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François Chollet x.com
If there really is a high chance of AI leading to the extinction of humanity within years/decades, then the only rational stance towards safety monitoring and research pacing should be stringent, top-down government involvement and universally ratified international treaties. Similar to what we have been doing for a long time with nuclear energy and nuclear weapons non-proliferation. If that's not what we're doing, then we must infer that the risk isn't being seriously considered by anyone involved. There are only two options that make sense here: 1. The near-term species extinction risk is r…
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20 September
19 September
From one piece Better Debt 2 beliefs · grumpy-economist.com
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Their words
Simplifying a bit, the Treasury should introduce a fixed-coupon perpetuity and a fixed-value floating-rate perpetuity. These should gradually make up the bulk of government debt.
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Their words
The tradeoff between cost of borrowing and how much interest rate risk taxpayers shoulder should be squarely on the shoulders of the politically-accountable Treasury not the independent Fed.
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korrents.com
Time spent on bureaucratic paperwork is a real economic cost even though it doesn't appear in government budgets.Their words
it is simply ridiculous that a ruinously expensive policy can be budget-neutral if the expense consists of wasted time rather than wasted money. But that's still a cost!
18 September
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korrents.com
A competent, empowered civil service that performs crucial government functions with in-house expertise is good.Their words
One unpopular position I’ve stuck to over the years is that a strong bureaucracy is good. I don’t mean “bureaucracy” as in red tape and regulation; I mean a competent, empowered civil service that can perform crucial government functions efficiently and well using in-house expertise. This is also called state capacity.
17 September
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Their words
Finland made great progress towards eliminating homelessness by giving people houses which they could feel was home. Alas, right-wing government has cut some of the spending and is driving homelessness back up.
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korrents.com
Failed U.S. attempts to secure its preferred outcomes in the Persian Gulf will keep energy prices elevated.Their words
So it does not seem as though U.S. preferences in the Persian Gulf will be achieved - which means prices in general and energy prices in particular are likely to stay high.
16 September
15 September
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Their words
Social media is destroying out society. Quitting doesn't help because everyone else is still on it. It's a bad equilibrium. It needs to be solved with government regulations.
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korrents.com
Solar power's exponential growth will continue until all other energy sources are far below 0.1%.Their words
The solar power exponential will continue until all other energy sources are <<0.1%
14 September
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AI data centers resulting in lower electricity prices for consumers
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that doesn't have to persist long for AI to join the ranks of systems that are important enough that there's someone senior in the government who's responsible for regulating them.
13 September
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The best way is to be strong, sovereign, hard-working and deeply competent. Ideally with an uncanny ability to start ambitious infrastructure projects and finish them on budget and on time. Shout-out to our nuclear energy sector for nailing that. Do that and every other problem melts away.
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Their words
If there really is a high chance of AI leading to the extinction of humanity within years/decades, then the only rational stance towards safety monitoring and research pacing should be stringent, top-down government involvement and universally ratified international treaties.
12 September
11 September
10 September
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Their words
a hard-earned lesson of the past few months is that mobilizing collective action against the federal government is hard.
9 September
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I do not think those running the government testing understand what is going on, and believe they are reacting basically on vibes and what various trusted people tell them.
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Their words
For knowledge work, which is roughly half of the U.S. economy, AI is as fundamental as electricity (or quickly will be so, with rapid improvements to agents in the next 18 months).
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Their words
data centers are nowhere near the biggest climate problem with artificial intelligence.
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the Trump administration's foreign policymakers are so lazy that they keep self-sabotaging.
8 September
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korrents.com
The current US government uses false antisemitism accusations to damage and control institutions it views as enemies.Their words
The Fascist regime now ruling the US both enables this and has effectively used bogus accusations of "antisemitism" to damage and exert control over prominent institutions they consider to be enemies.
From one piece Where’s the Beef (Coming From)? 2 beliefs · paulkrugman.substack.com
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It’s an administration that’s trying to turn us back to the 19th century or before. It’s really just trying to undo even the most essential functions of government.
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And this is not something that you can leave up to the private sector. It’s not something where you can do your own research. It’s a very complicated world out there. And the informational burden of trying to figure out whether the people responsible for your package of hamburger are actually following safe procedures, that’s beyond everybody.
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This is the case even though Canada gets broad access into the massive American Government Procurement Market, including those of our States. That is not reciprocity, it is a Canadian Trade Scam.
7 September
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korrents.com
The case for building AGI has always been framed around invention, such as curing cancer or solving fusion energy.Their words
The narrative around why building AGI was a good idea has always been about invention -- "it will cure cancer", "it will solve fusion energy", etc.
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korrents.com
Scaling up clean energy is more effective when it is paired with retiring fossil fuel infrastructure.Their words
Building clean energy is much more likely, and much more effective, if we're also shutting down dirty energy.
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Their words
Voting for the AfD in the current landscape, whatever your economic issues, in short, is not a vote to have your economic issues addressed by social democracy, or welfare or government intervention.
6 September
5 September
4 September
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korrents.com
A conspiracy theory can be used as a pretext to dismantle government programs and target researchers and citizens.Their words
Since 2025, MAGA ideologues have been using this alleged plot as an excuse to dismantle government programs, stifle research, intimidate American citizens, and even distort American foreign policy.
