For those unfamiliar with Bucky, I highly recommend his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Its a short, light read. He has a really interesting take on technology’s role in pirates and he was a firm believer that there is enough resources for everyone. He even talks about the US’s vulnerability to an attack on its water system.
I particularly love how clear his POV on design is. Put simply, he believes good design (and technology) boils down to doing more with less.
Others have written in reply that ephemeralization as he calls it (doing more with less) can help us solve physical problems. But it can also make non-physical problems worse. As systems become more complex and produce more information, the people who maintain them can have more difficulty and stress
Towards the end of his life, Bucky had achieved rock star status and his lectures filled stadiums in all corners of the world. At age 88, he twice circumnavigated the globe to give nonstop addresses. And they weren't short - his talks routinely lasted between three and four hours without breaks. Truly a remarkable character.
It's funny, I had a similar experience taking a nap in the office. I listen to the home of the spinny hard drives all around me, and suddenly my mind zoomed out, and I became aware of how many computers there were around me, and try to imagine how many there were in a 10-mile radius.
That radius kept expanding and I became painfully aware that most of them were just sitting there, not doing anything useful at all.
Not a very original idea — I was familiar with SETI@Home — but it was weird to me how little it had caught on.
Most computers are just spinning their wheels most of the time. That's a lot of power just sitting there.
Well I was thinking mostly of the CPUs. They're just sitting there. It's a waste of power sure, but more importantly it's a waste of a massive amount of useful computation that could have been happening.
The comic doesn't answer the question "how many energy slaves is 100 horsepower?" but based on the assumptions therein, the answer is 4,706 energy slaves.
I really enjoyed reading about his inventions when I was growing up, it was inspiring to me.
It’s also true though there’s a lot to be skeptical of, and it was also an education of sorts to go down the rabbit hole and read his Synergetics textbooks and discover he makes endless assertions that are not supported and also hard to parse.
At max, two full work weeks for a lightly trained amateur to transcribe 42 hours of decent but not great quality audio. A professional could do it in near realtime.
For me, it is notable that this is notable for you. This used to be as ubiquitous of a profession in modern organizations as typists were. Many people's entire job was going to meetings and/or listening to calls, transcribing the conversation, not just taking notes.
Professional stenographers transcribe in realtime with phonetic markers and everything. Even lightly trained transcriptionists can transcribe 1 hour of audio in 1.25-1.5 hours of wall clock time. For an amateur, you could probably get to a 1:2 ratio within a few hours. It's at max two full weeks of work.
I'm transcribing more than 42 hours of meetings and designs into software code; work is work. It's tedious and repetitive maybe but there's always people really into that kind of thing.
I quite like the traingular-tiled graphic of buckminster fuller in the hero section, and that hover highlights the tiles. All very buckminster fuller-y!
For those unfamiliar with Bucky, I highly recommend his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Its a short, light read. He has a really interesting take on technology’s role in pirates and he was a firm believer that there is enough resources for everyone. He even talks about the US’s vulnerability to an attack on its water system.
https://archive.org/details/operatingmanualforspaceshipearth...
Seconding this.
I particularly love how clear his POV on design is. Put simply, he believes good design (and technology) boils down to doing more with less.
Others have written in reply that ephemeralization as he calls it (doing more with less) can help us solve physical problems. But it can also make non-physical problems worse. As systems become more complex and produce more information, the people who maintain them can have more difficulty and stress
"Your Private Sky - The Art of Design Science" is also really good. Lots of photos and sketches.
Towards the end of his life, Bucky had achieved rock star status and his lectures filled stadiums in all corners of the world. At age 88, he twice circumnavigated the globe to give nonstop addresses. And they weren't short - his talks routinely lasted between three and four hours without breaks. Truly a remarkable character.
Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminsterfullerene
I remember this comic about Energy Slaves: https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/energy-slaves/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_slave
It's funny, I had a similar experience taking a nap in the office. I listen to the home of the spinny hard drives all around me, and suddenly my mind zoomed out, and I became aware of how many computers there were around me, and try to imagine how many there were in a 10-mile radius.
That radius kept expanding and I became painfully aware that most of them were just sitting there, not doing anything useful at all.
Not a very original idea — I was familiar with SETI@Home — but it was weird to me how little it had caught on.
Most computers are just spinning their wheels most of the time. That's a lot of power just sitting there.
Most of them these days are smart enough to NOT spin their wheels when idle.
Well I was thinking mostly of the CPUs. They're just sitting there. It's a waste of power sure, but more importantly it's a waste of a massive amount of useful computation that could have been happening.
That's what the AIs are going to say when they harvest the whole world to make more AIs.
It's still a big waste of compute power. Most of the lifecycle emissions come from manufacturing, not electricity.
The comic doesn't answer the question "how many energy slaves is 100 horsepower?" but based on the assumptions therein, the answer is 4,706 energy slaves.
I really enjoyed reading about his inventions when I was growing up, it was inspiring to me.
It’s also true though there’s a lot to be skeptical of, and it was also an education of sorts to go down the rabbit hole and read his Synergetics textbooks and discover he makes endless assertions that are not supported and also hard to parse.
Shameless plug: Buckminster Fuller has a (not so small) cameo in my game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/
:)
I have tried to listen to the whole thing but I have barely made a third through. I used to watch it but n archive.org and the audio wasn’t great.
Currently on mobile and the videos aren’t available to hear the audio quality. Just tried on a laptop and the video is not available.
Apparently there are transcriptions.
I like to listen to it. I certainly wouldn’t want to try to read it.
Am I understanding correctly that around 1997 a single person transcribed 42 hours of recordings? Wild and impressive. I wonder how long it took them?
Modern tools would likely do it in 42 minutes?
At max, two full work weeks for a lightly trained amateur to transcribe 42 hours of decent but not great quality audio. A professional could do it in near realtime.
For me, it is notable that this is notable for you. This used to be as ubiquitous of a profession in modern organizations as typists were. Many people's entire job was going to meetings and/or listening to calls, transcribing the conversation, not just taking notes.
Professional stenographers transcribe in realtime with phonetic markers and everything. Even lightly trained transcriptionists can transcribe 1 hour of audio in 1.25-1.5 hours of wall clock time. For an amateur, you could probably get to a 1:2 ratio within a few hours. It's at max two full weeks of work.
I'm transcribing more than 42 hours of meetings and designs into software code; work is work. It's tedious and repetitive maybe but there's always people really into that kind of thing.
That’s what foundations are for. Transcription used to be a human job just like computers.
It still is, if you want a correct transcription and not just a plausible one!
While 42 minutes would be hard to beat, I think that stenography was and remains a highly mature and impressive skillset.
Even if the transcription was instantaneous, you'd still need to manually vet it, i.e. listen to all of it.
Maybe those modern tools could be used to clean up the audio and video?
I'm not sure what's going on with the ordering of the sections, but it's definitely creative.
- 01: Section 1
- 02: Section 11
- 03: Section 10
...
- 10: Section 3
- 11: Section 2
- 12: Section 12
alphabetical order by title in ASCII terms instead of section
At any rate, the videos just say "Video unavailable" / "This video is unavailable" although there are transcripts.
What about alphabetical order would lead "Section 9" to sort above "Section 8"?
Elegant, actually
I quite like the traingular-tiled graphic of buckminster fuller in the hero section, and that hover highlights the tiles. All very buckminster fuller-y!
Is there an MCP?