Seems a batch of sites got unblocked. Wiki.edia (marvel as I blog in regular expressions) is accessible (again), Wikibooks, Reuters, CNN, and a lot more.

Still blocked: blogspot, livejournal, wordpress (no surprise here -- lots of political blogs), BBC, certainly more; most importantly, Sinfest and CRFH :-( (why the f* is CRFH blocked? Zombies? Satan?)

Also, the web feels slightly faster in general!

I changed my Google Reader and news clippings from Slashdot to Alterslash. Yes, it's some time behind Slashdot, but then again Slashdot is some time behind my other sources anyway... and Alterslash gives proper HTML, so you don't have to click Slashdot only to get the link to the actual useful article...

I'm not going to go back and retroactively change all old clippings, but I did that for the clippings of the last few days. Enjoy!

It goes like this...

Billy has a broken car. It's broken mostly because he doesn't know how to run it, of course; and more importantly, because it's making Billy rivers of money even though it's broken, so there's no incentive to learn to run it right.

Then Jerry drives by with an incredibly shaggy, shitty car, with a few nice accessories.

Billy immediately thinks: I'll buy Jerry's car, and use the parts to make mine less broken!

Of course, Billy still not knowing what to do with a car, it will remain broken, or best case, be fixed for a short time before he breaks it again. And it will still be hugely profitable. So to be honest, I see nothing wrong with Billy's logic.

Yeah, there's a reasonable chance it will make zero difference to Billy's car in the long run. But it will make people talk about Billy even more, which of course, puts more money on his pocket. Maybe even more than he's offering.

Yesterday I finished my new friend Stefan's book, Jame5. It's a read I recommend to pretty much anyone, but in particular intelligent people interested in the future. It deals with a concept that has been a hot topic in the last few years, the "technical singularity": an AI that's intelligent enough to improve itself.

There are a number of reasons why this concept is called a "singularity", a word borrowed from astrophysics (where it means black holes). Once it exists, it grows spontaneously, and at exponential speed. And no less importantly, we're unable to fully understand and predict what's happening in there, because all laws we know and live by are challenged.

It's the last thing humanity has to invent, because if done right, once it's there, it will invent everything else, at a pace that will seem instantaneous for us. And if done wrong, we won't be around to invent anything else.

The book is available online, on Stefan's site, and can be bought in dead tree form (links can also be found on Stefan's site). If you're in Beijing, you can also get one directly from Stefan.