The Myth of the “Censorship Industrial Complex”anneapplebaum.substack.com
3 September
From one piece Why you won’t get a flying car 2 beliefs · noahpinion.blog
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It’s a simple truth that if you want your economy to escape poverty, you need lots of energy consumption
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korrents.com
Solar power combined with batteries has surpassed nuclear power as the superior energy technology for most uses.Their words
Because solar has, broadly speaking, won the technological race. Intermittency was the last big problem, and batteries have gotten good and cheap enough to make solar reliable.
From one piece The Crisis We've Been Waiting For 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Rising AI capability is undermining the assumptions that justify slow, manual government processes.Their words
AI creates a crisis by making the assumptions on which government operates untenable.
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Things government has long explained as difficult, expensive, or slow are going to look increasingly like choices.
2 September
1 September
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Yet each time, we drastically overreacted, letting ourselves get swept up in a climate of fear after one emotionally vivid incident
From one piece Two Men 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Switching to sustainable energy is the one effective, scalable tool available to prevent catastrophic climate change.Their words
"Just switching to sustainable energy" is in fact the one good, scalable weapon we have to fight that
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Their words
Whatever good he did with his early advocacy for electric vehicles has now been undone a hundred times over with his advocacy for the people who hate EVs and all the other things we need.
31 August
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korrents.com
Desalination for drinking and household water is cheap and uses less energy than commonly assumed.Their words
Supplying drinking and household water through desalination is really quite cheap, and uses far less energy than I’d have guessed.
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korrents.com
The US federal government will eventually impose heavy-handed control over the internet.Their words
Sometimes I get super nervous that someday the US government is really going to fuck with the web. Like they are going to decide they just don't have enough control over it and are going to get really heavy-handed somehow.
30 August
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Extremely severe extinction events happen every 100M years or so and just switching to sustainable energy will not be enough to stop them. Space satellites to control temperature and massive geo-engineering will be needed or it will be game over.
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But physics is giving us very little time now, and so the next set of elections in this country will be, I think, our last real chance to make the sea change-replacing oil and gas with sun and wind-that is our best hope for limiting warming.
28 August
From one piece My Most Contrarian Opinion Right Now 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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I think the fact that the government took on debt during two crises to help households was a good trade-off.
My Most Contrarian Opinion Right Nowawealthofcommonsense.com
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korrents.com
The real danger of high government debt is the policy errors it provokes, not a debt crisis.Their words
But I am worried about high government debt levels causing policy errors.
My Most Contrarian Opinion Right Nowawealthofcommonsense.com
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korrents.com
The United States is not at risk of a financial crisis caused by the size of its government debt.Their words
So my baseline assumption is that people will continue complaining about the trillions of dollars we have in debt but it won’t lead to a financial crisis.
My Most Contrarian Opinion Right Nowawealthofcommonsense.com
27 August
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What we do know is that the actual Elon Musk that we have to live with on this here timeline was flagrantly incompetent in government, contrary to Noah's previous predictions.
26 August
25 August
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This is a computer system made for pros, and I mean that in the sense of professional computer lovers. People who are willing to invest time and energy into learning how their system works, and reap the benefits that come from that investment.
24 August
From one piece How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Planning a day or a week in advance works because it pays the brain's decision cost once rather than dozens of times.Their words
Every decision has a cost in terms as we've seen the brain having to put in invest fuel to make that decision. So if you're having to do that every time you make a decision, that can seem very burdensome. Whereas if you did it once in a big way where you planned it out for the day or the week, maybe the costs in terms of the activation energy required for the brain is much lower for you if you do that.
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Their words
It's showing us that apathetic people use more brain energy when they're making this decision. They have a bigger activation energy barrier to overcome because when they're making that decision, the brain is consuming more energy. It's consuming more glucose when it's doing that.
23 August
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korrents.com
Most high-skilled Europeans are happy to pay even high taxes, provided the government does a great job in return.Their words
I think most high skilled Europeans are happy to pay (even high) taxes That is, if the government does a great job like Singapore or Dubai or Korea or Japan and most things work well You pay the government for a service and you get safe cities, great public services and great healthcare back
21 August
From one piece How Countries Go Broke: The Dynamic Behind What is Happening Now 3 beliefs · raydalio.substack.com
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The debt dynamics work the same for a central government as they do for a person or a company, except that a central government has a central bank that can print money (which devalues it) and it can take money away from people via taxes.
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Early in the final stage of the Big Debt Cycle, the market action reflects this dynamic via interest rates rising led by long-term rates, the currency declining especially relative to gold, and the central government’s treasury department shortening the maturities of its debt offerings because of a shortage of the demand for long-term debt.
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Because one can measure these things, one can monitor this debt dynamic happening, so it’s easy to see problems approaching. I’ve used this diagnostic process in my investing and I’ve kept it to myself, but I’m now explaining it in detail in How Countries Go Broke: The Big Cycle because it is too important to keep to myself.
18 August
From one piece Michael Kratsios: Inside the White House's AI Strategy 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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I think it can be a slog, it can be bureaucratic, it can be painful, but when the when the outcome actually happens and you deliver the result, there is no place where you can have a bigger impact on on this country.
