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Writes on effective altruism, energy and the arithmetic behind arguments people repeat — including how much electricity a chatbot query actually uses.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The American data-centre backlash is homegrown, not a foreign influence operation.

  data centersAmerica

  Their words

  I have a long separate post here looking at the evidence we have, and I come away thinking the data center backlash is basically entirely homegrown.

  blog.andymasley.com

Chief Scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research, at Google since 1999, where he co-created MapReduce, Bigtable, TensorFlow and the TPU.

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  The numbers an AI engineer should know by heart are memory bandwidths and the energy cost of a single operation.

  energy

  Their words

  Yeah, I mean I think if you looked at what is important in AI systems these days, you would want to know things like the bandwidth between you know your main memory system on your accelerator to the onchip memory to the um you know the multiplier unit or whatever. You want to know how much energy does it take to do a single multiplier operation.

  Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AIyoutube.com

Novelist, author of twelve books including Foundry, Bandwidth and Cumulus. Sends a newsletter of monthly book recommendations.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  The Player of Games

  Their words

  The Player of Games by Ian M. Banks is about a champion board-game player who gets roped into an espionage operation infiltrating an alien culture where political power is determined by the outcome of a uniquely complex strategy game. Set in a far-future human civilization run by a constellation of (mostly) benevolent and inscrutable AIs, Banks's science fiction is more relevant than ever.

  eliotpeper.substack.com

Investment researcher and engineer who runs Lyn Alden Investment Strategy, writing on macroeconomics, currency systems and equity analysis.

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  Utility blockchains that provide useful services tend not to accrue much long-term value to their coinholders, unlike a winning monetary protocol.

  Their words

  Utility protocols face heavy competition, and thus their value trends toward their marginal cost of operation.

  Why Most Cryptocurrencies Won’t Accrue Valuelynalden.com

Historian of the Second World War; wrote Normandy '44 and Brothers in Arms, and co-hosts the We Have Ways of Making You Talk podcast.

From one piece James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles | Lex Fridman Podcast #470 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  On the scale of Barbarossa the operational level of war decides everything: it does not matter how good your commanders at the front are if the backup is not there.

  Their words

  So when you’re talking about Operation Barbarossa, to go back to your original question, Lex, you’re dealing with an operation on such a vast scale, that that operational level of war is absolutely vital to its chances of success or failure. It doesn’t matter how good your individual commanders are at the front. If you haven’t got the backup, it’s not going to work.

  youtube.com

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  Operation Barbarossa should never have come close to being a victory; the Germans got as far as they did because of Red Army and Soviet incompetence, not German prowess.

  Their words

  I mean, it is largely down to incompetence of the Red Army and the Soviet leadership in the summer of 1941 that they get as far as they do. I mean, Barbarossa should never have come close to being a victory.

  youtube.com

Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.

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  Below about a thousand dollars a kilowatt of capital cost, the right way to run a plant is intermittently on raw solar with no batteries at all.

  solar

  Their words

  For loads below $1000/kW, intermittent operation with some modest solar array oversizing is the winning strategy. Above $1000/kW, we charge and discharge batteries daily to run them.

  Solar and batteries for generic use casescaseyhandmer.wordpress.com

Software engineer who writes the blog Made of Bugs about performance, debugging and understanding computer systems. Previously worked at Anthropic on interpretability, at Stripe on Sorbet, and at Ksplice.

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  A profiler measures time already spent in an operation, not how much time would be saved by optimizing it.

  Their words

  a profile tells you how much time a program spent in a given operation; but not how much time it would spend if you optimized that operation.

  blog.nelhage.com

Co-founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and the writer who started the modern argument that a sufficiently capable AI would by default kill everyone. Has argued the case since the early 2000s, latterly with the conclusion that it is being lost.

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  Alignment has to be right on the first try at a dangerous level of capability, because failing at that level leaves nobody to try again.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  unaligned operation at a dangerous level of intelligence kills everybody on Earth and then we don’t get to try again.

  AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalitiesintelligence.org

Economist; former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.

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  Automatic fiscal stabilizers give fiscal policy an advantage over monetary policy in stabilizing output because they act faster.

  Their words

  In some dimensions, fiscal policy has an advantage over monetary policy in stabilizing output. The main example is indeed the operation of automatic stabilizers, which act faster than monetary policy can.

  Fiscal Policy under Low Interest Ratesdirect.mit.edu