I think in recent times we realized that culture is still very important and just doing realpolitik alone does not work. Turkey and North Africa are way too foreign and bring more problem than benefits.
I always thought I was a nerd, but I was never into super heroes or fantasy books/movies and I was never into playing Pokemon or Magic the Gathering. Star Wars didn't appeal to me and neither did Lord Of The Rings nor Narnia nor Harry Potter. I wasn't even that big into video games, although I did spend quite a lot of time playing some of the big titles (Vice City for example) but I spent way more time flying in MS Flight Simulator and FlightGear.
When I was little I was fascinated by big engines and in general driven by the curiosity of wanting to know how everything worked. I would disassemble every piece of electronics in the household. I was into model airplanes and gliders. I was obsessed with building electric motors. I was also really big into steam machines. Everything steam was just cool. Then computers took over my life. Today I find myself nerding out about wood working and back garden agriculture when I'm not doing AI stuff.
I differentiate nerd from geek as a heirarchy, geek to me being a sub-nerd.
These are geekisms:
>super heroes
>fantasy books/movies
>Pokemon
>Magic the Gathering
>Star Wars
>Lord Of The Rings
>Narnia
>Harry Potter
>video games
Here you describe nerdisms:
>When I was little I was fascinated by big engines and in general driven by the curiosity of wanting to know how everything worked. I would disassemble every piece of electronics in the household. I was into model airplanes and gliders. I was obsessed with building electric motors. I was also really big into steam machines. Everything steam was just cool. Then computers took over my life. Today I find myself nerding out about wood working and back garden agriculture when I'm not doing AI stuff.
Geeks consoom, nerds understand and tinker/build.
Most video games are geek (consoom), tools like Siemens NX or Adobe Master Collection CS6 are nerd (should be thought of as extremely open-ended games), simulators wobble between my classifications depending on accuracy/depth (Minecraft, Sims: geek; NX Nastran, flight/train/truck/forklift simulators: nerd).
Nerd / geek / spod / dork etc., very complex shifting meanings.
But what you're talking about in the first paragraph is what people used to call "geek" culture, and what you're talking about in the second is what people tended to call "nerd" culture.
> super heroes or fantasy books/movies and I was never into playing Pokemon or Magic the Gathering. Star Wars didn't appeal to me and neither did Lord Of The Rings nor Narnia nor Harry Potter. I wasn't even that big into video games
Some are more mainstream than they were (anything now owned by Disney certainly is) but all of them have been a part of "nerd" culture for a long time.
Some part of it - sure, but (perhaps with the exception of MTG if we stretch it) none of the things listed were even close to being defining or exclusive to that culture. They were a part of everyone's culture in certain demographics.
This is actually at the core of our (EU) problem. Instead of thinking, "here is this new technology, how can we build new markets/products out of it", our industry leaders always think, "here is this new technology, how can we apply it to our existing industries".
You can see it a lot in AI, right now. AI4industry is not where the gains are right now. We should be competing on training foundational models. Once the foundational models from US/China are strong enough, they will do AI4industry and we wouldn't have any edge on them anyway because their tech is more vertically integrated and they have better insight in how AI works under the hood.
There's no moat to AI models so it doesn't really matter who develops it first. If AGI happens none of it matters since it won't be controlled anyway. If there's an exponential wall then everyone will be at it within 12 months of the first person hitting it and then it's better not to have spent the cash pioneering the path.
The long-term idea that the we have to compete claim is based on is like AGI and it's gonna really care what Elon tells it to do. This is a dumb idea regardless of how it fails.
AI models are seeming the ultimate in fungible commodities at this point, why spend on R&D?
If you don't have the capability to train these models, then there's almost no chance of you having enough GPU power to run inference at a large scale on these models (assuming the weights for such a model are ever released or leaked in the future). And that's ignoring the fact that you won't have cultivated a sector that can continue to learn about and improve on said models.
At the time it was a perfectly rational decision that followed the liberal foreign policy dogma of the time, which advocated that we tie up unstable countries with economic trade, so they become less incentivized to create havoc. Let's please not rewrite history.
The abstraction is by necessity. Our puny brains have only a very small working memory. The only way we can reason about many problems is by creating multiple levels of hierarchy. That is actually the essence of what mathematics is.
I think it also depends on where you live and the political sphere you spend your time in. Broadly speaking I believe men and women are spending less time with each other but I think it’s less about gender war nonsense and more the destruction of third spaces, cost of going out, social media pseudoaddiction, etc.
My parents bought their house cash. No they were not high earners and not even median income earners. Yes the house is now worth close to a million dollars.
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