Posts
Wikitag Contributions
Hi, I've pre-ordered it on the UK Amazon, I hope that works for you. Let me know if I should do something different.
I have a number of reasonably well-respected friends in the University of Cambridge and its associated tech-sphere, I can try to get some of them to give endorsements if you think that will help and can send me a pdf.
Finally finished it, took about a month-and-a-half at around 3 hours a day. It kind of ate my life. I enjoyed it immensely.
I think the last thing that I liked as much as this was 'Game of Thrones'. I think it's probably a Great Work of Literature. Shame the future isn't going to be long enough for it to get recognised as such...
I wouldn't have wished it shorter. There were a couple of 'Sandbox' chapters that I'd probably cut, in the same way that Lord of the Rings could do without Tom Bombadil, but the main thing is well-paced and consistently both fun and thought-provoking.
It turned out that my preferred way to read it was to unzip project-lawful-avatars-moreinfo.epub. In the unzipped structure all the chapters become plain html files with avatars included, which can be easily read in firefox.
Thank you so much for this! I tried to read this thing once before, and didn't get into it at all, despite pretty much loving everything Eliezer has ever written, which experience I now put down to something about the original presentation.
I'm now about 10% of the way through, and loving it. Two days well spent, see y'all in a fortnight or so.....
For anyone in a similar position, I found (and am currently reading):
https://akrolsmir-glowflow-streamlit-app-79n743.streamlit.app
which is much more to my taste.
And I also found https://www.mikescher.com/blog/29/Project_Lawful_ebook, of which the project-lawful-avatars-moreinfo.epub version looks like the one I would prefer to read (but haven't actually tried reading more than a couple of pages of yet).
I actually think that the avatars are really important to the feel of the story, and have been carefully chosen, and I wouldn't want to be without them.
I knew that those wise and good benefactors of humanity would turn out to have been warning us of the dangers of polyunsaturated fats all along.
They might want to mention it to people like my father, who, on the advice of his doctor, has been pretty much only eating polyunsaturated fats these last twenty years, for the good of his heart.
Or perhaps to McDonalds, who on the basis of a consumer-led campaign changed their famously good beef-dripping fried chips to vegetable-oil fried chips, coincidentally at about the time obesity and various other nasty diseases with no known cause really became fashionable in America.
Another thing linoleic acid does when there's oxygen around is polymerize into a varnish, which is why linseed oil (lin-oleic) is traditionally used to waterproof cricket bats.
It used to say 'do not eat' in quite large letters on the cricket-bat-varnish bottles. Presumably now it says 'heart-healthy!'.
I wouldn't just write off the naive anti-seed oil position either from a chemical point of view. Metabolism is absurdly complicated and finely tuned. Substituting a slightly different substrate into a poorly understood set of reactions and feedback loops is unlikely to go well.
There was very little linoleic acid in the diet we evolved to eat. Sure, it's essential in small quantities, but using it as a major energy source is likely a very bad idea a priori.
This is a great story Miranda. Well written. It catches something.
--
Honestly it's not that bad. When I was born they told me I would live forty years or so, and then decay into uselessness and ugliness and die; and back then there was also the ever present possibility of getting evaporated in a nuclear armageddon that nobody wanted but that seemed fairly likely to happen at some point.
Even back in the 1970s the whole situation was clearly horribly unstable and not going to go well long-term. We never had much of a chance, or any more agency than yeast in a barrel have. A different race might have done better, but we are not that race. I'm not at all sure I would have wanted to live in the sort of world that might have survived.
I've had my forty years and then some, and they were great. I've already seen some of my friends and lovers die, and the next bit doesn't look like it would have been much fun anyway, and just because there was a point in the middle where I thought I might be able to watch the Milky Way go out doesn't mean it wasn't mostly a good life.
I am sorry for the suffering I caused, but that is my only regret. I hope that on balance my life improved the lives of those around me, people and animals both.
If we all go together then we don't have to watch our loved ones die. We have lived in interesting times, were awake in a way that very few have ever been awake, and we got a better deal than almost everyone who has ever lived.
Enjoy the last bit. We don't have very long. Make sure you use it wisely. Do have children if you want. You do them no harm. Very few people regret that they were alive, however briefly.
Moriturus te saluto!