August 2016 Media Thread
This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.
Rules:
- Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
- If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
- Please post only under one of the already created subthreads, and never directly under the parent media thread.
- Use the "Other Media" thread if you believe the piece of media you want to discuss doesn't fit under any of the established categories.
- Use the "Meta" thread if you want to discuss about the monthly media thread itself (e.g. to propose adding/removing/splitting/merging subthreads, or to discuss the type of content properly belonging to each subthread) or for any other question or issue you may have about the thread or the rules.
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Comments (29)
Meta Thread
Other Media Thread
Orion's arm: a far future, deeply transhumanist, hard sci-fi collective world building effort. LWers will find themselves immediately at home, and at every page you will find something interesting or surprising. Eliezer is explicitly quoted as a source for their mindspace diagram.
On me it exerts an attraction even stronger than tvtropes, so be warned!
There's a lot of Orion's Arm to wade through. Are there any sections you'd particularly recommend? Any stories or pages you enjoyed most?
Not at the moment, I'm wading through myself randomly following links in their wiki.
I suggest you just ask the forum to be honed on topics you're interested about.
I think I will contribute with ideas of my own, but I'll more likely ask the curators if they are new and where to place them.
Podcasts Thread
I interviewed Robin Hanson about The Age of Em on my podcast Future Strategist.
Music Thread
Touhou:
Vocaloid:
Games Thread
Stellaris - a 4X sci-fi game with interesting pro's and con's.
I especially like the very detailed race creation, with choices ranging from basic morphology to meta-ethics and government type. I also like that the game accounts for ethical drifting within your population, different models of FTL travel and malignant events such as UFAI fooming (called synth rebellion in the game).
However it's a young and complex production, and some of its strategic aspects are poorly balanced, read the negative Steam reviews for those, I've not played it enough and with the right focus to have an opinion on those.
As a pure sci-fi 4X, it's not the best: you will probably enjoy Endless Space or Beyond Earth much more.
But as a meta-civ simulator, I think it's amazing. I play Stellaris as if I'm playing a space version of Democracy 3: coming up with ludicrous empires and having fun evolving them in space, without much focus on winning.
I started Stellaris and regret it. I agree with many of the pros, but I find two extreamly annoying downsides. Firstly, even the fastest mode is quite slow, especially early on.
Secondly, there is a mechanism whereby if an empire is loosing a war, it surrenders; this would be reasonable except I had no idea this would happen, afaict there is no 'moral level' which would warn of a surrender, no way to negotiate a conditional surrender. Loose one minor outlying system and your entire empire surrenders.
Thirdly, it seems that 'hard difficulty' provides a 50% bonus to everything your opponents do, while normal difficulty provides no bonus. I suspect that hard difficulty is very hard, while normal will be quite easy. Adding a custom 'the AI gets an x% advantage' sounds like a very easy modification that would make the game far better.
TV and Movies (Live Action) Thread
The (Dis)Honesty Project hopes to create a safe space where we can explore the complicated truth(s) of the matter and improve our own behavior and that of the world around us.
http://thedishonestyproject.com/
TV and Movies (Animation) Thread
Fiction Books Thread
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is available now. I devoured the script in four hours and I will only say: it's powerful and beautiful.
I'm halfway through Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics. They're science-based creation myths, and they're breathtaking.
Nonfiction Books Thread
Fanfiction Thread
Online Videos Thread
Short Online Texts Thread
Everything is heritable:
Politics/religion:
AI:
Statistics/meta-science:
Psychology/biology:
Technology:
Economics:
Philosophy:
Fiction:
Unsupervised class on machine and deep learning.
http://ufldl.stanford.edu/tutorial/supervised/LinearRegression/
CuratedAI
A literary magazine written by machines, for people.
http://curatedai.com/