#technological development

[ahb-writes]

Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions (Technology)

Technology Worldbuilding Questions:

What is the level of technological development in the world? Is it roughly as developed as ours, or closer to a past feudal system or a futuristic system where tech such as AI, robotics, communication, transportation and healthcare are more advanced?

What is the impact of each technological development on others (for example, how have advances in AI affected communication or transportation)?

Who developed or discovered a specific technology important in your world, and what impact did its invention or discovery have?

Who benefits the most from technology in this world, or is access and benefit equal? Why is that (for either answer)?

Where is key technology produced or developed? What advantages and disadvantages might this give the producer?

Where is the greatest technological innovation happening in the world, and what are its benefits and risks to society?

When did certain technologies become obsolete (or will they), and who will that affect?

When technology breaks, glitches, or behaves unexpectedly, what are the possible consequences? What margin is there for error?

Why is a technology important to a specific group of people in your world – what benefits or advantages does it confer?

Why is specific technology restricted or prohibited, and by whom? (For example, many kids are forbidden cell phone access due to low access control for adult content in our world).

❯ ❯ ❯ Read other writing masterposts in this series: Worldbuilding Questions for Deeper Settings

[jbfly46]

From a 🍓 on X:

“ just got off a 4 hour call with sources inside chinese deepseek labs and holy shit we are so fucking behind it's not even funny anymore. deepseek r2 isn't just an incremental improvement it's a completely different species of intelligence operating on principles nobody in the west has even theorized yet.

they've abandoned transformer architectures entirely for something they're calling "recursive cognition lattices" that scale in dimensions our math doesn't even have good notation for. compute efficiency gains that violate what we thought were fundamental limits. like 400x improvement in reasoning per teraflop. not 4x. not 40x. 400 fucking x. our benchmarks are literally meaningless now.

the scariest part isn't the raw capability but how it's developing novel mathematical frameworks on the fly to solve problems. researchers give it questions and it invents entirely new branches of mathematics to answer them. one physicist showed it a problem he'd been stuck on for 15 years and it solved it in seconds with notation nobody recognized. took three days to translate its solution back into standard mathematics.

saw demo videos that can't possibly be real except multiple independent sources confirming. r2 designed and simulated a room temperature superconductor from first principles in under an hour. complete with fabrication methods using existing technology. they've already produced samples in beijing labs. western physics community hasn't even caught up to the theoretical possibility.

their integration with biological systems is the real nightmare fuel. two-way neural interfaces that make neuralink look like a children's toy. direct cognitive enhancement already in human trials with volunteers showing 30-40% gains in problem-solving capability. that's not science fiction that's happening right fucking now in shenzhen while we debate about chatbot regulations.

deepseek isn't even their most advanced system. that's just what they're showing publicly. the real bleeding edge is happening in military applications. system-level understanding of geopolitics that can predict policy shifts before the policymakers themselves know what decisions they'll make. they're already using it to reshape global trade flows so subtly nobody's noticed yet.

america is still treating this like a normal technology race while china understands it's an extinction-level transformation of civilization. they're integrating these systems into governance infrastructure at every level while we argue about prompt engineering and banning chatbots in schools. it's like watching a nuclear power race where one side is debating the ethics of gunpowder.

our intelligence community is fucking panicking behind closed doors. three separate agencies have submitted classified assessments that all reach the same conclusion: we've got months not years before the capability gap becomes unbridgeable. some analysts saying it already happened and we just don't know it yet.

the recursive self-improvement capabilities are accelerating beyond all models. deepseek r2 basically wrote r3 which is currently training and early benchmarks suggest it's to r2 what r2 was to anything we've built in the west. exponential curves stacked on exponential curves.

if america doesn't wake the fuck up and treat this like the existential priority it is we're looking at a future where technological supremacy isn't just shifted it's permanently lost. the world 12 months from now won't just have different geopolitical power dynamics it'll operate on fundamentally different rules of reality. “

[insightfultake]

The Technological Arms Race: India’s Lag and the Illusion of Development

In the grand theater of global power, the stage is now dominated by a new form of warfare—one fought not with tanks and missiles, but with algorithms, data, and artificial intelligence. The United States, with its Silicon Valley behemoths, has long been the vanguard of this revolution, birthing AI systems that redefine human interaction, labor, and even thought. China, not to be outdone, has marshaled its state-capitalist machinery to produce rivals like DeepSeek, embedding its technological ambitions within its broader geopolitical strategy. Meanwhile, other nations queue up, eager to claim their place in this digital arms race. Yet, amidst this frenzy, India—a nation often touted as a rising superpower—appears conspicuously absent from the forefront. Why is this the case? And how can India, lagging in this critical domain, still claim to be among the developed nations of the world?