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I think there is there is um no place where you can work on bigger problems than the US government. Even at the the biggest tech companies in the world, you're never going to be dealing with problems of this of this scale.
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no matter what kind of industry you're looking at, there was this government angle where the government's policy actions could be ones that could actually unlock technologies.
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Over time that has sort of inverted completely. The private sector plus philanthropy now do about 70% of R&D and the and the government only does about 30.
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korrents.com
Britain has a systemic problem building large infrastructure projects, including reservoirsTheir words
I think Britain has a real problem with building almost anything, from train lines to houses, and reservoirs to energy infrastructure.
The UK needs to build more reservoirshannahritchie.substack.com
17 August
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korrents.com
The large-scale AI compute buildout may turn out to be a temporary phase rather than a permanent necessity.Their words
The supercomputer inside our own skull runs on about 25 watts, which hints that the minimum energy needed for intelligence might be small - and that the giant, controversial AI compute centers we're building now may turn out to be a temporary blip rather than a permanent feature.
15 August
From one piece How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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energy being a commodity, the demand is set by the price, right? So if you can reduce the price, you increase the demand.
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But the problem of nuclear today is like the Toyota Camry problem, right? Like we don't want to make Lamborghinis. We want to make a very simple, very cheap, very safe reactor that we can make literally tens of thousands of. Um and actually that is going to make the cheapest energy in the world, right?
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Energy is the fundamental input to uh the quality of human life. U if you look backward into time and say how did humanity go from one standard of living to the next, it's always unlocked by cheaper energy, right?
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korrents.com
Once AI and robotics do the manufacturing, the price of any object becomes the price of the energy used to make it.Their words
If you keep asking this question, what you realize is energy is the fundamental input. When we figure out AI and robotics that allows us to do semi-aututonomous manufacturing, energy will become the cost of all things, right? The cost of buying a thing will become the cost of energy used to make it.
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it's just been sitting there in legislation for like 40 years and no one's really taken advantage of it except for one government program here or there where they want to, you know, do a NASA space reactor or something like that. But it has from a legal perspective been waiting for an administration to say, "Hey, this might be a way to accelerate nuclear R&D."
14 August
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korrents.com
Superintelligence bottoms out in mining, because both the chips and the energy it runs on come out of the ground.Their words
Chips come from the ground. Where's the energy come from? And a lot of people are like, "Oh, it comes from the sun." Yeah, it comes from the sun. But how are you capturing it from the sun? From stuff made from the ground, right?
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But um I think the whole point of that project and the graphics was it isn't really just about a grid of pixels. It's the metaphor and the idea and the meaning behind everything.
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korrents.com
Renewable energy offset schemes share the same fundamental flaw as carbon offsets in general.Their words
This renewable energy offsetting suffers from the same fundamental problem as all offsets.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Energy Transitions in Regulated MarketsTheir words
Gowrisankaran, Langer and Reguant have an excellent paper, Energy Transitions in Regulated Markets
12 August
From one piece AI’s climate problem is worse than we thought 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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they found that Big Oil's use of AI to produce more oil and gas could create 3.3 to 13.3 times more climate pollution than powering AI's data centers.
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AI had to help renewable energy four to five times more than fossil fuels just for emissions to break even.
10 August
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korrents.com
Data centre opposition only pushes construction to the parts of America that regulate energy and pollution least.Their words
It seems pretty clear that the only thing data center opposition is doing is pushing data center construction to the (many) places in America that won't regulate energy or pollution. Weird thing to pat oneself on the back for.
7 August
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korrents.com
Philanthropy can never operate at the scale of government, no matter how well-funded it becomes.Their words
Even with the influx of funding that may come with the AI companies' IPOs, philanthropy can never act at the scale of government.
6 August
5 August
From one piece The real energy use of agentic AI 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
This is the Jevons paradox in action: making compute cheaper per token in turn tends to lead to greater levels of AI use.
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Which is why the lever that actually matters most is the carbon intensity of the electricity.
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Unlike aviation, this is an end-use we already know how to decarbonize.
3 August
31 July
30 July
From one piece Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AI 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Yeah, I mean it's a little different, but I think uh you're going to see more and more uh uh high performance and um low energy uh inference hardware systems because I think everyone is now realizing that inference is the key to making you know these agent-based systems be available to more and more people and that latency is really important and that specialization of the hardware is a really key way you can make uh things that are more energy efficient and lower latency than more general purpose uh computational devices like say GPUs or TPUs
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korrents.com
Batching exists only because moving data costs about a thousand times more energy than computing on it.Their words
Um because if you didn't have that thousandx difference then you know you wouldn't have to do batching but you have to do batching of you know many examples or maybe many tokens at once in order to amortize that data movement
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korrents.com
The numbers an AI engineer should know by heart are memory bandwidths and the energy cost of a single operation.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.
29 July
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but I can tell you with first hand experience nuclear power plants do not care about this stuff. They're actually just fine with with with thorough testing.
28 July
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I've never seen any commodity quite like this one but it seems to me like the demand for sufficiently high quality intelligence at a sufficiently low price is effectively uncapped.
