Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, the issue of free speech on college campuses has received a new wave of scrutiny. Palestinian student groups have faced threats of censorship for their statements, donors have warned about pulling funding, and employers have blacklisted students who blamed Israel for Hamas’s attack.

But as far as free speech is concerned, 2023 has been a relatively normal year for colleges and universities. Just don’t confuse “normal” with “good.”

…

Protecting free speech requires defending the rights of both sides of any conflict. That will only get harder if we ignore just how long colleges have been falling short. Today’s headlines can distract from the fact that campuses have been in crisis for the better part of a decade.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/pro-palestine-speech-college-campuses/676155/

I’ve certainly posted about Iris van Herpen’s work on this blog before, though probably not in the past few years. It’s great to see her remarkable, sculptural fashion get a retrospective in paris.

“Dynamic tension, fluidity, delicacy, and complexity, as well as poetry and philosophy: these are the main elements of the dialogues she establishes between body and clothing, which allow her to convey a new, rich, enthusiastic perspective on the world to come,” writes curator Cloé Pitiot.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2023/12/iris-van-herpen-sculpting-the-senses/

Interesting economic point, but mostly I just love the idea of claistered monks using advanced technology to build gothic cathedrals. Click through to the original post to see (extremely brief) video of what they’re working on.

One way to overcome the Baumol effect is to replace labor with capital. AI and robots are making that possible. Here’s a clip of the Carmelite Monks of Wyoming who are building a monastery in the Gothic style using CNC machines:

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/12/overcoming-baumol.html

I haven’t quite given up yet, but it may very well happen at some point. Like the author, I’ve done everything you’re supposed to do, and a non-trivial percentage of emails from my domain still get rejected or go to spam. I’ve started sending from a gmail address when something really has to go through. I planned to make my own domain’s email address my permanent one, and it’s sad to think of that becoming impossible.

(to be clear, I’m facing a slightly easier problem than the author; my emails are being sent out from a bluehost email server, not a truly self-hosted one — and it’s still an absolute nightmare trying to keep emails going through.)

Many companies have been trying to disrupt email by making it proprietary. So far, they have failed. Email keeps being an open protocol. Hurray?

No hurray. Email is not distributed anymore. You just cannot create another first-class node of this network.

Email is now an oligopoly, a service gatekept by a few big companies which does not follow the principles of net neutrality.

I have been self-hosting my email since I got my first broadband connection at home in 1999. I absolutely loved having a personal web+email server at home, paid extra for a static IP and a real router so people could connect from the outside. I felt like a first-class citizen of the Internet and I learned so much.

Over time I realized that residential IP blocks were banned on most servers. I moved my email server to a VPS. No luck. I quickly understood that self-hosting email was a lost cause. Nevertheless, I have been fighting back out of pure spite, obstinacy, and activism. In other words, because it was the right thing to do.

But my emails are just not delivered anymore. I might as well not have an email server.

So, starting today, the MX records of my personal domain no longer point to the IP of my personal server. They now point to one of the Big Email Providers.

I lost. We lost. One cannot reliably deploy independent email servers.

https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-twenty-three-years-i-have-thrown-in-the-towel-the-oligopoly-has-won.html

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2023/11/jim-denevan-self-similar/

Badly titled — it’s still extremely random, it’s just (very slightly) biased. Interesting, though!

Researchers at the University of Amsterdam recently made a surprising discovery that challenges long-held assumptions about the randomness of coin tossing. After flipping coins over 350,000 times, the largest study of its kind, they found that coins have a slight tendency to land on the same side they started on.

The data showed a small but statistically significant same-side bias of 51%, just slightly higher than the 50% predicted by chance. This subtle yet remarkable finding defies the conventional wisdom that coin flips represent a random and unpredictable 50/50 outcome.

Coins of 46 different currencies were flipped by hand and caught in the palms of 48 student participants to record the landing side. The data collection process required meticulous recording over many months, with flipping sessions videotaped to validate the results.

https://boingboing.net/2023/10/10/coin-toss-not-so-random-after-all-says-groundbreaking-study.html

Ultimately ‘AGI’ is a pretty contested term, such that there’s no simple answer to where the threshold is. But I agree with Arcas and Norvig (Norvig in particular is a very careful thinker who I have great respect for) that by many definitions we’ve crossed that threshold, albeit just barely.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) means many different things to different people, but the most important parts of it have already been achieved by the current generation of advanced AI large language models such as ChatGPT, Bard, LLaMA and Claude. These “frontier models” have many flaws: They hallucinate scholarly citations and court cases, perpetuate biases from their training data and make simple arithmetic mistakes. Fixing every flaw (including those often exhibited by humans) would involve building an artificial superintelligence, which is a whole other project.

Nevertheless, today’s frontier models perform competently even on novel tasks they were not trained for, crossing a threshold that previous generations of AI and supervised deep learning systems never managed. Decades from now, they will be recognized as the first true examples of AGI, just as the 1945 ENIAC is now recognized as the first true general-purpose electronic computer.

Artificial General Intelligence Is Already Here

tl;dr:

Global warming, though not ocean acidification, is quickly and cheaply reversed by ejecting calcite nanoparticles (with an average radius in the ~90nm range) into the stratosphere, using a propeller-based system to prevent particle clumping. The particles should be carried up by hydrogen balloons, and very preferably released over the tropics. The total amount needed will be on the order of several hundred kilotons yearly, and the total cost should be somewhere between $1B and $5B yearly.

https://nephewjonathan.substack.com/p/diy-geoengineering-the-whitepaper