What public figures publish and believe, in their own words.
About this feed
Highlights: posts that did unusually well for the person who wrote them, everything
they published at length, each release and new project, and every belief — at most
two a day from anyone. Day by day, newest
day first; within a day, the people with the most beliefs on this site come first. Nothing
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The quoted blocks are what people actually said; a beneath one is
the belief those words support, in korrents' wording. Nobody here wrote their own page.
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most here. Choose an area and the row leads with the people whose beliefs are about it;
tap a face for their feed.
The point is that economic interdependence at its root has prosperity as the core variable. In the realest story, the core variable is survival, and survival always trumps prosperity.
A realist like me would say that it doesn't matter whether a state is a democracy or not, all states behave the same way because the structure of the system, getting back to our earlier discussion about international anarchy, the structure of the system leaves those states no choice, whether they're democracies or autocracies.
So it's very important to understand that I'm not arguing that states are inherently aggressive. My point is that as long as states are in anarchy, they have no choice but to behave in an aggressive fashion.
I believe that power is the currency of international relations, and by that I mean that states are deeply interested in the balance of power and they're interested in maximizing how much power they control.
Obviousness comes from conforming to people’s existing mental models. Don’t waste time reinventing common UI patterns or paradigms unless they are at least 2x better, or you have some critical brand reason to do so.
Best travel book I’ve ever read! Shook my soul many times. Tiny “daily meditation” format, with lots of quotes from others, but wow what wonderful insights. They make me yearn to travel again. Love love love these ideas and perspectives so much.
The terrorist attacks on 9/11 killed 2996 people in a day of singular horror. Our ongoing indifference to regulatory inefficiency, considering only the area of green energy development, kills more people every year – more than 10 people per day, and that’s only within the US.
The primary driver of increased impact, longer time scales before displacement, and catastrophically high levels of avoidable pollution is environmental protection regulations.
Yet solar development is hopelessly snarled by dozens of different development regulations which begin with the assumption that it will permanently and severely harm the environment unless proven otherwise, at exhaustive length.
I tried out Humane's long-awaited new AI pin. While there are some undoubtedly novel new features in its interfaces, I think "AI hardware" may turn out to be a dead end
Look, I think I would just recommend do not send the flower of Ukrainian youth to die in trenches, whether he talks to Putin or not, just don’t do that. Whoever goes on the offensive will lose massive numbers of people and history will not look kindly upon them.
So generally, I think we obviously want to prioritize civilizational risks over things that are painful and tragic on a local level, but not civilizational.
So really the question is like for every Hamas member that you kill, how many did you create? And if you create more than you killed, you’ve not succeeded. That’s the real situation there.
So the counterintuitive thing here, I think that the thing that I think should be done, even though it’s very difficult, is that I would recommend that Israel engage in the most conspicuous acts of kindness possible
People think of nature as perhaps some sort of peaceful thing, but in fact it is not. There’s some quite funny Werner Herzog thing where he is in the jungle saying that it’s basically just murder and death in every direction. The plants and animals in the jungle are constantly trying to kill each other every single day, every minute. So it’s not like we’re unusual in that respect.
If the future is like the past, this implies that debt rollovers—that is, the issuance of debt without a subsequent increase in taxes—may well be feasible. Put bluntly, public debt may have no fiscal cost.
Their words now
Across advanced economies, the celebrated ( r - g ), i.e., the difference between the interest rate and the growth rate, appears to have durably changed sign or, at a minimum, to have gone from a substantially negative number to a number closer to zero.
Thus, once current debt has been refinanced and the average interest on debt reflects the higher long rates, absent changes in policy, debt ratios will increase.
It is fair to say that, while economists expected the short end of the yield curve to reflect the higher rates needed to win the fight against inflation, the sharply steeper long end of the yield curve in the last few months has come as a surprise. I shall freely admit that I did not predict it.
One thing that drives me crazy about the React ecosystem, and more specifically "tech influencers" and "thought leaders" in the space, is the infantilization of the developers using and working in it. I’m tired of reading takes like TypeScript generics, mapped types, etc should only be needed and used by library authors for most use cases. Or today’s discourse; Don’t use `useCallback’, ‘useMemo’, and React.memo. If you’re building anything beyond a simple CRUD app or a an incredibly focused app with few features, you _will_ need these features.
