Slow AI, No Growth Economics, and Chemistry for Social Networks
Hello folks,?
Welcome to Last Week I Learned!
As always, let me know which articles stick out! If you found any media (books, TV shows, etc) of your own, please send them my way.?
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It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. It’d be weird if you made something beautiful so quickly. The problem isn’t that you’re not working fast enough. The problem is your expectations are not realistic. Our AI helps you slow the fuck down and make something wonderful.
When Franklin Roosevelt supported grappling with Great Depression unemployment by decreasing the workweek to 30 hours, the largest corporations fought back fiercely. America, they argued, would be saved only by the new “gospel of consumption.” The administration would need to pursue flat-out growth, loosening labor laws and so forth, so that the industrialists could revive the nation. Roosevelt backed down.
In the past, software used to run on one computer. Today we expect our software and data to be available on multiple devices, with synchronisation across devices belonging to the same user (e.g. laptop, smartphone, tablet), and also allowing real-time collaboration between multiple users. At present, such multi-user, multi-device software typically relies on cloud services that store the authoritative copy of the users’ data, and which can be accessed through thin clients such as web browsers and mobile apps. However, reliance on the cloud comes with problems: services require ongoing maintenance by expensive 24/7 operations teams, and they cease to exist when the organisation backing them terminates their funding
The Evaporative Cooling Effect is a term I learned from an excellent essay by Eliezer Yudowsky that describes a particular phenomena of group dynamics. It occurs when the most high value contributors to a community realize that the community is no longer serving their needs any more and so therefore, leave. When that happens, it drops the general quality of the community down such that the next most high value contributors now find the community underwhelming. Each layer of disappearances slowly reduces the average quality of the group until such a point that you reach the people who are so unskilled-and-unaware of it that they’re unable to tell that they’re part of a mediocre group.
The Lao People’s Democratic Republic, as it’s formally known, is somewhat smaller than the state of Oregon, but it used to be a lot bigger. When the French invaded Southeast Asia (known in the 19th-century West as Indochina), they set the Mekong River as the border between Thailand and Laos, effectively splitting off a significant portion of the country and transforming it into what is now the Isan region of Thailand.
Deep Dive
A friend of mine told me about the Utah War, which took place less than a decade before the Civil War. In doing a little reading, I realized how little I knew about the history of the Mormon faith. This week's deep dive takes a look at the history of the Mormon faith.
Mormons are a religious group that embrace concepts of Christianity as well as revelations made by their founder, Joseph Smith. They primarily belong to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or LDS, which is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, and has more than 16 million members worldwide. Another Mormon denomination, the Community of Christ, is centered in Independence, Missouri, and has about 250,000 members. The religion was officially founded in 1830 when The Book of Mormon was published.
By pretty much every measure, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has defied the expectations of its early observers. In the years immediately after its founding' as Mormons were being chased across the country by state-sanctioned mobs' skeptics predicted that the movement would collapse before the century was out. Instead, it became one of the fastest-growing religions in the world. The Church now averages nearly 700 converts a day; it has temples in 66 countries and financial reserves rumored to exceed $100 billion. In the past few years, Mormons have become a subject of fascination for their surprising resistance to Trumpism. Unlike most of the religious right, they were decidedly unenthusiastic about Donald Trump. From 2008 to 2016, the Republican vote share declined among Latter-day Saints more than any other religious group in the country.
It’s been six years since I became a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Each year has been a lesson in faith and doubt, stretching and engaging what it means to be black, a woman, and Mormon. The decision to join on my own was not an easy one. As the child of a Protestant mother and a father who converted to Islam in his teens, I was doing something unheard of in my family by becoming a Mormon. And as a black woman, I had a heightened awareness of what it means to potentially be the only black person in any given congregation in the United States.
The coolest and most unbelieving of them all succeeded to the autocracy. Brigham Young, whether guided by instinct or reason I do not know, avoided the fatal mistake of Smith, who turned back from Missouri to Illinois, and the crazy fantasy of Rigdon, who would have gone from Illinois to Pennsylvania. Tribes and religions cannot travel against the sun. Young, during the troubled year that followed, exerted himself to gather all the reins of government into his own hands ; and there was not in all the slavish East a despot more absolute than he when at last he started, with his wives and his servants and his cattle, to lead his people into the vast tolerant wilderness.
Product of the Week
Did you know that 85% of ALL textiles end up in landfills? (Yes, even the ones you donate!) With Trashie’s #1 bestselling product, The Take Back Bag, your unwanted clothes and textiles stay out of the trash.
Cause of the Week
There is a major flood in Nigeria. It is catastrophic, and hundreds of thousands of people have lost their homes and sources of livelihoods. Hundreds of thousands of hectares of farmland have been washed away. Hundreds of people have died. A food crisis looms along with an intensification of poverty especially among the rural farmers. The flood has collapsed buildings, destroyed roads and equipment, stopped children from going to school, heavily diminished people's access to medication and food, disrupted the lives of people, separated families, and killed hundreds of their loved ones. And some who have lost their dead cannot bury them yet. It is a nightmarish time.
Album of the Week