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By the way, this is the pattern in a lot of regulation. It doesn't come from like some well-meaning person trying to keep the public safe. It comes from some entrenched, frankly, lazy interest that doesn't want to have to compete and runs to DC or runs to the local regulator and tries to use the power of government to shut their competition down. I think this is deeply unethical, but it happens all the time.
27 July
26 July
22 July
20 July
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And what they found is there's kind of this um bell-shaped curve between energy availability and brain volume. And in general, brain volume, right, the more the better, right, we think. And so if you're chronically calorically restricted, your brain is smaller um because you just don't have the resources to invest in, you know, the structure um and to maintain it. At the other end, you see the same thing. So if you're chronically in a chronic state of chloric excess, you also tend to have a smaller brain on average.
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korrents.com
AI is raising public expectations of government service at the same time it changes what government must deliver.Their words
Every state, and the federal government right along with them, is about to be asked to do a lot more than keep the lights on.
15 July
14 July
12 July
From one piece The Network State 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
A government is legitimate internally if the governed have consented to it, whatever form it takes.Their words
Given the consent of the governed, any form of government is internally legitimate.
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Their words
This gives us a new perspective on why micronations like Sealand don’t work: they start backwards, from the territory and the government, rather than working forwards from a people and their culture.
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korrents.com
The US federal government has lost the capacity to build basic infrastructure, let alone advanced military hardware.Their words
This US government can’t build a bathroom in San Francisco, let alone a costeffective fighter jet, destroyer, combat ship, or aircraft carrier.
11 July
9 July
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I think of it like this: any person has an innate curiosity about life, and an energy toward it, that may manifest itself in all kinds of ways throughout the course of their life.
7 July
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Without a move away from fossil fuels, future heatwaves will keep testing the limits of public health systems and more people will die.
2 July
1 July
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It is actually pretty likely that it was Google's efficiency actions that enabled their total energy consumption to increase.
30 June
From one piece Saving the world from bad ideas: the continuing failure of food ecomodernism 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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To meet the global population’s protein needs through factory-produced bacterial protein in 2024 would have used more than the total global electricity generated using renewable (hydro, photovoltaic and wind) energy
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korrents.com
"Food from thin air" is not from thin air: it runs on water, minerals, ammonia and industrial plant.Their words
Another is that it isn’t ‘food from thin air’ as is often claimed – as well as the high energy use, it’s food from a lot of tap water, minerals, ammonia and industrial infrastructure.
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but I do think that in a future of probable energy constraint there will be a need for a more peopled agriculture, with populations spreading out to tap diffuse solar energy input.
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Agriculture is the only major sector that at present is significantly energised directly by zero cost and zero carbon sunlight.
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Their words
a more relevant metric in the long term is the cost, not the efficiency, of food production methods at sustainable levels of energetic and material throughput.
29 June
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To shout “temporary” and pull the plug essentially overnight after immigrants have relied on the government’s representations that they should put their efforts and future into establishing a life in the United States wreaks unfair havoc on the lives of immigrants as well as the welfare of their communities.
SCOTUS Whitewashes Otherwise Racist Decisionblog.simplejustice.us
24 June
21 June
From one piece How to breathe air when we’re drowning in big tech’s slop 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Generative AI systems have no built-in drive toward truth and accuracy, unlike people or institutions.Their words
Generative AI has no internal, designed momentum towards truth and accuracy (beyond the absurdly diminishing returns of energy-hungry multi-layered LLMs), but a person or an institution can (and should).
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korrents.com
Genuinely valuing truth, honesty and climate action logically entails opposing generative AI.Their words
Being pro-correctness, anti-theft and anti-fossil fuels automatically places you in an aggressively anti-generative-AI position.
19 June
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korrents.com
Government controls both the resources and the legitimacy needed for large-scale change.Their words
Government is where the literal money is (money that could often go much further if we fixed what's wrong with government), but it's also where the impact is. And it's where the legitimacy is.
18 June
From one piece Re-engineering the Semiconductor Supply Chain with Intel CEO Lip Bu Tan 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
And then in terms of the capital intensive like AI in a factory and also the foundry and then you really need to tap either government funding or some sovereign fund
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Just I explained to President Trump, TSMC when they started they have the Taiwan government as a shareholder. If you look at Japan, you look at Singapore, this is the infrastructure US government get to provide the support.
17 June
16 June
From one piece Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time – Ada Palmer 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
When you break that, when you overthrow the ruler, when you dissolve the republic, when you put in a new thing, it doesn't have that same staying power. And so, it's very common when there's one regime change for there to then be five regime changes rapid-fire over and over.
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And soon we have a precedent that every new pope feels he has the authority to knock down every pawn upon the chessboard if he feels like it. Once that is the norm, even a fairly nice pope still inherits the idea that the pope is going to overthrow and replace governments. And this creates a unique instability within Italy that no other part of Europe is subject to
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It shouldn't It shouldn't be shelved next to How to Win Friends and Influence People because it's a manual not of how to gain power, but of how to keep power.
+ 1 more
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The Inquisition, the Vatican, it controls everything, which is completely untrue and is propagandistic. The Inquisition is overseen by a whole bunch of isolated guys who are in isolated towns and it takes weeks or months to even communicate with the Vatican and they're making their own decisions.