Sigrid Nunez's novel The Vulnerables: Nunez's most famous novel, The Friend, was what you get when you take autofiction from a well-established NYC writer and add a big, friendly dog.
Bryan Washington's novel Family Meal: Bryan is the great millennial fiction writer of food, among many other talents. His descriptions of cooking and meals are fantastically rich, as much for the food itself as for the social and emotional exchange involved.
Hua Hsu's memoir Stay True: This book is now out in paperback, and you probably don't need me recommending it (it won a Pulitzer), but it is fantastic.
Mind candy: black comedy crime fiction / murder mystery, in rural Finland. I enjoyed both the comic darkness and the convincing happy endings all around. (At least, happy by the characters' own lights...) My first Tuomainen, but I'd read more if they crossed my path and I was in the right mood.
Despite evaluations, we cannot consider coming powerful frontier AI systems "safe unless proven unsafe". With current testing methodologies, issues can easily be missed. Additionally, it is unclear if governments can quickly build the immense expertise needed for reliable technical evaluations of AI capabilities and societal-scale risks. Given this, developers of frontier AI should carry the burden of proof to demonstrate that their plans keep risks within acceptable limits.
Without sufficient caution, we may irreversibly lose control of autonomous AI systems, rendering human intervention ineffective. Large-scale cybercrime, social manipulation, and other harms could escalate rapidly. This unchecked AI advancement could culminate in a large-scale loss of life and the biosphere, and the marginalization or extinction of humanity.
For AI to be a boon, we must reorient; pushing AI capabilities alone is not enough. We are already behind schedule for this reorientation. The scale of the risks means that we need to be proactive, as the costs of being unprepared far outweigh those of premature preparation.
Society's response, despite promising first steps, is incommensurate with the possibility of rapid, transformative progress that is expected by many experts. AI safety research is lagging. Present governance initiatives lack the mechanisms and institutions to prevent misuse and recklessness, and barely address autonomous systems.
“lots of anonymous people just invented through trial and error and adaptation” just doesn’t cut it for me — I’ve never found such stories to be true upon closer investigation.
Yet lime is a huge blind spot for economic historians, despite it increasing the productivity of what was still by far the largest portion of the economy: agriculture.
We believe technology is a lever on the world – the way to make more with less. Economists measure technological progress as productivity growth: How much more we can produce each year with fewer inputs, fewer raw materials. Productivity growth, powered by technology, is the main driver of economic growth, wage growth, and the creation of new industries and new jobs, as people and capital are continuously freed to do more important, valuable things than in the past.
Most people don't read books. If you read a book on a topic (say, clouds, or Italian furniture), you can now only communicate on that topic with 1 in 10 to 1 in 100 people.
So abstract. Maybe the most abstract book you’ll ever read. Compares “finite” games with rules and winners, versus “infinite” games without winners where we can play with the game itself. Is it about a job versus a calling? Religion versus spirituality? A story versus story-telling? Who knows. Thought-provoking if you can apply the metaphor to whatever concerns you.
Image is perhaps the most versatile format for model inputs, as it can be used to represent text, tabular data, audio, and to some extent, videos. There's also so much more visual data than text data.
Text is a much more powerful mode for model outputs. A model that can generate images can only be used for image generation, whereas a model that can generate text can be used for many tasks: summarization, translation, reasoning, question answering, etc.
But while I have seen no evidence (and Chris provides none) that higher food prices alleviate global hunger, there is a wealth of evidence that they exacerbate it.
It seems to me that an attractive robust approach is to have governments pay lots for kids (at no cost or risk to them!) and then let those who respond to these incentives tell us which compromises seem most attractive.
the most likely identifiable scenario by which fertility will rise again is via the growth of currently-small insular high-fertility subgroups like the Amish and Orthodox Jews
One of the most important things I didn't understand about the world when I was a child is the degree to which the returns for performance are superlinear.
I am myself skeptical that there is a clearly defined notion of who “the right people” might be, and thus I am on public choice grounds far more skeptical of government than Keynes was.
I view Keynes’s bisexuality and his strong interest in gay sex as a significant cause of what made him interesting and which gave him so strong an ability to grasp different and outside perspectives.
