Where, exactly? All I've noticed is that there's less interesting material to read, and I don't know where to go for more.

Okay, SSC. That's about it.

Nothing terrible was going to happen. As has been pointed out, collisions that energetic or more happen all the time in the upper atmosphere.

But you're always stuck in one reality.

Let's take a step back, and ask ourselves what's really going on here. It's an interesting idea, for which I thank you; I might use it in a story. But...

By living your life in this way, you'd be divorcing yourself from reality. There is a real world, and if you're interacting solely with these artificial worlds you're not interacting with it. That's what sets off my "no way, no how" alert, in part because it seems remarkably dangerous; anything might happen, your computing infrastructure might get stolen from underneath you, and you wouldn't necessarily know.

Do you by any chance have those as MP3 or FLAC?

"not impossible" == "possible". And this article doesn't show either one.

So, some Inside View reasons to think this time might be different:

• The results look better, and in particular, some of Google's projects are reproducing high-level quirks of the human visual cortex.

• The methods can absorb far larger amounts of computing power. Previous approaches could not, which makes sense as we didn't have the computing power for them to absorb at the time, but the human brain does appear to be almost absurdly computation-heavy. Moore's Law is producing a difference in kind.

That said, I (and most AI researchers, I believe) would agree that deep recurrent networks are only part of the puzzle. The neat thing is, they do appear to be part of the puzzle, which is more than you could say about e.g. symbolic logic; human minds don't run on logic at all. We're making progress, and I wouldn't be surprised if deep learning is part of the first AGI.

If you're being generous, you might take the apparent wide applicability of simple techniques and moderate-to-massive computing power as a sign (given that it's the exact opposite of old-style approaches) that AGI might not be as hard as we think. It does match better with how brains work.

But this particular result is in no way a step towards AI, no. It's one guy playing around with well-known techniques, that are being used vastly more effectively with e.g. Google's image labelling. This article should only push your posteriors around if you were unaware of previous work.

The craziness it produced was not code, it merely looked like code. It's a neat example, but in that particular case not much better than an N-gram markov chain.

Log Horizon

If you liked the anime, you will likely find that this is better. If you felt that the anime was flawed, you may well find that the book is not, or not in the same way.

The story is slow, with a great deal of explanations and musings, especially in the beginning; it's trying to paint an entire world, and that shows. It is the sort of thing that is very difficult to adapt to an animated format. The book, however, was well worth the read.

Only the first volume is out yet, the second to come in July.

nostalgebraist has started work on a new novel, The Northern Caves. It's off to a slow start, but looks interesting so far.