9 June
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Their words
And Russia's never had a commerce-driven economy. China much more so under Deng Xiaoping, but recently Xi Jinping has been privileging the crony sector over the private sector and neither one has stable government institutions.
4 June
From one piece The better AI gets, the smaller its share of the economy might get – Alex Imas and Phil Trammell 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
because a lot with electricity, a lot of the downstream benefits actually came to like the users of the electricity rather than the rather than the actual entity producing the electricity. On the other hand, with social media, it was the opposite case, right? Social media, you know, it was everywhere. Everybody uses social media, but the rents went to the platform.
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So, I think there is a world where it is concentrated, in which case it's going to be really hard to index AGI. There is another world where it is not It's electricity, then like basically every company has access to AGI. So, you just buy you use buy the index. So, like, you know, Nigeria just needs to buy the index.
29 May
27 May
From one piece BloombergNEF: The Great Clean Energy Acceleration 2.0 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
The Gulf conflict and closure of the Strait of Hormuz will accelerate the global shift away from fossil fuelsTheir words
What the current conflict in the Gulf - in particular the closure of the Strait of Hormuz - is going to do is to provide a further push to global attempts to reduce dependence on fossil fuels.
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Their words
We are about to see the Great Clean Energy Acceleration 2.0 - a discontinuity in energy markets as profound as the oil shocks of the 1970s, and one that could bring forward the peak in fossil fuel use and emissions to this side of 2030.
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Their words
the joke I made was pre AI, I would spend 95% of my energy thinking about what to do and 5% of my energy doing it. Now I spend 96% of my time thinking about what to do and 4% of my time actually doing it. So yeah, it's like a 20% improvement, but dayto-day it feels as hard as ever.
21 May
15 May
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korrents.com
Federal Reserve Board members have historically often resigned before completing their full terms.Their words
Federal Reserve Board members have often resigned their positions well before their 14-year terms expired, since that's quite a long time to spend in one position in government.
9 May
From one piece Stop Microlooting the Tax Code 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Stronger enforcement against tax and benefit cheating would raise social trust in government.Their words
It would behoove politicians to take cheating more seriously, because better enforcement would improve social trust
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Their words
The necessary tax rates depend on how big a government you want, but all these systems rely on people paying taxes.
5 May
30 April
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korrents.com
Data centres will become the majority driver of electricity demand growth in Australia's National Electricity Market.Their words
Even if a small fraction of this pipeline ends up operational, data centres will drive far more than 50% of demand growth in the NEM.
27 April
24 April
21 April
16 April
15 April
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Their words
Computing is not like that. There's a reason why the x86 still exists. There's a reason why ARM is so sticky. These ecosystems, these ecosystems are hard to replace. It costs an enormous amount of time and energy and most people don't want to do it.
14 April
7 April
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What I see now is, well, "I'm a a programmer and I've got six agents. So, really I'm managing a team." No, you're not. You're using six tools at once, which is fine. But, it's that's very different than having a conversation with somebody who believes things that are a little different than what you believe.
5 April
4 April
1 April
24 March
23 March
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Their words
Now, the second thing is we have to build data centers that gracefully degrade.
22 March
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We may have a handful of genies, but that's different from having a handful of friends, right? In part because the energy's different, the conversations are different. Also, they just agree with us constantly.
21 March
19 March
17 March
13 March
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Their words
So, space data centers effectively are not li limited by, you know, hey, we have this energy advantage. It's actually just limited by the same contended resource. We can only make 200 gawatts of chips a year by the end of the decade.
8 March
5 March
28 February
17 February
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Their words
Both estimates make me think that the concern about global energy demand for LLMs is over-blown.
9 February
From one piece Do subsidies make meat much cheaper? 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Simply making fossil fuels more expensive without having affordable alternatives just makes energy more expensive, which hits the poorest hardest.
Do subsidies make meat much cheaper?hannahritchie.substack.com
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Their words
Again, you cannot pay for the externalities by pulling subsidies (there is nothing there to pull
Do subsidies make meat much cheaper?hannahritchie.substack.com
5 February
3 February
22 January
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Their words
Back when the Fourth Amendment was enacted, the most fundamental remedy for an unlawful government entry into your home was a civil suit for trespass against the officers.
10 January
29 December 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
BreakneckTheir words
Wang argues that the US & China each have a dominant form of government problem-solving
23 December 2025
18 December 2025
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Their words
There is a close mapping between government ideal types and corporate governance structures given their shared origins in transaction costs.
12 December 2025
9 December 2025
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Their words
And there are a whole bunch of people who are employed not always by the government just as much by the private sector who are much more interested in adherence to uh approved procedure than they are in quality of outcome.
-
korrents.com
Cheap clean energy has broken the old trade-off between raising living standards and cutting environmental harm.Their words
The rapid drop in renewable energy costs in the last decade (alongside huge improvements in battery technologies) has started to break this deadlock.
8 December 2025
-
Their words, before
we will see batteries aggressively displace transmission as the most cost-effective way to ensure continuity of electricity supply, leading to an eventual pruning of the grid and drastic reduction in the average distance that power travels between production and consumption, even as the average time that power is stored increases.