I don’t view Keynes primarily as an economist, rather I see him as a British aesthete rationalist who did economics in his spare time, and fortunately he had lots of spare time.
I don't think we necessarily want there to be one big super intelligence. We want to empower everyone to both have more fun, accomplish their business goals, just everything that they're trying to do. We don't tend to have one person that we work with on everything, and I don't think in the future we're going to have one AI that we work with.
I mean, any screen that you have can be a hologram, any media, in any book, art. It can basically be just as effective as a hologram, as a physical object. Any game that you're playing, a board game or any kind of physical game, cards, ping pong, things like that, they're often a lot better as holograms.
And in that world, I think that there are going to be, not too far off, maybe by the end of this decade, we'll be living in a world where there are as many holograms when you walk into a room as there are physical objects.
And I kind of think increasingly, the physical world is super important, but I actually think the real world is the combination of the physical world and the digital worlds coming together.
My friend Nicole has written a provocative, funny and honest memoir. Nothing Is Missing: A Memoir of Living Boldly. I'll be interviewing her in NYC on October 9.
Conical burrs appear on average less unimodal and less uniform, although there is a large overlap meaning that one can easily find a specific flat burr that is less unimodal and less uniform than a specific conical burr.
As we just saw, one cannot just discard the Collapse Postulate. For this reason, if one does calculations in any Many Worlds approach, one must effectively replace the Collapse Postulate by other assumptions, notably about what happens to observers and/or measurement devices when worlds branch.
while decoherence has the potential to solve this aspect of the measurement problem, it hasn't yet been satisfactorily done. Decoherence also certainly does not return us to Local Causality.
Since Local Causality is a property of a model, observing violations of Bell's inequality cannot tell us anything about nature itself, but merely about the properties of the model that we use to describe nature.
I was super excited when I saw the Lvl-10 dripper, because it was very close to what I wanted to achieve, and as I expected, it performed very well in terms of extraction quality.
The world’s croplands are still expanding. At a time when we should be using less land for farming, allocating high-quality farmland to grow food that we then put into cars is a mistake.
Fundamentally, the game invites you to make guesses, but punishes you for them — and a missed guess doesn’t help you prune the logic space, only the trivia space.
So if you think about entire all of nature, let's say all of living systems as a matrix that runs across two axes one is material sophistication, which is terribly relevant for designers, and the other is communication. The termites ace on communication, but their material sophistication is crap.
So we keep coming back to this answer of nature wants to increase information, but decrease entropy. So find order, but constantly increase the information scale.
Well, first of all, yes, they're connected, but that network stops when there is a physical gap. That network does not necessarily enable the whales in the Dominican to connect with an olive tree in Israel to connect with a weeping willow in Montana.
Everybody talks about intelligence these days, but I like to think that nature has kind of wisdom that exists beyond intelligence or above intelligence, and it's that wisdom that we're trying to tap into through technology.
I think that let's say from the beginning of mankind going back 200,000 years, the products that we have designed have separated us from nature. And it's ironic that the things that we designed and produced as humankind, those are exactly the things that separated us.
Buroker is a reliable author of very fluffy mind candy, either science fiction or fantasy. A lot of her output is re-working material from identifiable prior art, without hewing so closely to the canon as to constitute fan fiction.
They suck! But they also feed the world. Half the people alive today would be very not alive if fertilizers manufactured from natural gas weren’t super-sizing our harvests.
But I’ve become increasingly worried that science’s replication crises might pale in comparison to what happens all the time in history, which is not just a replication crisis but a reproducibility crisis.
There is no "spooky free will" that violates the laws of physics in our common model of them, but the experience of free will certainly exists and is informative.
Redness is not "objective" in the sense of being "in the object", it only exists in the models generated by the sort of brains which are hooked up to eyes.
Even in that case, though, what we should trust is not the particular output of the scientific process at any given time. It can make wrong turns. Instead, we should trust that it will find the truth eventually, and that it is our best and only method for doing so.
Reading the book had not changed my fundamental belief that, in balance, we were on a good trajectory with AI research: good for science and good for society with expected positive impacts in many domains.
Their words now
I now believe that I was wrong and short-sighted to ignore that dual-use nature. I also think I was not paying enough attention to the possibility of losing control to superhuman AIs.