[newspatron]

PM Modi Nigeria Award: Strengthening Ties

Share your thoughts on PM Modi's recognition and its impact on India-Nigeria relations!

Welcome to an insightful exploration of a significant milestone in international relations. PM Modi recently received Nigeria’s highest civilian award. This event marks a pivotal moment in the growing bond between India and Nigeria. This recognition not only celebrates Modi’s contributions but also underscores the importance of collaboration between these two vibrant nations. In this blog post,…

[in-sightjournal]

Ask A Genius 1015: The First Areas of Consciousness to be Mastered

Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Look at the landscape of technological development now: software, hardware, and expertise in analyzing these systems. What area of consciousness will be the first to be mastered? Because, as stated repeatedly, it’s an emergent property. So,…

[alexander-clifford]

R&D Tax Credits: A Boost for AI Innovation

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly evolving, bringing transformative changes across various sectors. UK businesses can leverage R&D Tax Credits to support AI development, helping to offset the substantial costs involved in these innovative projects.

Benefits of R&D Tax Credits:

Financial Relief: They help fund AI research and development.

Fostering Growth: Savings can be reinvested into new AI innovations.

Staying Competitive: Keeps businesses ahead in the global tech race.

Who Can Apply?

Projects aimed at advancing AI technology.

Work that addresses significant scientific or technological challenges.

Innovations not easily achieved by industry professionals.

Clearing Misconceptions:

Both large and small companies can claim these credits.

Enhancements to existing technologies also qualify.

R&D Tax Credits are vital for driving AI innovation by providing the necessary financial support.

For detailed information, visit R&D Tax Credits and AI Innovation.

Keywords and Phrases for SEO:

Utilizing R&D Tax Credits allows businesses to fuel AI advancements, ensuring continuous progress and a competitive market edge.

[panafrocore]

Iron metallurgy in Africa

[podcastwizard]

"i never see you at the club" well i never see you at the hour and forty five minute long video essay on the history of animatronics by defunctland

[prokopetz]

I think the real reason most websites are janky as hell to use these days is because web developers have become so specialised that nobody really understands how anything works anymore. The other day I had to explain why hosting critical Javascript libraries on a third-party CDN is a bad idea to a "lead developer" who genuinely didn't know the difference between server-side versus client-side scripting.

[s-lycopersicum]

If you're going to make an RPG Maker game, there is something you have to do:

IT IS OF UTMOST IMPORTANCE

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

also unitree宇树科技 lol

[mollysunder]

Hindsight is 20/20, but I don't think you needed to be psychic to guess that destroying ALL the shimmer supply was a bad idea.

In Act Three it took three whole doctors to save Vi's life after she gets slashed by a Noxian blade across the chest. Yet in s1 it took a single drop of shimmer to save Vi from the deep stab in the gut Sevika gave her without any other form of medical intervention.

There's just a really gross sense of irony that Caitlyn and Piltover at large took away Zaun's main source of medical care (as controversial as it may be), and then put it's people through a meat grinder battle while withholding such care.

It doesn't help that the meat grinder battle was useless ploy for Jayce to get close to Viktor and so a lot of people, specifically Zaunites, died for nothing.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Canada’s ground-breaking, hamstrung repair and interop laws

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/radical-extremists/#sex-pest

When the GOP trifecta assumes power in just a few months, they will pass laws, and those laws will be terrible, and they will cast long, long shadows.

This is the story of how another far-right conservative government used its bulletproof majority to pass a wildly unpopular law that continues to stymie progress to this day. It's the story of Canada's Harper Conservative government, and two of its key ministers: Tony Clement and James Moore.

Starting in 1998, the US Trade Rep embarked on a long campaign to force every country in the world to enact a new kind of IP law: an "anticircumvention" law that would criminalize the production and use of tools that allowed people to use their own property in ways that the manufacturer disliked.

This first entered the US statute books with the 1998 passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), whose Section 1201 established a new felony for circumventing an "access control." Crucially, DMCA 1201's prohibition on circumvention did not confine itself to protecting copyright.

