Should Hyperion receive the Dune treatment and be adapted into a movie? In spite of the series’ popularity, John Kao argues it just wouldn’t be the same. This is a powerful question. Lots of beloved and important books can’t work as TV or movies… or can they?

I’ve finally started CDProject Red’s near future masterpiece. It’s awesome! But when it was released the game sucked eggs so badly the company had to refund people’s money. Did that bad start make for a great game?

With so much hype about AI replacing everybody how about the world the arts? Recent surveys on the perception of AI art confirm that humans place a good deal of emphasis on the mind behind the work.

LLM’s (the Chat-GPT version of AI) don’t know anything because there is no one in there to know. This is what makes putting AI in charge of things so dangerous. But there are other better paths to AI including one which begins with “world models”. But whose world would these AI be living in?

So much of how we interpret the world is derived from how it treated us in the past. How can we balance the things that make us who we are with the people we hope to become?

All the Earth’s “planetary systems” - atmosphere, hydrosphere (water), cryosphere (ice), lithosphere (ground) - are being changed by human activity. How can we keep from having this lead to disaster? When it comes to the oceans, Dona Bertarelli, says this requires recontextualizing our relationship to the natural world.

Oh my god, COFFEE! Turns out humans aren’t the only ones reliant on caffeine to make it through the day. The molecule is so useful to survival that several different plants, each on unique continents, independently evolved to produce it.