Neurobiologists tell us that it takes two things to unlock and open up a neural pathway. The first is that the implicit must be made explicit. Sometimes you need help seeing what you don't see. But you must be open to the feedback. Second, there must be some sort of recoil, a sense of discrepancy, of "Oh no, I'm not sure I really want to keep doing that."
In my practice, I have seen that opening neural pathways can lead to profound change, to brand-new traits and behavior, sometimes in a matter of minutes.
ChatGPT is fast-tracking the commodification of the human spirit by mechanising the imagination. It renders our participation in the act of creation as valueless and unnecessary.
You can’t change the United States from a country that builds subways for $2 billion/km in New York and $1 billion/km elsewhere to a country that does so for $200 million/km if all you ever do is talk to other Americans.
Everything is negotiable. Challenge authority. You have the power in any situation. This is how to realize it and use it. A must-read classic from 1980 from a master negotiator. My notes here aren’t enough because the little book is filled with so many memorable stories — examples of great day-to-day moments of negotiation that will stick in your head for when you need them. (I especially loved…
Be skeptical of absolute certainty not backed up with proof. Be skeptical of pronouncements that there’s only one way a court will ever possibly interpret something.
Here’s the point: there are legal and factual defenses to this indictment, but anyone telling you that it obviously, inarguably violates the law is lying to you.
Comic book mind candy fantasy. Superficially, this is a cynical, post-apocalyptic subversion of the Matter of Middle Earth. In fact, the hard-bitten surface merely conceals a core which actually believes in epic fantasy, both in the content and in the classical form (a trilogy ending in a eucatastrophe).
The psychology of how and why we believe. How we learn and change. The craft of doubt and persuasion. Insights into the social definition of truth. Epistemology. Certainty is a feeling not based on facts. Well-written with a nice balance of story-telling and deeper dives.
Google’s the first — and often the last — place we go to for answers, so snagging top billing in a Google search results page is, approximately speaking, equivalent to being “true.”
Great anthropology! So many insights into religions, tribes, friendships, organizations, the evolution of minds, superstition, and more. Got me thinking most about friendships.
They frame the situation as a choice between continued human drivers killing people (without statistical context) vs. immature robotaxis who don't drink and drive (but make other mistakes).
In the fall of 1999, against the backdrop of the massive gains being achieved in tech, media, and telecom stocks, I read Edward Chancellor’s excellent book Devil Take the Hindmost.
I was born in Brazil and I've been living in the US for the past 11 years, yet, english doesn't feel like my first language. I use Grammarly to help me with that.
I explain why in the essay; the TLDR is that they’re energy hogs. The sun is a really awesome source of calories, and it’s kind of dumb not to take advantage of it.
I’ve been a happy Superhuman subscriber since they were Silicon Valley’s hottest invite-only club, and I’ve been waiting for them to do something like this for a while.
I think we’re going to build super intelligence before we build any sort of robustness in the AI. We cannot build an AI that is capable of going out into nature and surviving like a bird. A bird is an incredibly robust organism. We’ve built nothing like this. We haven’t built a machine that’s capable of reproducing.
We’re actually going to build that, I think, but it’s not going to be one static tape. I think the human brain is too complex to be stuck in one static tape like that. If you look at ant brains, maybe they can be stuck on a static tape, but we’re going to build that using generative models. We’re going to build the TikTok that you actually can’t look away from.
When I talked about will GPT12 be AGI, my answer is no. Of course not. I mean, cross-entropy loss is never going to get you there. You need probably RL in fancy environments in order to get something that would be considered AGI-like.
It is actually all their nuances and quirks and slight annoyances that make this relationship worthwhile. I don’t think we’re going to realize that until it’s too late.
I think time is a useful model, whether it exists or not. Right. Does quantum physics exist? Well, it doesn’t matter. It’s about whether it’s a useful model to describe reality.
Now, finally, the Court has resolved the question: the First Amendment requires that, at a minimum, the government prove that a speaker was reckless about whether their statement would be interpreted as threatening.
As I’ve argued before, the so-called “objective standard” can be very difficult to administer in this big diverse messy country where we often don’t share a common sense of reality and there is no uniform “reasonable person.”
Thus, the 2nd UI paradigm will survive, albeit in a less dominant role. Future AI systems will likely have a hybrid user interface that combines elements of both intent-based and command-based interfaces while still retaining many GUI elements.