Their words now
Do we need to drastically expand the grid in order to metabolize renewables? No.
From one piece Energy Predictions 2025 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
While heat pumps can achieve higher efficiency, consumer uptake has been much lower than expected because fundamentally, a heat pump is a 20 year bet on future power prices that most homeowners are unwilling to make.
-
Their words
Storing electricity for months is economically difficult, but storing heat is easy.
-
Their words
The only highly populated industrial country unable to trivially meet its electricity and synthetic fuel needs with solar alone is the United Kingdom, due primarily to a high population density and high latitude. The Nordic and Baltic countries are tiny by comparison. Among other problems, the UK needs to decide if it wants the future where energy is cheap and it is rich, or the future where energy is expensive and it is poor. If the former, it is time to get serious about large scale deployment of wind power, using home-grown vertically integrated technology at prices as low as $10/MWh.
+ 2 more
-
Their words
Do we need to drastically expand the grid in order to metabolize renewables? No.
-
Their words
By 2045, natural gas will be used as LNG primarily for high performance supersonic aviation, shipping, and industrial heat.
1 December 2025
28 November 2025
27 November 2025
-
korrents.com
Widespread AI-driven performance tuning agents will meaningfully reduce global energy waste.Their words
In future there will be AI performance agents that can be run on everything, helping to save the planet by reducing energy usage.
17 November 2025
16 November 2025
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Their words
AI has been compared to various historical precedents: electricity, industrial revolution, etc., I think the strongest analogy is that of AI as a new computing paradigm (Software 2.0) because both are fundamentally about the automation of digital information processing.
30 October 2025
27 October 2025
26 October 2025
From one piece The Rise of Renewable Energy 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
But politics aside, what’s notable about that 2001 report, put together by men who regarded themselves as hard-headed realists, is that it envisaged an energy future reliant almost entirely on fossil fuels plus a bit of nuclear energy.
-
korrents.com
Renewables now account for the bulk of the growth in electricity generation, whatever their opponents believe.Their words
there are many people who still refuse to believe that renewables can be practical even as renewables keep growing around the world, in fact accounting for the bulk of growth in electricity generation
19 October 2025
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korrents.com
A government's political legitimacy depends on providing a fair, merit-based channel for social advancement.Their words
One possible reading of the last century or so of political history in China, therefore, is that governments who provide a meritocratic channel for social advancement have legitimacy and popular support, and governments who do not provide one, do not.
13 October 2025
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Their words
In general your body would rather use glycogen than fat, because glycogen loses almost no energy in the conversion from and to sugar and fat loses a lot.
10 October 2025
From one piece Data centers & electricity - part 1: as of 2025 they haven't raised national prices 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
That data centres have not raised national electricity prices so far is no promise that they never will.Their words
This is not to say that data centers won’t affect national prices in the future.
-
korrents.com
The American states with the fastest electricity load growth saw prices fall rather than rise.Their words
A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study found that state-level load growth from 2019 to 2024 — including growth driven by data centers, manufacturing, and electrification — was associated with lower average retail electricity prices, not higher ones.
-
inflationdata centersenergyAmerica
Their words
This is the first conclusion of my deep dive: Data centers have (so far) not affected national average household electricity bills.
5 October 2025
From one piece Finding hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I think especially if you have a product that has daily frequency like that's actually the retention that matters the most is that like of your existing user base that has developed a habitual pattern how sticky is your product and it's that retention rate that really compounds and build that builds that daily habit.
-
Their words
I saw some of the highest performers just being people that had very high agency, had that clock speed, had that energy. Um, yes, they they cared about the mission, but they didn't necessarily need to have deep experience on that matter. And in fact, sometimes that experience could be a crutch in certain ways. Especially in this world where the grounds are shifting so fast with AI, a lot of your like learn habits actually need to be intentionally discarded. You know, you need to have a beginner's mind on this type of stuff.
30 September 2025
From one piece Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature | Lex Fridman Podcast #482 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
That's how you end up in an endless loop of ever-increasing taxes, ever-increasing regulation, which ultimately suffocates free market, free enterprise, and free speech. So, you do want to have very, very strict limitations on the extent the government can increase its powers at the expense of citizens.
-
Their words
And I would rather lose everything I have than yield to this pressure because, if you submit to this pressure and agree with something that is fundamentally wrong and violates rights of other people as well, you become broken inside, you become a shell of your former self on a deep biological and spiritual level.
19 September 2025
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korrents.com
LSD is not a truth drug and never could be — it takes you toward your own truth, not out of it.Their words
They miserably failed because LSD… Is not the truth drug. LSD maybe leads you closer to your own truth, because when suddenly the default mode network receives less energy and other parts of the brain think more, and the neuroplasticity of the brain is enhanced and stimulated, you might understand something about your life.
18 September 2025
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Their words
no one carries the full legitimacy inside of a company. Legitimacy is a currency in a companies. No one carries the full legitimacy in a company, even the CEO. The CEO just has a lot of input on the plan. The plan carries the legitimacy.
