Like a church? A synagogue? A mosque? That fits the definition exactly. It seems like a substitute for a house of worship for people who do not believe in God.
Do religious people go to church daily and hold business meetings in church? Do religious people go to a church to do a casual date or catch up with friends and associates on weekdays?
I might be very misinformed about how church works, but I think that coffee shops fill a very different niche. History kinda supports this: coffee shops became valuable places of business and occupied the 'third place' role even in extremely religious places and times (I'm thinking of Lloyd's specifically, and 17th and 18th century coffee shop culture as a locus for business ventures in the Netherlands and England).
I would like to add what many non-religious people (and some "out to lunch" evangelicals) do ot understand about churches (I guess this applies to mosque and synagogue too).
The role of a church is social, not religious. There are religious elements of course, but churches would not be required if it were not for the communities they foster
My church is also my kids' school. We also don't have bus service. During the school year a large portion of the parish is in constant contact and communication because of this.
You do things at a place of worship other than socializing and meeting people, so while a church is a third space not all third spaces are very church like. A bar doesn't really have worship analogues right
I don't think that's true. All third spaces I can think of are based on some activity, around which some community (or individual social relationships) form which might or might not be so closely related to the activity.
All these have "a thing you do other than socializing and meeting people". You could (and do) go there specifically for the activity without socializing and meeting people (just like church).
Spaces that are "social-only" are pretty rare. Coffee shops are maybe closer to that as you're probably not going to consume many coffees, but people stay to read, work... it's a bit less structured than other third spaces (and personally I find that it makes it more difficult to socialise there)
But in a non-religious third place you may find people from any religion besides us atheists, which is not going to happen on places of worship. Your examples all seem more homogeneous to me.
That may be good or bad depending on what you’re looking for, but my point is I don’t think they’re as comparable as you do.
They are homogenous in terms of one shared belief. Places of religion can be just as varied in terms of most other things (industries, skills, politics apart from a few unacceptable things) and can be even more varied in some things (affluence of people there, and width of area they draw from).
I went to church as a kid and know what you mean. However, the shared belief usually implies a narrower heterogeneity, if that makes sense (in a way that’s proportional to how orthodox the beliefs are).
In a secular shared space it’s far more common to be exposed to people with radically different beliefs, sexual orientation (or even preferences), and political views, to mention a few examples.
I think it’s very important that people have places where they can be surrounded by others that, while different as you say, all share a very important core belief, but it’s also very important for a healthy society to have spaces where radically different people can coexist peacefully and even work towards some goal together (e.g., a “repair” meetup where people go get something fixed or help others fix things).
> sexual orientation (or even preferences), and political views,
In the churches I have been to over the years (all Catholic or Anglican) I have met people with different sexual orientations and a very wide range of political views (everything except far right, as far left as outright communist).
> I think it’s very important that people have places where they can be surrounded by others that, while different as you say, all share a very important core belief, but it’s also very important for a healthy society to have spaces where radically different people can coexist peacefully and even work towards some goal together
I agree. It does happen at work anyway though so I put less importance on this as a requirement for third spaces.
>In the churches I have been to over the years (all Catholic or Anglican) I have met people with different sexual orientations and a very wide range of political views (everything except far right, as far left as outright communist).
Yeah, it was similar for me (only Catholic churches in my case), though politics were usually homogeneous per church (what I mean is: whether you leaned left or right, you'd find a Catholic community to welcome you, but I'm not sure it'd be easy to find one that would comfortably welcome wide political views). As for sexual orientation, this was not common at all, but bear in mind the last time I attended Church was in the early 90s so things may have changed.
> I agree. It does happen at work anyway though so I put less importance on this as a requirement for third spaces.
I think the main difference of a third space vs work is that, at work, we're forced to "put up" with people we wouldn't normally engage with, because we all have the common goal of making a living, while in a third space, even in one with a common goal like the repair meetups I mentioned, you go there voluntarily and not because otherwise you can't put food on the table.
I think both will vary wildly. I also think my experience in the UK and Sri Lanka is very different from, say, the US.
Catholic churches, politically, pretty similar to the rest of society where the church was, with a left wing tilt.
Sexual orientation also varies with church. Obviously a gay friendly church (e.g. St Patrick's Soho a few decades ago, Farm Street now - both in Catholic London). For Anglican churches I would say St martin in the Fields where David Monteith ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Monteith ) was one of our parish priests.
