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July 2020 News

July 2020 Gwern.net newsletter with links on the Uighurs, authoritarianism, negative emissions, AI overhang; 1 movie & 2 anime reviews.

July 2020’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, June 2020 (archives). This is a collation of links and summary of major changes, overlapping with my Changelog; brought to you by my donors on Patreon.

Writings

Media

Film/TV

Live-action:

Animated:

  • The Dragon Dentist (review)

  • Rage of Bahamut (mediocre JRPG sekaikei anime; the worldbuilding is sketchy and internally incoherent—angels serve “Zeus”?—and far more care has been given to the poorly-integrated and flashy CG than to minor considerations like animating anything of interest, although even there I fear I overpraise the CG of things like its MacGuffin, Bahamut. I’m sure there must have been a reason I put this on my list but whatever it was, it failed.)

Music

MLP:


  1. The Uighur genocide is awful not just because it is far worse than anything happening in, say, the USA, but because it is the Syrian & Spanish Civil War of our era—the testing grounds of techno-totalitarianism.↩︎

  2. For perspective, note that there are ~40 million children in the USA in 2020, and thus on the order of >40 American children per year, and presumably several times that worldwide, would have died in 2020 without any safety measures. Because of decreases in population growth rate, the number of children in the USA has remained remarkably constant since 195866ya, and so one could reasonably extrapolate that back as >62↩︎