jessup

> keeping clocks in sync is nontrivial.

masterful understatement imo

"The algebraic numbers are spotted over the plane like stars against a black sky; the dense blackness is the firmament of the transcendentals."

-- E. T. Bell

"Before the Law" is an example of a Kafka story that reads like a joke / one of the jokes that Kafka wrote:

http://www.kafka-online.info/before-the-law.html

"Mailer, Updike, Roth-the Great Male Narcissists* who’ve dominated postwar realist fiction are now in their senescence, and it must seem to them no coincidence that the prospect of their own deaths appears backlit by the approaching millennium and on-line predictions of the death of the novel as we know it."

David Foster Wallace (1997)

http://observer.com/1997/10/john-updike-champion-literary-ph...

A lecture series by Langlands for a lay audience:

https://video.ias.edu/The-Practice-of-Mathematics

The video is not great, but the content. From the summary:

"In spite of forty years as a mathematician, I have difficulty describing these problems, even to myself, in a simple, cogent and concise manner that makes it clear what is wanted and why. As a possible, but only partial, remedy I thought I might undertake to explain them to a lay audience."

>AI alarmists are fond of the paper clip maximizer, a notional computer that runs a paper clip factory, becomes sentient, recursively self-improves to Godlike powers, and then devotes all its energy to filling the universe with paper clips.

>It exterminates humanity not because it's evil, but because our blood contains iron that could be better used in paper clips.

The consolation of the cingularity narrative is that it tells a story in which the world is not—yet—being destroyed by paper clip maximizers—in cingularity land, the nightmare scenario is still a ways off, and thankfully, with the help of a few Ayn Rand types, market forces can still save us.

"The original text has been typed again and obvious spelling and grammar errors, possibly put there deliberately as markers to identify the origin in case of a leak, have been removed. Other apparent textual or formatting-related markers were removed as well. None of these adjustments have altered the content of the text in any way."

This statement is leading me to rethink my conception of how steganography might be applied In The Real World.

:%s/obstacle/target