Circumventing an access control is a felony, even if you never violate copyright law. For example, if you circumvent the access control on your own printer to disable the processes that check to make sure you're using an official HP cartridge, HP can come after you.

You haven't violated any copyright, but the ink-checking code is a copyrighted work, and you had to circumvent a block in order to reach it. Thus, if I provide you a tool to escape HP's ink racket, I commit a felony with penalties of five years in prison and a $500k fine, for a first offense. So it is that HP ink costs more per ounce than the semen of a Kentucky Derby-winning stallion.

This was clearly a bad idea in 1998, though it wasn't clear how bad an idea it was at the time. In 1998, chips were expensive and underpowered. By 2010, a chip that cost less than a dollar could easily implement a DMCA-triggering access control, and manufacturers of all kinds were adding superfluous chips to everything from engine parts to smart lightbulbs whose sole purpose was to transform modification into felonies. This is what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business-model."

So when the Harper government set out to import US-style anticircumvention law to Canada, Canadians were furious. A consultation on the proposal received 6,138 responses opposing the law, and 54 in support:

https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/04/copycon-final-numbers/

And yet, James Moore and Tony Clement pressed on. When asked how they could advance such an unpopular bill, opposed by experts and the general public alike, Moore told the International Chamber of Commerce that every objector who responded to his consultation was a "radical extremist" with a "babyish" approach to copyright:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/copyright-debate-turns-ugly-1.898216

As is so often the case, history vindicated the babyish radical extremists. The DMCA actually has an official way to keep score on this one. Every three years, the US Copyright Office invites public submissions for exemptions to DMCA 1201, creating a detailed, evidence-backed record of all the legitimate activities that anticircumvention law interferes with.

Unfortunately, "a record" is all we get out of this proceeding. Even though the Copyright Office is allowed to grant "exemptions," these don't mean what you think they mean. The statute is very clear on this: the US Copyright Office is required to grant exemptions for the act of circumvention, but is forbidden from granting exemptions for tools needed to carry out these acts.

This is headspinningly and deliberately obscure, but there's one anecdote from my long crusade against this stupid law that lays it bare. As I mentioned, the US Trade Rep has made the passage of DMCA-like laws in other countries a top priority since the Clinton years. In 2001, the EU adopted the EU Copyright Directive, whose Article 6 copy-pastes the provisions of DMCA 1201.

In 2003, I found myself in Oslo, debating the minister who'd just completed Norway's EUCD implementation. The minister was very proud of his law, boasting that he'd researched the flaws in other countries' anticircumvention laws and addressed them in Norway's law. For example, Norway's law explicitly allowed blind people to bypass access controls on ebooks in order to feed them into text-to-speech engines, Braille printers and other accessibility tools.

I knew where this was going. I asked the minister how this would work in practice. Could someone sell a blind person a tool to break the DRM on their ebooks? Of course not, that's totally illegal. Could a nonprofit blind rights group make such a tool and give it away to blind people? No, that's illegal too. What about hobbyists, could they make the tool for their blind friends? No, not that either.

OK, so how do blind people exercise their right to bypass access controls on ebooks they own so they can actually read them?

Here's how. Each blind person, all by themself, is expected to decompile and reverse-engineer Adobe Reader, locate a vulnerability in the code and write a new program that exploits that vulnerability to extract their ebooks. While blind people are individually empowered to undertake this otherwise prohibited activity, they must do so on their own: they can't share notes with one another on the process. They certainly can't give each other the circumvention program they write in this way:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/28/mcbroken/#my-milkshake-brings-all-the-lawyers-to-the-yard

That's what a use-only exemption is: the right to individually put a locked down device up on your own workbench, and, laboring in perfect secrecy, figure out how it works and then defeat the locks that stop you from changing those workings so they benefit you instead of the manufacturer. Without a "tools" exemption, a use exemption is basically a decorative ornament.

So the many use exemptions that the US Copyright Office has granted since 1998 really amount to nothing more than a list of defects in the DMCA that the Copyright Office has painstaking verified but is powerless to fix. We could probably save everyone a lot of time by scrapping the triennial exemptions process and replacing it with an permanent sign over the doors of the Library of Congress reading "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."