I doubt that the current set of generative AI tools, like ChatGPT, Bard, etc., are representative of the UIs we’ll be using in a few years because they have deep-rooted usability problems.
The third UI paradigm, represented by current generative AI, is intent-based outcome specification. The user tells the computer the desired result but does not specify how this outcome should be accomplished, such as the steps to be executed. Compared to traditional command-based interaction design, this completely reverses the locus of control.
I don’t know about you, but I personally feel starved of ambitious sensemaking frames for recent history that aren’t quite as silly as say Friedman’s World is Flat or Harari’s Sapiens, or quite as ideologically compromised as Graeber’s Debt.
I don’t know about you, but I personally feel starved of ambitious sensemaking frames for recent history that aren’t quite as silly as say Friedman’s World is Flat or Harari’s Sapiens, or quite as ideologically compromised as Graeber’s Debt.
I don’t know about you, but I personally feel starved of ambitious sensemaking frames for recent history that aren’t quite as silly as say Friedman’s World is Flat or Harari’s Sapiens, or quite as ideologically compromised as Graeber’s Debt.
Most of our fears begin to subside when we just allow ourselves to be in this moment, as anxiety and worry stem from a preoccupation with an anticipated or envisioned future.
Whether one does find a good spouse or not depends more on one's orientation towards actually building relationships, and whether they can identify non-trivial traits in a partner that would contribute to that.
I even think AI is going to improve warfare, when it has to happen, by reducing wartime death rates dramatically. Every war is characterized by terrible decisions made under intense pressure and with sharply limited information by very limited human leaders.
My view is that the idea that AI will decide to literally kill humanity is a profound category error. AI is not a living being that has been primed by billions of years of evolution to participate in the battle for the survival of the fittest, as animals are, and as we are. It is math – code – computers, built by people, owned by people, used by people, controlled by people.
They're all mind candy, but of high quality, and this one even makes me swallow a time-travel plot without complaint. But it really does rely on having read the rest of the trilogy beforehand.
RSC is the future of React. The React team has made this very clear and we are lucky to be in touch with their amazing team members to help us along this path.
While we love GraphQL for many use cases, implementing a secure and performant GraphQL API can be tricky and there is a definite cost to requiring it during early prototyping of your app.
If you’re interested in learning more about the history of Africa, its central role in the world, and the ways in which both have been misunderstood in the West, I highly recommend Born in Blackness.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow resonated with me for personal reasons, but I think Zevin’s exploration of partnership and collaboration is worth reading no matter who you are.
But we do not have enough data and we do not have enough insight to use AI/ML to pick better targets that have a higher chance of succeeding in the clinic.
this is the most personal of personal decisions and no one should ever try to pressure anyone else to have kids-it's way too big a thing to be anyone else's business.
The problem is, when humans went bipedal, our pelvises got smaller, and as humans got smarter, our heads got bigger. So evolution had to get creative. Its solution: all human babies would be premies, born when they were still small enough to pass through a human pelvis.
So I can now state with confidence: beating out a crowded field, this is the worst book about quantum computing, for some definition of the word "about," that I've ever encountered.
If my class is so boring that I have to devise an additional carrot-and-stick system to get students to pay attention, the problem is my class is boring.
Evaluation forces me to flatten everything I teach into something that can be tested, and it encourages students to ignore everything that isn’t on the test.
Instruction is collaborative: students want to learn, and I want them to learn, too. Evaluation is adversarial: students want the points, and I have to make sure they don’t get too many.
Grade harder, grade softer, grade with words rather than numbers, hide the grades entirely—none of it works, because the problem was never the grades themselves. The problem was trying to be both a teacher and a cop at the same time.
The liberation we are offered is a liberation from the very care-driven involvement in the world and in our communities that would render our lives meaningful and satisfying.
Ships are great at carrying bulky and heavy stuff with minimal cost and energy usage. We need a battery chemistry that leans into that and sacrifices performance to reduce cost.
Mimestream feels like the Apple Mail app I’ve always wished Apple would make. It’s incredibly fast and fluid, it syncs instantly, and it supports all the keyboard shortcuts that you’d expect in a modern app
The app costs a few dollars up front and then has an optional subscription for unlimited requests, but I would recommend going directly to OpenAI’s developer dashboard, creating your own account, and copy/pasting your own API key into Petey.