-
Their words
The average European and UK voter, once he or she moves on from immigration, will notice how Europe and the UK have made energy unaffordable, stopped its growth-exactly as degrowthers wish-and deindustrialized, on the altar of climate policies that do nothing to improve the climate.
17 September 2025
15 September 2025
10 September 2025
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Their words
This must be Europe's Independence Moment. I believe this is our Union's mission. To be able to take care of our own defence and security. To take control over the technologies and energies that will fuel our economies.
6 September 2025
29 August 2025
18 August 2025
15 August 2025
13 August 2025
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Their words
Another big misunderstanding, and a fundamental one, is that people somehow think that the state suppresses the private sector. It’s not at all as simple as that. For the most part, if we look at the local government’s incentive system, they want to help the best, private companies, which are the most promising, because it makes them look good.
7 August 2025
23 July 2025
From one piece Demis Hassabis: Future of AI, Simulating Reality, Physics and Video Games | Lex Fridman Podcast #475 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Information is the most fundamental unit of the universe, more fundamental than energy or matter.Their words
And it sort of fits with the way I think about physics in general, which is that I think information is primary, information is the most sort of fundamental unit of the universe, more fundamental than energy and matter.
-
Their words
I think fusion and solar are the two that I would bet on. Solar, I mean it's the fusion reactor in the sky of course, and I think really the problem there is batteries and transmission.
16 July 2025
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Their words
So, you while we kind of saved the system a lot, we bailed a lot of people out, they made us pay 5 billion dollars on the more the bad mortgages that Bear Stearns had done. And that's what made me make the statement I wouldn't do it again.
16 June 2025
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Their words
Shoulder generation (in late summer) of any given year is generally a higher share of global electricity demand than the peak generation (spring) of the year prior.
5 June 2025
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Their words
Many years ago, I think it might've been 2017 or 2018, I said at the time, AI is the most profound technology humanity will ever work on. It'll be more profound than fire or electricity. So, I have to back myself. I still think that's the case.
27 May 2025
19 May 2025
From one piece Lessons from Spain 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
It's all part of the political culture wars where everything gets weaponised to push an agenda, score points against opponents or curry favour.
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korrents.com
The failure of wind or solar power to show up has never been the primary cause of a major grid blackout.Their words
While renewables are almost always blamed in the aftermath of major power cuts or grid disruption - and the way they have been integrated into the grid has certainly been found to compound problems - the simple failure of wind or solar power to show up has never yet been found to be the primary cause.
12 May 2025
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Their words
this technology, consistently underestimated, now adds more capacity to the global grid than anything ever and will soon add more power in any given year than anything ever as well.
-
korrents.com
Carbon capture and storage cannot be economically competitive without a policy that prices carbon.Their words
CCS can never be competitive in the sense of working economically in the absence of a policy framework to price in the cost of carbon, unlike clean electricity.
Why Tony Blair needs to reset his climate resetliebreich.com
8 May 2025
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Their words
The gravity of existing decisions in current systems requires so much energy to reach escape velocity that you tend to conform rather than explore. Essentially you're bent back to where you started, rather than arcing out towards a new horizon.
5 May 2025
From one piece Janna Levin: Black Holes, Wormholes, Aliens, Paradoxes & Extra Dimensions | Lex Fridman Podcast #468 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
The hardest step on the road from chemistry to us was multicellularity, and it was strictly a problem of energetics.Their words
I would say, multicellularity which is strictly an energy problem, I think. Again, it’s just like can electrons flow the right way. And is it energetically favorable for multicellularity to exist because if it’s energetically expensive, it’s not going to succeed.
-
Their words
And so I would say, yes, we are just giving proxy names to things we don’t understand, but to dismiss that as some kind of, “Oh, they just don’t know…” It is actually quite the opposite.
21 April 2025
From one piece Programming Notes 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
there is no such thing as a high-income, low-electricity economy.
-
korrents.com
Electrification is a process shift across industries, not just a change in energy source.Their words
Electrification is not just a change of energetic inputs; it's a process shift through and across industries.
17 April 2025
14 April 2025
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korrents.com
America borrowed cheaply from the world and spent it on consumption rather than investment, exactly as Greece did.Their words
In sum, spurred on by the federal government (in many ways), the US borrowed a huge amount from foreigners at very low rates, and went on a consumption binge. Sooner or later we have to pay it back, or we go though the wrenching adjustment of a debt crisis.
6 April 2025
From one piece America Underestimates the Difficulty of Bringing Manufacturing Back 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Without the construction of huge amounts of new energy infrastructure, like nuclear power plants, we cannot meaningfully increase our manufacturing output.
-
Their words
Since the year 2000, US electricity generation per person has been flat.
31 March 2025
-
Their words
But, tariffs are unavoidable, even within the ringfence that is US energy trade, and even within electricity trade more specifically.
28 February 2025
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Their words
But the underlying ideology is familiar from Silicon Valley, Mark Zuckerberg's dictum to "move fast and break things" and replace the messily human with frictionless technology, built by elite engineers who are supposed to know better than anyone else.
19 February 2025
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Their words
Since signaling, not building human capital, is the main function of education, the main effect of government subsidies is credential inflation.