> I think the main difference of a third space vs work is that, at work, we're forced to "put up" with people we wouldn't normally engage with, because we all have the common goal of making a living
I agree, but by putting up with people you can come to like them, particularly if you are avoiding people because of things such as a stereotyped view of a group.
Wonderful, a nice meeting place between modern and classical art. Arguably one of the most alluring features of classical art is the complexity and intricacy of detail.
Certainly an important discovery for utilizing these models on scaled hardware. This approach could certainly be applied beyond LLMs to other types of neural networks. That would be an interesting space to explore.
Strangely enough, I work with AI models as a programmer and do not use any AI tools to code. The creation of "cognitive debt" as AI researchers describe it means that crucial components of my code are offloaded into a black box understanding.
"Across groups, NERs, n-gram patterns, and topic ontology showed within-group homogeneity. EEG revealed significant differences in brain connectivity: Brain-only participants exhibited the strongest, most distributed networks; Search Engine users showed moderate engagement; and LLM users displayed the weakest connectivity."
In other words, working with LLMs reduces the level of engagement in our brains and offloads much of our cognitive activity.
When working with models that require a high level of abstraction and optimization, offloading these tasks to LLMs that essentially scrape and combine code from various sources can lead to disaster. For something like a basic CRUD app such factors are not nearly as important.
I can see the future convergence of two clear trends in software: No-code tools and AI tools. The development of AI agents which handle not only the generation of code but the full development cycle of creating, testing, and deploying projects with a limited level of programming knowledge required.
As an additional note:
Both of these software trends aim to automate and replace many responsibilities of the programmer in a commercial sense. I believe that future programmers will need to become familiar with these emerging technologies in order to remain competitive in the job market.
Namely, math skills. Linear regression, multivariable calculus, the sort of math applied by scientists and researchers. If you do not understand the mathematics at the core of neural networks, now is the time to learn.
Absolutely fascinating. Detecting ripples in the fabric of space and time? The NSF is still producing Nobel worthy discoveries.
I've been working on a Deep Convolutional Generative Adverserial Network (DCGAN) which utilizes astronomical data and have been on an astronomy kick.
Cutting funding to pure science research is a profound mistake, pure science research puts our nation at the forefront of technological discovery and is of national strategic importance.
Something interesting about the American Revolutionary War is that the popular force raised from the population were not only able to overcome the most powerful international military force at the time, they were able to demonstrate significant martial superiority in battle.
For example, at Lexington and Concord, the outset of the war, the Loyalists suffered 73 combat deaths while the Revolutionaries suffered 49.
At Saratoga, the turning point of the war, the British suffered 440 combat deaths while the Revolutionaries suffered only 90.
At Yorktown, again, ~200 combat deaths for the Loyalists against 88 combat deaths for the Revolutionaries.
This demonstrates something unique to this conflict. Typically, in unconventional wars of this nature, insurgent forces suffer proportionally higher losses than occupying forces. This was not the case in the American Revolutionary War.
I believe that a number of factors contributed to this. For one, mass mobilization due to overwhelming popular support. Lexington and Concord began with only 77 Revolutionaries and escalated to nearly 4,000. It was the escalation of conflict that attracted insurgents from far and wide who were eager for action and an opportunity to join the revolutionary effort. Literally anyone with a rifle, even fowling pieces for bird hunting, could join in and fight the clearly, visually marked occupying forces.
Secondly, a familiarity with the surrounding terrain which provided ample foliage and an advantageous landscape. Namely, forested hills and mountains. As for the swampy terrain mentioned in the article, Brigadier General Francis Marion AKA "the swamp fox" as written here was able to use it to his advantage to conduct guerrilla style operations in the Southern theater.
Thirdly, the pre-war efforts of Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben were instrumental in his service to Washington of transforming what was once a ragged band and physically unprepared mass of men into an organized and confident fighting force. These men were strenously trained to a high standard, they were not like Mao's men who were simply handed a rifle (sometimes even a sword) and thrown into battle. They were trained to fight like professionals and carry themselves with confidence in combat.
The American Revolutiory War provides insight into a unique sort of war where it is demonstrated that a popular force raised from everyday people has the potential to not only defeat the most powerful professional military force in the world but to do so with demonstrable martial superiority.