This isn't perfect, but soon it will be, and you will be able to listen to or read any content you want in the timeframe, tone, voice and bias of your choosing.
I want to see more tools and fewer operated machines - we should be embracing our humanity instead of blindly improving efficiency. And that involves using our new AI technology in more deft ways than generating more content for humans to evaluate. I believe the real game changers are going to have very little to do with plain content generation.
Good tools let the user choose when to switch between implementation and evaluation. When I work with a chatbot, I'm forced to frequently switch between the two modes.
Hopefully I've convinced you that chatbots are a terrible interface for LLMs. Or, at the very least, that we can add controls, information, and affordances to our chatbot interfaces to make them more usable.
I forbid myself from anything too tempting or addicting. I keep no cookies in my home. To prevent myself from falling off the wagon, I strap myself to the mast.
Design is not the way it looks, or beautiful colors and animations. It's not the brand or the logo. It is how the product works. Designing is the the process of exploring and arriving at a solution. I believe all builders are designers.
These are important principles, but they ignore the problems of sustainability, inequity, and bias. In addition, the emphasis is usually on the immediate issues, not the long-term impact. In other words, they describe the way we did things in the past, not the issues in this book, and not the way we need to do things in the future.
My view is that it’s going to take more than this regulatory campaign to defeat dynamism in China.
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What I did not sufficiently appreciate is that a state that would so casually decapitate a sector like online tutoring would also have the will to visit catastrophe upon whole cities.
And on balance I believe we should think of the Chinese state today as an autocratic regime that is occasionally capable of economic pragmatism rather than a technocratic regime that slips occasionally into Marxist faults.
If we collectively devoted the same levels of investment and inventive power and entrepreneurship to developing more and better legal pathways for people to move across borders to needed jobs, including a variety of modalities for labor mobility, we could solve the growing challenge of labor scarcity.
But, whether it makes financial sense or not for the individuals involved, they are responding to distorted prices, not scarcity, and the world is not better off from their invention and innovation.
This is not because there are not people who would drive trucks for Amazon in the world, and not because “natural” scientific progress has made machines that drive trucks easy and cheap, but because in a global economy which is “flat” for capital, information, and goods, there is a legal “cliff at the border” for labor, as prices don’t reflect scarcity.
Therefore, we have the perverse situation that the richest people are hiring some of the most talented and technologically sophisticated people on the planet to engage in innovation aimed at driving down the demand for labor—the major and often only asset of the world’s poor.
My key argument is that in the current global economy we have some of the scarcest resources on the planet devoting themselves to economizing one of the most abundant resources on the planet.
But modularity may also facilitate a shift away from a concentration of model development in a few institutions and to distributing the development of modular components across the community.
A platform operator can effortlessly change the distribution of surpluses in an instant, while suppliers and customers have to engage in minute, time-consuming and unreliable Platform Kremlinology just to detect these changes, much less understand them.
tech barons are ordinary mediocrities, no better and no worse than the monopolists that preceded them, and any differences come down to affordances in technology and regulation, not an especial wicked brilliance.
The biggest issue is probably that we don’t control neutral networks enough to be able to ensure AI doesn’t harm humans. We can’t even control AI to not reveal internal prompts.
This book is my best crack at explaining what I think is an existential risk to liberal societies and what I think we need to do to get to that awesome future I used to be so excited about.
There were a bunch of bad trends: Tribalism was flaring up everywhere, mass shaming campaigns were roaring back into fashion, politicians were increasingly clown-like, public discourse had become a battle of one-dimensional narratives.
I spoke with @mariamenounos about the link between emotions and illness, and the importance of focusing on mental health, on her Heal Squad podcast. To listen to the full episode, please follow: https://t.co/XPIKAvi8tH
Experiencing sleepiness is normal and does not necessarily imply that you are undersleeping.
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Therefore, I realized that it’s very important to be as awake as possible and that my model of sleepiness where you can be “awake”, “sleepy” and “asleep” is dumb.
This is how I frame it: if the effort required to replace or fork a dependency should it go unmaintained is measured in engineer-months, that’s a critical dependency and retaining its maintainers probably makes good business sense.
