree with you, but I'm basing this on the idea that our lives haven't radically changed since 2010. Smart phones have changed incrementally -- faster, better cameras, better apps -- and we're more dependent on them than ever, but it's fundamentally still the same device from 2010.

Back in the 1800s, you couldn't drive from NYC to Boston in the same day. A carriage ride or even a train ride would take up at least an entire day, if not longer. The advent of personal automobiles transformed your middle-class lifestyle into something dramatically different than before.

In a car-centric world -- automated or not -- we still have to live near our jobs and friends and family. In a transporter-centric world, I can live in Kansas and work in London, I can grab dinner in Paris and catch a film in Tokyo in the same day.

But life with cars, even automated, is the same.

That's still within the existing paradigm of "personal 4 wheeled vehicles that get you from Point A to Point B."

Now if AI (or someone) invents the Star Trek-style transporter, then we're talking about a paradigm shift that radically disrupts society.

I don't know if I'd say I'm being disingenuous. I'm not really talking about individuals as much as I'm talking about societal shifts. Like, we're already moving toward automated cars today. So I wouldn't be surprised 100 years from now if all cars were automated.

If AI can, I dunno, invent a new realm of physics or design affordable space elevators or take us to FTL travel where we're living on Mars or Alpha Centauri, then I'd agree.

But from my viewpoint, AI is operating within the current paradigms and nothing is changing except the rich getting richer.

So far, it writes text that sounds mostly human and generates images that look mostly correct, but those are things we already do every day as a society. It's not _changing_ the way we think about or interact with the world. It's largely just web 4.0 and will eventually turn to selling ads.

AI, I will grant, potentially has room to alter the paradigm, but so far it's going the way of crypto: making a *ton* of promises it can't keep. OpenAI claimed that AI would eliminate 40% of jobs.

Even space mining is just Earth mining but somewhere else. It's not a fundamental paradigm shift. Your life and my life won't change because Elon Musk mines a few trillion dollars worth of metal out of an asteroid.

Basically what I'm saying is that if you dropped someone from 1925 in to 2025, their minds would be BLOWN.

I'm not convinced that my mind would be blown even close to the same level if you dropped me in the year 2125. I'd probably say, "Yeah, your cars drive themselves. That seems predictable."

but I think those things are still incremental within their domains. Clean energy hasn't dramatically changed the world. You still pay a power bill, you flip a switch. Someone in 1925 didn't necessarily know where their power came from, and we don't either. You pay the bill the same way

*1875 was radically different from 1975, oops

My position is that we'll see incremental change over the next 100 years, but the last 25 (maybe the last 50, excepting the internet!) have been largely within the existing paradigms, whereas from 1925 to circa 2010, the societal paradigms changed every decade.

Refrigerators changed the food stability game. But refrigerators today are incremental improvements over the refrigerators of 1950. Dishwashers, laundry machines, the same.

Arguably, the last major innovation of humanity was the internet. But the internet of the last 25 years has been incremental.

Like, in 1825, the average person couldn't have conceived of high powered personal vehicles that would let them drive 60+ miles per hour down the road. Then cars were invented.

But cars today are incrementally better -- not radically better. We still fundamentally drive the same way as in 1940.