This requires a respect for the sacredness of human life and a recognition of the horribleness of war and conflict. To minimize losses and to minimize the time in which the conflict is resolved.
Nuclear weapons can be repurposed for nuclear energy. Maybe, just maybe, one beautiful day we will live in a world where there are no nuclear weapons nor need for them. These weapons cannot be used ethically, they poison the soil, air, and water.
A quote from Sun Tzu is etched in stone at the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site just outside the Pine Ridge Native American Reservation:
"Someday, an ultimate class of warriors will evolve, too strong to be contested. They will win battles without having to fight, so that at last, the day may be won without shedding a single drop of blood."
Maybe I'm misunderstanding why you juxtaposed your statement about repurposing nuclear weapons and the quote, but isn't the quote suggesting that nuclear weapons are those ultimate warriors that will bring an end to bloodshed? It seems like an artful allusion to the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction and the claim that MAD prevents wars.
It depends on the way you read it. Nuclear bombs cause bloodshed. The blood might be vaporized, cooked, or irradiated - but still shed.
I don't think that's what OP meant; rather I read it literally, to mean one day there might actually be a world without war, or at least, a world without violent wars.
We aren't in a position to answer this one one way or the other.
If things go very wrong they have the potential to take us out. But a non-nuclear WWIII could, also--not by direct kills but by taking down the interconnected stuff that makes society work.
Also, while they serve to prevent direct wars between major powers they cause proxy wars between the major powers.
The only way we will, now that the genie is out of the bottle, not need these weapons is when we will have easy and affordable (for nation states) ways to neuter a nuclear attack which is as likely as the earth being peaceful and filled with bonhomie unlike anytime in history ever.
Besides if (and that’s some “if”) that happens that means the world has already found something more deadly and again some people will suddenly grow very mature insights on this and after destroying few cities they would totally focus on an initiative that ensures only they get to keep those weapons and every other nation should voluntarily sign up for it. And this is the main reason we will never get rid of deadliest of weapons and the endless quest for them.
Defending against a nuclear attack though isn't a desire for peace, it's a desire for freedom of action without consequence.
In a world with nuclear weapons and limited, unreliable defenses against them, you have to actually fully comprehend what "wanting peace" actually means - i.e. negotiation and diplomacy are the actual kings.
In a world without them, you always have the option of resorting to the barrel of the gun again - as happened to prior to WW2.
I don't think reliable defenses against nukes can exist can they? Airbursting nukes high enough causes emp events and the irradiated material still floats around - that's without the assymetry in cost in trying to hit 100% of decoys produced by the nuke, stopping a single nuke is at least an order of magnitude more expansive than sending one - I don't think it could really be done!
>I don't think reliable defenses against nukes can exist can they? Airbursting nukes high enough causes emp events and the irradiated material still floats around
With enough anti-missile technology, it's possible (though challenging) to defend against that.
But good luck trying to stop them from smuggling a multi-kiloton device across your border and detonating it at a time calculated to cause the most casualties.
I'd say that's debatable, but whether its possible isn't really the point: it's important to have both eyes open on the actual ramifications of nuclear weapons not being a reality anymore. Because the idea that that is "the peaceful option" isn't one borne out by history - past or present.
Disagree. You're assuming nothing upsets the balance. I'm thinking of the Hammer's Slammers books. For those who haven't read them: a reasonable extrapolation of future tech with one big change: Cartridge-based energy guns. They are lightspeed weapons, no leading your target or the like. Center it in the optics and you'll hit it. The skies are nobody's friend, no aircraft, ballistic weapons are generally not of much use. The only combat rockets are ultra high acceleration short range stuff that's based on getting through before it can be tracked and engaged by the defense mounts. While nukes exist they don't get used because they're just going to be picked off. Against missiles you can make your warheads salvage fuse (messes up the tracking against the next missile), but you can't detect a lightspeed weapon until it hits.
I'm not familiar with the books, but I have a very hard time believing that the simple presence of lightspeed weapons would make all forms of combat other than ground combat obsolete.
Nukes come from security competition between nation states. It's the anarchic nature of this security competition that necessitates nukes.
The only way to avoid this is a one world government.
The analogy is: the existence of police is the only reason you don't need to own a gun. Without police, it's anarchy, and therefore you need a gun to survive in that incentive structure.