As a project gets more popular in the ecosystem, the workload increases but the value of that project for the company stays the same, so resources don’t increase accordingly.
This experiment started from the observation that despite being critical for the functioning of the Internet—and, by extension, the economy—the role of open-source maintainer has not yet found a sustainable manifestation.
Designing your aircraft for the beachhead market is a huge distraction, particularly when there are certification costs that have to be paid for each new model.
What makes a great song great is not its close resemblance to a recognizable work. Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite.
Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer.
What ChatGPT is, in this instance, is replication as travesty. ChatGPT may be able to write a speech or an essay or a sermon or an obituary but it cannot create a genuine song.
Our best explanation is that the UK adopted what we call the globalized system of procurement, privatizing planning functions to consultants and privatizing risk to contractors, which creates more conflict; the UK also has an unusually high soft cost factor.
Just giving more support to agencies in their current configuration is not going to help. To the contrary, it only confirms that profligacy gets rewarded.
Taken together, there is an argument to be made that AVs should be safer than human drivers by about a factor of 10 (being a nice round order of magnitude number) to leave engineering margin for the above considerations.
These shifts in price without any physical change to the housing stock are by far the biggest part of the affordability story. They dwarf the impact of actual new construction.
Affordability for the masses will live or die not by what we build this year or next, but by what happens to the price of homes that already exist, in which the vast majority of people live.
The ISS crew spend most of their time fixing the machinery that keeps them alive, and when they have a free moment for science, they tend to study the effect of space on themselves.
If you use this, I owe you nothing. At all. We have no relationship. I put this up online on the condition that if you use it, all the risks are on you.
But to do that, I am going to have to become a supplier. Which means you are going to have to start to pay me. A fair price, that we can negotiate. Under a different license.
We are not suppliers. All the people writing and maintaining these projects, we are not suppliers. We do not have a business relationship with all these organisations.
Hell even worse, a lot of the libraries that underpin the fabric of what we all call the digital economy have trouble getting enough money to pay for food.
Every time you find a new favourite blog or Twitter account or Tiktok personality online, you’ll have to ask: Is this really a whole human with a rich and complex life like mine?
This, as was noted on Twitter, is a recipe for bad studies: it encourages the cherry-picking of results that went your way and the hiding of those that didn’t.
"Finishing games gets easier with each game you finish, and the more games you finish, the better you will understand what it takes to make a successful game."
Absolutely. It is incredibly enjoyable and readable. The authors, in a way that is very rare for economists, find small stories that paint big pictures for the points they make.
Although his training is not in economics, Richard Reeves draws on economic research, as well as research from the fields of sociology, psychology, and political science, to tell an under-told story. The book explores the problems faced by boys and men, the roots of those problems, and possible policy solutions.
Chris Miller tells us the history of how microchips were developed, emphasizing the critical role of the government, and especially defense procurement.
Before I start any book project, I take a few hours and re-read The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, maybe the greatest book ever written on the creative process.
The Reading List email is sponsored by Hiya , the pediatrician-approved superpowered chewable vitamin created by two dads tired of children’s vitamins that cause more problems than they solve.
There have been many novels written in historical modes this year, and I've hated all of them except Fellowship Point by Alice Elliott Dark precisely because that novel feels vibrant and lively and full of characters and it reminds me of early 20th century literature.
Recently though, I went to The Drama Bookshop, which was a delightful surprise. It is the closest I have come to the experience of a Manhattan bookshop as a third place in the kind of Prairie Lights mode.
All radically new products, and air taxi eVTOLs certainly count as radically new, require the convergence of many different capabilities and technologies. Often one or more technology will be lagging and it may take decades for them all to come together in the right place at the right time.
I see lots of hype about eVTOLs being on the verge of being big, but I can’t find any videos of prototypes doing what the hype says will be common place by 2025.
I spent the last few weeks reading Template Metaprogramming with C++ by Marius Băncilă. It is currently 50$ on Amazon. Though, technically, the book is about advanced 'template' techniques, it is much more broad and practical. It is one of the 'good programming books'. If you are an experienced C++ programmer, you should give it a peek
I’m constantly on a quest to make writing more hands on — more manipulative, in the sense that you’re using your hands to shape it. The more I treat writing like one of my collages, the better it gets.
