It's actually running on a templated instance of Datasette - try the "Use my location" button on the homepage to see tiny museums near you that I've been to.
I ask because I tried look for listings of places I know well (e.g. Turin, Italy or Budapest, Hungary) and found that the closest entry was hundreds of miles away.
Turin has, for example, this: http://www.museodellafrutta.it/en/ which is pretty niche, imho. Budapest has a chocolate museum: https://www.csokolade-muzeum.hu/bemutatkozunk/ and so on...
The one I would be recommending (to the niche museums site, and also to everyone who is around) is the Yokohama Coast Guard museum.
It has a really unassuming name, I only went in because I got caught out in the rain without an umbrella in Minatomirai. Dare I say it is the best museum I have ever visited. It is organised around a single curious event: In 2001 a Japanese Coast Guard vessel encountered a suspiciously behaving fishing travel. They wanted to board them when the fishing vessel took off at high speed and started shooting at them. During the pursuit they even seen the crew wield shoulder mounter missile launchers.
Turns out it was a North Korean spy ship on a mission to raise funds by smuggling drugs to Japan. The incident ended by the Korean crew scuttling their vessel. The coast guard has raised the sunk ship and built this museum around it.
Website of the museum: https://jcgmuseum.jp/en/
More info on the event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Amami-%C5%8Cshima
My favorites are the Clockarium, Museum of the Art Deco Ceramic Clock. (https://www.clockarium.org/ Check out the video, its is magnificent.)
And The Sewer Museum: Experience an authentic sewer, stroll along the Senne and discover the little-known but ever so important profession of a sewage worker. Descend deep into the bowels of the city for this unique experience! https://sewermuseum.brussels/
Who didn’t want to know what happened to East London Victorian Sewage.
Or the mysterious cave of shells which no science know it came to be [I suspect due to lack of interest, lols]
many thanks for all the content and inspiration, your blog is genuinely my favourite read right now!
May I suggest two additions? Kassel, Germany has two weird ones: A museum for death culture (Sepulkralkulturmuseum, https://www.sepulkralmuseum.de/), and a museum of wallpaper (https://www.tapeten.museum-kassel.de/) :)
It would be a fun place to visit for OCD-type people.
Not some kind of speculative art exhibit, but real harm?
These harms can be diffuse at massive scale, and acute at small scale.
One example of each: (1) https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.aax2342 One of USA’s largest health insurers builds ML system for patient triage. It optimizes for a proxy metric of health need (namely, cost) rather than health need itself; consequently it deprioritizes and systematically excludes millions of people from access to health care.
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg Autonomous Uber car builds their braking system on top of a vision model that optimizes for object classification accuracy using categories of {"pedestrian", "cyclist", "vehicle", "debris"}; consequently it fails to determine how to classify a woman walking a bicycle across the street, as a result killing her.
In both cases, optimizing for a naively sensible proxy metric of the thing that was truly desired turned out to be catastrophic.
For example when Tesla autopilot kills someone (which has happened).
https://impakter.com/tesla-autopilot-crashes-with-at-least-a...
The paperclip optimizer could be called a "bug" I guess. But the comparison to Tesla autopilot is interesting. First, is anyone calling that an AI? Second, when an objective baseline comparison to human drivers is possible, shouldn't that determine whether the AI is a net benefit or loss? And then (assuming a benefit) we can say with some degree of confidence that the AI is not malicious?
Human deaths from weather and climate related events are near all time lows, while overall population is indeed at all time highs. We have better crop yields (3) and productivity thanks to both technology and indeed, CO2 fertilization of the atmosphere (4), which is driven by photosynthesis, a process which is optimized at thousands of ppm for the vast majority of plant species, many multiples from where we now stand.
Of course, the most abundant periods for life on earth have been periods of abundant carbon, such as the Carboniferous era, and the Cambrian era (5).
Clearly the ecosystem is far from collapse as a result of mild warming and improved plant productivity. In many regards, it's thriving, and certainly more so than 100-120 years ago, which predated any pretense of conservation at all.
And we know that it's indeed glaciation (global cooling) that so often leads to catastrophe in ecosystems (1)(2).
But that we can program human beings with subtle prods of horrific and exaggerated headlines, along with cult-like expectations of consensus, into believing the opposite to be true from reality, is certainly an indication of paperclip optimization gone awry.
(1) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259495017_Ecologica... (2) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/360894775_Global_co... (3) https://www.agriculture.com/news/crops/usda-raises-the-us-co... (4) https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer... (5) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5942912/
I.e. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/07/17/1005396/predicti...
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in my opinion our efforts at being humane have not yet risen to our ability to imagine humanity
I do not think that AI will help in our efforts to create humanity but will rather enhance the negative aspects of our already harsh nature