That would be worse than nukes. We already see what UN and UNSC has become. Even hearing the “one world” government gave strong star wars vibes even though I didn’t need to go that far.
We are designed (or destined, if you want to say so) to be fucked and fuck up everything on this earth faster than we thought maybe even just 20-30 years ago.
The earth will survive humans and we will be nothing but an archeological record. Fucking things up is subjective. The great oxigenation event also really fucked up the planet, subjectively, wiping out millions of species
>The only way to avoid this is a one world government.
Plainly false. But even if that were true, then the cure's worse than the sickness.
Let's have a planet with 100,000 sovereign governments. Tiny city-states that neither have the mineral resources to build those nor the wealth to attempt it.
> Let's have a planet with 100,000 sovereign governments.
This is an impossible scenario because there is no authority that can enforce this. We had what you wanted in our tribal past, but it was not competitive. Nation states naturally emerged as the technology that allowed nation states (printing press, railroads, etc) emerged. You can't reverse this just by wishing it to be so. A one world government is at least a feasible possible future instead of an impossible one.
> Nation states naturally emerged as the technology that allowed nation states (printing press, railroads, etc) emerged.
Nation states were around long before railroads or the printing press; they were around before the pyramids were built. Arguably the original technology that made them viable as an alternative to hunter-gatherer tribes was agriculture.
Modern technology has made modern nation states harder to dislodge in some ways, but that doesn't mean they're a good idea.
> A one world government is at least a feasible possible future
Yes, but I disagree that it's the only feasible option. For one thing, technology can also make it harder for nation states to lie to their people about what they're up to (the technology that is allowing us to have this conversation being the prime example). And once mation states lose the ability to do that, their viability becomes much more problematic, since without being able to tell and sustain such lies, the extent to which they make things worse instead of better becomes more and more widely known, and people are less and less willing to put up with that. A single government that was supposed to rule the entire world would have even worse problems in that regard.
>This is an impossible scenario because there is no authority that can enforce this.
No, it's not impossible, it's just not extant. It may be true that there is no path from where we are now to that world, and it is certainly true that if there is a path it's not trivially predictable. But this can be said of the "one world government" thing as well. Knowing that people like myself exist and would sabotage attempts at one world government, how do you propose to make that possible?
>We had what you wanted in our tribal past,
No, we had something even better. We had a zero-world-government. That truly is impossible, at least considering that I'm not a fan of human extinction.
It's impossible in the sense of "this goes against an informed understand of history and human nature", which admittedly is a soft analysis not rooted in verifiable fact, but is one that I nevertheless hold to. The last 10,000 years have been a gradual, unceasing trend of increasing centralization, from isolated hunter gatherer tribes, to EU and UN type bodies today. The unceasing nature of this trend isn't an accident. There are underlying causal factors that generate it. Positing that those causal factors will continue in the future, leading to an increase in the size of EU-like entities, to the point of de facto hemispheric/world government type bodies, isn't so radical, even if it is uncertain.
>It's impossible in the sense of "this goes against an informed understand of history and human nature",
No, that's just your narrative. You even acknowledge that there was a point in history where it was the prevailing condition, so clearly it wasn't against human nature.
> The last 10,000 years have been a gradual, unceasing trend of increasing centralization,
Hardly gradual. Incredibly punctuated. In some places in the world the stateless/tribal paradigm survived until modern times. The progressive's version of "the market only ever goes up!"...
>Positing that those causal factors will continue in the future,
So you're bad at prediction too. No, humanity becomes extinct in the next 2 or 3 centuries, because you've all become sterile worker drones and can't even maintain a stable population. Sometimes I hope that part's just an accident, but then I read words written by people like yourself, and you seem all too enthusiastic about it as if you've discovered some divine secret. Oh well.
6. Therefore the skillful leader subdues the enemy's troops without any fighting; he captures their cities without laying siege to them; he overthrows their kingdom without lengthy operations in the field.
7. With his forces intact he will dispute the mastery of the Empire, and thus, without losing a man, his triumph will be complete. This is the method of attacking by stratagem.
and maaaaybe the original text underlying some of that could also be translated as the second sentence in the alleged quotation. But the bit about "an ultimate class of warriors" seems really fishy to me.
[EDITED to add:] Ah, looking at a picture of the thing, it says "adapted from Sun Tzu, The Art of War". Seems like a pretty loose adaptation.