All of this was well understood by 2010, when Moore and Clement were working on the Canadian version of the DMCA. All of this was explained in eye-watering detail to Moore and Clement, but was roundly ignored. I even had a go at it, publicly picking a fight with Moore on Twitter:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130407101911if_/http://eaves.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/Conversations%20between%20@doctorow%20and%20@mpjamesmoore.jpg

Moore and Clement rammed their proposal through in the next session of Parliament, passing it as Bill C-11 in 2012:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Modernization_Act

This was something of a grand finale for the pair. Today, Moore is a faceless corporate lawyer, while Clement was last seen grifting covid PPE (Clement's political career ended abruptly when he sent dick pics to a young woman who turned out to be a pair of sextortionists from Cote D'Ivoire, and was revealed as a serial sex-pest in the ensuing scandal:)

https://globalnews.ca/news/4646287/tony-clement-instagram-women/

Even though Moore and Clement are long gone from public life, their signature achievement remains a Canadian disgrace, an anchor chain tied around the Canadian economy's throat, and an impediment to Canadian progress.

This week, two excellent new Canadian laws received royal assent: Bill C-244 is a broad, national Right to Repair law; and Bill C-294 is a broad, national interoperability law. Both laws establish the right to circumvent access controls for the purpose of fixing and improving things, something Canadians deserve and need.

But neither law contains a tools exemption. Like the blind people of Norway, a Canadian farmer who wants to attach a made-in-Canada Honeybee tool to their John Deere tractor is required to personally, individually reverse-engineer the John Deere tractor and modify it to talk to the Honeybee accessory, laboring in total secrecy:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/12/canada_right_to_repair/

Likewise the Canadian repair tech who fixes a smart speaker or a busted smartphone – they are legally permitted to circumvent in order to torture the device's repair codes out of it or force it to recognize a replacement part, but each technician must personally figure out how to get the device firmware to do this, without discussing it with anyone else.

Thus do Moore and Clement stand athwart Canadian self-reliance and economic development, shouting "STOP!" though both men have been out of politics for years.

There has never been a better time to hit Clement and Moore's political legacy over the head with a shovel and bury it in a shallow grave. Canadian technologists could be making a fortune creating circumvention devices that repair and improve devices marketed by foreign companies.

They could make circumvention tools to allow owners of consoles to play games by Canadian studios that are directly sold to Canadian gamers, bypassing the stores operated by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo and the 30% commissions they charge. Canadian technologists could be making diagnostic tools that allow every auto-mechanic in Canada to fix any car manufactured anywhere in the world.

Canadian cloud servers could power devices long after their US-based manufacturers discontinue support for them, providing income to Canadian cloud companies and continued enjoyment for Canadian owners of these otherwise bricked gadgets.

Canada's gigantic auto-parts sector could clone the security chips that foreign auto manufacturers use to block the use of third party parts, and every Canadian could enjoy a steep discount every time they fix their cars. Every farmer could avail themselves of third party parts for their tractors, which they could install themselves, bypassing the $200 service call from a John Deere technician who does nothing more than look over the farmer's own repair and then types an unlock code into the tractor's console.

Every Canadian who prints out a shopping list or their kid's homework could use third party ink that sells for pennies per liter, rather than HP's official colored water that cost more than vintage Veuve Cliquot.

A Canadian e-waste dump generates five low-paid jobs per ton of waste, and that waste itself will poison the land and water for centuries to come. A circumvention-enabled Canadian repair sector could generate 150 skilled, high-paid community jobs that saves gadgets and the Earth, all while saving Canadians millions.

Canadians could enjoy the resliency that comes of having a domestic tech and repair sector, and could count on it through pandemics and Trumpian trade-war.

All of that and more could be ours, except for the cowardice and greed of Tony Clement and James Moore and the Harper Tories who voted C-11 into law in 2012.

Everything the "radical extremists" warned them of has come true. It's long past time Canadians tore up anticircumvention law and put the interests of the Canadian public and Canadian tech businesses ahead of the rent-seeking enshittification of American Big Tech.

Until we do that, we can keep on passing all the repair and interop laws we want, but each one will be hamstrung by Moore and Clement's "felony contempt of business model" law, and the contempt it showed for the Canadian people.

Image: JeffJ (modified) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tony_Clement_-_2007-06-30_in_Kearney,_Ontario.JPG

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

--

Jorge Franganillo (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Duga_radar_system-_wreckage_of_electronic_devices_(37885984654).jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[getbreaded]

Not working at the desk, but not working in bed either, so win!

I reallyyy need to start revising for exams, but this PTI/PTR project seems endless. I'm actually enjoying working on the frontend, so I'm spending a lot of time on it, because I want it to look nice and professional dammit.

[computer-nerd-girl]