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Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Open models will end up serving a long-tail of specialized uses while closed models retain the most valuable applications.

  Their words

  open models are still incredibly useful, but fill a long-tail ecosystem relative to the closed counterparts that have monopoly ownership stakes in the most valuable areas like knowledge work collaboration, drug discovery, SWE, etc.

  Teaching Everyone to Fish for Tokensinterconnects.ai

Co-CEO of Waymo and a founding member of Google's self-driving car project, which he joined in 2009.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  In the areas where it operates, the Waymo driver is about seventeen times better than human drivers at avoiding crashes that cause serious injury.

  self-driving cars

  Their words

  in the areas where we operate, the Waymo driver is about 17 times better than human drivers when it comes to crashes uh that cause serious injury.

  youtube.com

Physician and neuroscientist at the University of Washington; researches brain health, metabolism and athletic performance.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Digital brain training makes you better at the training and at nothing else, which is the strongest argument against it.

  Their words

  This is one of the main arguments against online or you know digital brain training is that you get very good at doing that one specific thing but it doesn't transfer over to other areas of your life.

  youtube.com

Writes Pedestrian Observations on public transit and why infrastructure costs what it does; a pure mathematician by training, comparing how different countries build.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Corridor zoning's real purpose is to concentrate density's pollution and social costs onto arterial streets so single-family areas can avoid them.

  Their words

  the explicit purpose of corridor zoning is to concentrate both air pollution and the perceived social pollution of apartment dwellers in quarantine zones that single-family homeowners can avoid

  pedestrianobservations.com

Co-founder and CEO of Until, a reversible-cryopreservation company, and previously the founder of the Longevity Fund.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The areas worth working on are the ones with a social blind spot around them.

  Their words

  I think longevity is interesting because it feels like an area where there's a social blind spot around something and I find those very interesting.

  youtube.com

Founder of the International Center for Clinical Excellence and originator of Feedback-Informed Treatment. Writes about what actually makes a therapist effective, usually against the field's own assumptions about training and experience.

• Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app

  Outcome Rating Scale (ORS)

  Their words

  The ORS is a brief, 4-item measure designed to assess areas of life functioning known to change as a result of therapeutic intervention. It takes less than one minute to complete and score.

  scottdmiller.com

Co-founder of Rockstar Games, lead writer of the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption series, and founder of Absurd Ventures since leaving in 2020.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI has done the first ninety per cent of the work of sounding human, and the last five per cent will turn out to be about ninety-five per cent of the work.

  Their words

  I also think that they’ve done the sort of first 90% of the work to sound human, 95% possibly in some areas. The last 5% is going to end up being about 95% of the work.

  youtube.com

Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product design at Facebook; author of The Making of a Manager; writes The Looking Glass.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Conversational interfaces get to the first seventy percent quickly and are bad at iteration; the future is chat married to traditional direct-manipulation controls.

  Their words

  Conversational UIs are great at quickly getting to the first 70%, but suck at offering easy controls over narrower areas for iteration.

  lg.substack.com

Software engineer and writer; former CTO of Wave, now at Anthropic. Blogs at benkuhn.net on attention, engineering management and doing hard things well.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Different people's areas of strongest judgment or taste rarely overlap much with each other.

  Their words

  it's quite rare for different people's "zone of best taste" to overlap very much.

  Impact, agency, and tastebenkuhn.net

Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  It is only in dense cities that land dominates the price of a home, and there the land is expensive because of the rules limiting what can be built on it.

  Their words

  It’s only in dense urban areas that the cost of land begins to dominate the cost of new housing, driven by regulatory and zoning restrictions that limit how much housing can be built in a given area.

  What Makes Housing So Expensive?construction-physics.com

Journalist and author writing on politics, liberalism and ideas; a contributor to Quillette and co-author of a book on Christopher Hitchens.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Effective altruism demands hard evidence of effectiveness in some of its causes while accepting abstract conjecture in others, and never justifies the split.

  Their words

  While there are interesting theoretical arguments for these causes, there’s a disconnect between an almost-neurotic focus on hard evidence of effectiveness in some areas of EA and a willingness to accept extremely abstract and conjectural “evidence” in others.

  How Effective Altruism Lost Its Wayquillette.com

Author and clean-energy analyst who writes on solar cost curves.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  After four more doublings of installed solar capacity, solar electricity will cost about 3 cents per kwh in the sunniest areas and 4.5 cents per kwh in moderately sunny areas.

  solarenergy

  Their words, before

  And beyond that, by the time solar scale has doubled 4 more times, to the equivalent of 16% of today’s electricity demand (and somewhat less of future demand), we should see solar at 3 cents per kwh in the sunniest areas, and 4.5 cents per kwh in moderately sunny areas.

  Their words now

  Both of those forecasts were wrong. Solar has plunged in price faster than anyone – including me – predicted.

Ancient and military historian; writes A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, long series checking what history actually says against how popular culture tells it.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  States were born in the richest and easiest country, not in hard marginal land.

  Their words

  Rather than hard, difficult country being the breeding ground for the state, it is in fact the richest, softest areas that were (for those who have been to Mesopotamia and are wondering why it doesn’t seem quite so rich and soft anymore, the word you want to look up is salinization).

  acoup.blog

Mathematical biologist; Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Bath and author of The Maths of Life and Death and How to Expect the Unexpected.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  The Creativity Code: Art and Innovation in the Age of AI

  Their words

  It's increasingly coming to the fore and Marcus deals with it in a really interesting way. He takes us through lots of different areas where AI is being used to mimic creativity, which some people would argue is the essence of being human. It's interesting to see how close to being human AI is getting.

  fivebooks.com

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  The Art of Statistics: Learning from Data

  Their words

  The Art of Statistics is a really accessible and comprehensive introduction to statistics. It's not only about the tools of statistics, but it also goes through lots of interesting and relevant areas where statistics can help us make important decisions.

  fivebooks.com

Obesity researcher; wrote The Hungry Brain, on why the brain overeats, and reviews nutrition evidence.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Nutrition is one of the domains where beliefs track group identity rather than evidence, so an expert's claims there deserve more suspicion than in physics.

  Their words

  The likelihood that someone is providing high-quality information in these domains is lower than in less controversial areas like physics or neuroscience.

  stephanguyenet.com