> "Someday, an ultimate class of warriors will evolve, too strong to be contested. They will win battles without having to fight, so that at last, the day may be won without shedding a single drop of blood."
With such power asymmetries, the "bleeding" might merely be displaced to after the battle is settled. Look at the history of how colonialism played out.
I disagree. Our most dangerous enemies aren't even human. On the off chance the little green men show up, let's have something with a bit more oomph than polite rebuke. Just in case.
>"Someday, an ultimate class of warriors will evolve, too strong to be contested. They will win battles without having to fight, so that at last, the day may be won without shedding a single drop of blood."
This is just silly. What if those warriors want to ban abortions and library books? Will you be satisfied that their fighting prowess grants them the power to dictate that to you? Do you believe that there's some mystical connection between that strength and your particular ethical perspective?
It's pretty much impossible to come up with a stardrive that doesn't have a weapon potential that makes nukes look like firecrackers.
1) The direct Kzinti Lesson: Anything that can push a ship to relativistic velocity produces incredibly energetic exhaust. The efficiency of the drive is directly related to how well you can point it in one direction, thus making it very hard to make something that isn't a weapon. And in a population-attack scenario such a starship throwing rocks is devastating. At 86% of lightspeed a rock hits with it's annihilation energy. At 94% of lightspeed it hits as hard as if it were antimatter.
2) Jump drives (whatever you call them) still need to get somewhere without waiting years. While it doesn't have nearly the planet-killing potential of a relativistic starship it's still quite capable of throwing city-killers.
3) Intertialess (Lensman series). No direct weapon potential but they knew they couldn't crack the defenses of Jarvenon--so the slapped inertialess drives to a couple of planets and used them as a nutcracker.
Known physics only leaves the first scenario as possible, I threw out the others to cover the various sci-fi drives. I can't think of any story that uses something that doesn't fit one of these three categories.
> Maybe, just maybe, one beautiful day we will live in a world where there are no nuclear weapons nor need for them.
We already live, and have since forever, in a world that does not need nuclear weapons.
> A quote from Sun Tzu
The logical outcome of which being that whoever controls that class of warriors controls the world. I’m not convinced, despite what the quote seems to imply, that is better than never again shedding blood.
With all due respect to ancient Chinese wisdom, Sun Tzu had no concept of atomic bombs, autonomous drones, and weaponised diseases.
On that note: Trumps golden dome has the chance to end this paradigm, since with it the US can now Nuke countries that it likes without direct payback (which is probably the point of the whole thing in the first place).
The problem with that is that it changes the incentive on nukes into using them in more concealed, non-attributable ways, like smuggling a suitcase nuke into Manhatten and have everybody wonder which nations or terrorist organization it was.
1) EMP strike. The device is a big h-bomb peacefully sitting in orbit, pretending to be something else. Push the button and basically everything to the horizon (which is a very long ways) gets fried. Some of the hardened military stuff might survive, but the country is gone. The survivalists might hang on for a while, but they can't rebuild.
2) Salvage fuse. You put a proximity sensor on the missile that detonates it if something comes sufficiently close. All the antennas and missile seekers looking at the area are dazzled if not destroyed. The defenses have a very hard time engaging the next missile. The next missile doesn't need to be looking at anything, it doesn't get fried.
3) Suppose it "works"?? Nope, the reality of missile defense is that you spend more on the interceptors than your enemy spent on the missiles. Iron Dome is last I knew $50k/shot. And note what happened in the aftermath of 10/7--Hamas bled the launchers dry with rockets that were at least an order of magnitude cheaper. Last I knew Iron Beam was only test-deployed (shooting at real inbounds but not considered fully operational) and even it can be swamped. And it's only a short range defense. And it takes dwell time--salvage fuse becomes an issue even though it's an energy weapon. Point defense, yes. Country defense, no.
Especially when you consider that similar studies conclude that caffeine has an overall positive effect on brain function when consumed at 200mg per sitting and 400mg per day.
100mg being equivalent to one cup of coffee or two cups of tea. I personally prefer tea as it is milder and the lower caffeine content means I can drink it all day.
Love it, made me smile. The "warmth" of all this old tech is nostalgic, all the little human touches lost to history. The little bits of heart and soul that shaped the details of our lives, some nameless engineer on some forgotten afternoon implementing the little blue waves in the rain clouds. Something strangely bittersweet about it.
