201–210 of 398 posts
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Can someone explain what he meant by that please.
Digitisation preserves the contents of the book, but not the book itself.
But then that'd devalue the NFTs, so F that.
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And also will be unauthorized since they own no rights to derivative work (or even the original work)
Perhaps it will be a series inspired by the book (the physical object) not the contents/story They could release a series about overpaying for a copy of dune at auction and technically fulfill their mission
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Sure but ipfs hosting etc rely on one or a few hosts; if you use a blockchain like btc, at least it is vast and that means someone will be hosting at least until btc reaches $0.
not necessarily. BTC has UTXO (unspent transaction output), whereas ETH has proper accounts and the money is a property of the account. so if any of these chains only want to focus on sending/storing money (or simply address the evergrowing size of the chain), then they can start purging the old transactions from the ledger. (yes, ETH has smart contracts, but it's not impossible to imagine that ETH will start chargin…
For most of human history, people have lived in small, local information bubbles which were hard to penetrate with facts from the outside world. We see this manifest as the pre-industrial global patchwork of weird and wonderful religious/spiritual/cultural variety. Then somehow the world started to join up and information began to seep into local cultures and sweep away a lot of these pre-rational beliefs. And for a…
I think it's access to broadcast media. When access to broadcast media was heavily gatekept, the official reality bubbles were few and strengthened everywhere. Now everyone has it, there can be far more bubbles. I also hope that we're in a transitional time as people get used to the new technology. I'm sure that it took people a while to understand how much they should believe newspapers or not when they first came a…
Today, the majority would dismiss the broadcast as nonsense, but a small, ardent minority would form a distributed, international community around taking it seriously that would then continue on for years and rip apart friendships and families, and potentially have sufficient critical mass to do something stupid.
I feel the difference may be in the stickyness of ideas (across a wider spectrum of merit) and what enables that stickyness.
On the topic of popular scifi, I often think back to this exchange between two characters in Michael Crichton's The Lost World (1997), a bestseller at the time:
"[...] Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species."
- "Yes? Why is that?"
"Because it means the end of innovation," Malcolm said. "This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. [...]"
When I read this as a young teenager, enthusiastic about scifi and technology and curious about the internet, I dismissed it as cynical and conservative. And of course he got wrong - we don't really lack diversity of thought in the cyberspace age. Instead we managed to create a new kind of cyber-enabled tribalism. Or, maybe, one is a reaction to the other.
> 1. Make the book public (to the > extent permitted by law) Extra dumb: A big chunk of it is already online. https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNGBuasYa_WETf7sF6Q9W3S... Seems like NFT logic in reverse, lol
> Extra dumb: A big chunk of it is already online Let's not pretend some low quality jpegs in a Google Photos album is an acceptable archive for this work.
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I think it's access to broadcast media. When access to broadcast media was heavily gatekept, the official reality bubbles were few and strengthened everywhere. Now everyone has it, there can be far more bubbles. I also hope that we're in a transitional time as people get used to the new technology. I'm sure that it took people a while to understand how much they should believe newspapers or not when they first came a…
> Now everyone has it, there can be far more bubbles. Yeah, I feel like this is the issue. I've heard the theory that in the past, every village had a village idiot. The internet has enabled all these village idiots to find each other and to broadcast their idiocies. They feel strengthened in finding like-minded people and feel vindicated in their beliefs. Due to the size of the group and how vocal they are, they're…
For most of human history, people have lived in small, local information bubbles which were hard to penetrate with facts from the outside world. We see this manifest as the pre-industrial global patchwork of weird and wonderful religious/spiritual/cultural variety. Then somehow the world started to join up and information began to seep into local cultures and sweep away a lot of these pre-rational beliefs. And for a…
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How is buying a book, converting it into NFTs and then burning it a public good?
Where does it say anything about burning books? I'm referring to the bit about making it public and supporting derivative works.
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You can't really put content on the blockchain, that costs a surprising amount because of all the proof-of-waste. What happens is people put the content on a host and the URL on the blockchain. I suppose in theory it could be kept in IPFS, but few NFTs seem to bother with that.
What blockchain? Some newer ones are not expensive (but also are not decentralized enough yet). They dismiss ipfs straight away in the responses already for it and actually say they will put the actual imagine on the blockchain. This will cost something (possibly a lot) depending on which chain, but they have $4m+ left to burn on ‘the good cause’. This all stinks but I must agree, if you want something for eternity (…
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> Because the book remains on-chain, the book does not die, but crosses the boundary of physical to digital. It reminds me of the video game SOMA, where people upload a brain-scan of themselves to live on after some catastrophe, essentially making a digital copy of their consciousness. But because they are also still physically alive, they see the digital version of themselves as a clone, someone else. To "complete t…
It goes back at least 50 years more, to Star Trek transporters. And the most chilling version I've seen is in Charles Stross' Glasshouse , where some soldiers fight a virus that infects the consciousness of everyone using such a transporter. They "rescue" an infected population by chopping off their heads and throwing them into a transporter hacked to remove the virus. IIRC only the heads because transporting the ent…
Personally, I like to trace this stuff back to early Christian theological debates. Here's an illuminating quotation:
Origen's belief that he could be resurrected in a numerically different body is parallel to Derek Parfit's belief that he could enjoy some kind of survival short of identity, if his present body was destroyed, but the information from it was electronically beamed, so as to construct an exactly similar body and brain with exactly similar psychology at a distance, say on the planet Mars (Reasons and Persons, 199-320). Parfit, like Origen, discounts the need for bodily continuity, and discounts the idea we encountered in Philoponus that it matters whether the original body is replaced gradually, or all at once (op. cit., Appendix D).