His 2000 masterpiece The Great Divergence argues that the Americas, won and worked by force, provided the critical ghost acreages that propelled Britain past the Old World's common ecological constraints.
Prior to this inflection point, productivity growth had increased before, but every time had induced a response of higher population growth rates, eroding any gains in per-person living standards.
I think this matches the general finding that AI progress is faster than expected, and increases my certainty that scale and normal progress can sometimes be enough to solve even very difficult problems.
Our Tendency shapes every aspect of our behavior, so understanding this framework lets us make better decisions, meet deadlines, suffer less stress and burnout, and engage more effectively.
With her signature mix of rigorous research, easy humor, and personal experimentation, author Gretchen Rubin identifies the 21 habit-change strategies that will help every reader to create the habits that will transform their lives.
The Happiness Project synthesizes the wisdom of the ages with current scientific research, as Rubin brings readers along on her year to greater happiness.
I would say pretty fundamental. I wouldn’t like to say it’s impossible for life to start any other way, but water is everywhere. Water’s extremely good at what it does, and carbon works in water especially well. And carbon is everywhere. So, those things together make me think probabilistically, if we found 1,000 life forms, 995 of them would be carbon-based and living in water.
So, there is no necessary trajectory towards great complexity in human beings at the end of it. It’s very easy to imagine that without photosynthesis arising or without eukaryotes arising, that the planet could be full of bacteria and nothing else.
So, how did they do that? You may as well say that a miracle happened. I don’t believe in soup. I think what we have in a vent is a continuous conversion, a continuous growth, a continuous reaction, a continuous converting a flow of molecules into more of yourself, you might say, even if it’s a small bit.
But there’s a very interesting deep split in life between bacteria and what are called archaea, which look just the same as bacteria. And they’re not quite as diverse, but nearly, and they are very different in their biochemistry. And so any explanation for the origin of life has to account, as well, for why they’re so different and yet so similar. And that makes me think that life probably did arise only once.
It’s possible it started multiple occasions. There’s two provisos to that. One of them is oxygen makes it impossible really for life to start. So, as soon as we’ve got oxygen in the atmosphere, then life isn’t going to keep starting over.
Sure, electric bikes aren't cheap. But I believe they're a rare object to be well worth the cost. This in spite of their annoying flaws, their often bad software, their defective geometries. Because they open the world.
Despite these flaws I put hundreds of kilometers on this thing in the first month. The front and rear suspension turn every road to glass, and are even fine for dirt trails; I find myself hunting down paths through parks I'd never otherwise think about.
The Vanmoof is much smarter — the brain and software within it are refined, the app good, the acceleration curves smooth — but the bike is all custom components, and they aren't the highest quality at that.
The Pauls feel as fresh today as the day I put them on, whereas the hydraulics have required much bikeshop tuning over the course of the last eighteen months.
I upgraded my BESV to an SRAM drivetrain and Paul brake levers and Klamper disc calipers, some MKS pedals, and a set of Brooks grips and saddle and it feels wonderful through and through.
I still have a custom orange Moulton that I've modified into a single-speed city bomber that goes remarkably fast while floating atop its simple suspension.
New land can be brought under cultivation (or cultivated more intensively) of course, but marginal gains decrease rapidly (because the best land is cultivated first and because adding more labor to already cultivated land, while it can increase harvests, is less efficient than cultivating new land) and there is a fairly hard ceiling on total production of this sort that was, for the most part, fairly low.
If you had given the Romans the designs for a Newcomen steam engine, they couldn’t have built it without developing whole new technologies for the purpose (or casting every part in bronze, which introduces its own problems) and then wouldn’t have had any profitable use to put it to.
The specificity matters here because each innovation in the chain required not merely the discovery of the principle, but also the design and an economically viable use-case to all line up in order to have impact.
As much as we might want to imagine that the greater currents push historical events largely on a predetermined path with but minor variations from what must always have been, in practice events are tremendously contingent on unpredictable variables.
In my view the key takeaway here is just how contingent the industrial revolution was: the industrial revolution that occured required a number of very specific pre-conditions which were really on true on Great Britain in that period.
I don't know who I would reccomend this device to. The premise of this device has a lot of promise, but in practice it has so many problems that it's overall not really worth choosing in comparison to devices like the Steam Deck.
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