3 February 2025
From one piece DeepSeek, China, OpenAI, NVIDIA, xAI, TSMC, Stargate, and AI Megaclusters | Lex Fridman Podcast #459 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Interesting thing is certain regions of the US transmitting power cost more than actually generating it because the grid is so slow to build. And the demand for power, and the ability to build power, and re-ramping on a natural gas plant or even a coal plant is easy enough to do, but transmitting the power's really hard.
-
Their words
So, Japan has a law which you're allowed to train on any training data and copyrights don't apply if you want to train a model, A. B, Japan has 9 gigawatts of curtailed nuclear power. C, Japan is allowed under the AI diffusion rule to import as many GPUs as they'd like.
-
Their words
FLOP is the vector that the government has cared about historically, but the other two vectors are arguably just as important. And especially when we come to this new paradigm, which the world is only just learning about over the last six months: reasoning.
2 February 2025
-
Recommendsrcmnd.app
The Selfish GeneTheir words
Foundation, The Lessons of History, Unqualified Reservations, A Short History of Nearly Everything, The Selfish Gene, Albion's Seed, War and Peace and War, Stalin's War, Energy and Civilization, Who We Are and How We Got Here, The Ancient City, The Fourth Turning, The Grey Lady Winked
-
Recommendsrcmnd.app
Albion's SeedTheir words
Foundation, The Lessons of History, Unqualified Reservations, A Short History of Nearly Everything, The Selfish Gene, Albion's Seed, War and Peace and War, Stalin's War, Energy and Civilization, Who We Are and How We Got Here, The Ancient City, The Fourth Turning, The Grey Lady Winked
-
Recommendsrcmnd.app
Stalin's WarTheir words
Foundation, The Lessons of History, Unqualified Reservations, A Short History of Nearly Everything, The Selfish Gene, Albion's Seed, War and Peace and War, Stalin's War, Energy and Civilization, Who We Are and How We Got Here, The Ancient City, The Fourth Turning, The Grey Lady Winked
+ 2 more
-
Recommendsrcmnd.app
The Fourth TurningTheir words
Foundation, The Lessons of History, Unqualified Reservations, A Short History of Nearly Everything, The Selfish Gene, Albion's Seed, War and Peace and War, Stalin's War, Energy and Civilization, Who We Are and How We Got Here, The Ancient City, The Fourth Turning, The Grey Lady Winked
-
Recommendsrcmnd.app
Invisible CountriesTheir words
Imagined Communities, Invisible Countries, The Origins of Political Order, How to Hide an Empire, The House of Government
25 January 2025
20 January 2025
From one piece The Inaugural Address 3 beliefs · whitehouse.gov
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korrents.com
The inflation of the early 2020s was caused by government overspending and rising energy prices.Their words
The inflation crisis was caused by massive overspending and escalating energy prices, and that is why today I will also declare a national energy emergency.
-
korrents.com
Federal efforts to restrict free expression in recent years were illegal and unconstitutional.Their words
After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I also will sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.
-
Their words
America will be a manufacturing nation once again, and we have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have — the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on earth — and we are going to use it.
19 January 2025
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inflationimmigrationgovernment
Their words
And so my argument is, that has now opened the door to the presidency of Donald Trump, which is potentially a deeply transformative moment that will change the size and shape of government, that may change our foreign policy profoundly, that may change our immigration policy, that may change the demographics of our country, all of that, and my thesis is that that's all been made possible by inflation.
13 January 2025
From one piece PM speech on AI Opportunities Action Plan, 13 January 2025 2 beliefs · gov.uk
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korrents.com
On AI the state's job does not stop at safety; leaving everything else to the market is a mistake.Their words
We shouldn’t just focus on safety and leave the rest to the market… Government has a responsibility to make it work for working people…
-
Their words
This is the global race of our lives. Now, some countries are going to make AI breakthroughs and export them… Others will end up buying those breakthroughs and importing them. The question is – which of those will Britain be? AI maker or AI taker?
8 January 2025
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korrents.com
The United States is not at risk of a financial crisis caused by the size of its government debt.Their words
Stabilizing factors such as the global demand for U.S. dollars and debt denominated in its own currency suggest an era of fiscal dominance in the U.S. that's less dramatic than alarmists predict but more persistent and intractable than optimists hope.
31 December 2024
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korrents.com
Reading fiction is necessary to an engineer's creative capacity; reading only technical books drains itTheir words
Yet, I also need to read fiction because if I only read tech books, they take away my creative energy rather than grant it, as fiction does.
-
Their words
There’s still plenty to worry about with respect to the environmental impact of the great AI datacenter buildout, but a lot of the concerns over the energy cost of individual prompts are no longer credible.
22 December 2024
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Their words
There's the first law of thermodynamics, which is just about the different forms of energy. Then there's the second law, which is about when you use that energy, Kardashev wasn't thinking about the second law. If you get all that energy and you use it, there is waste heat. You don't get to use it all.
17 December 2024
-
Lovedrcmnd.app
The New MapTheir words
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Yergin explores the changing landscape of energy, geopolitics, & climate change.
1 November 2024
-
korrents.com
Government payments and benefits aimed at raising birth rates do not reverse the decline.Their words
Across the OECD, governments are upping their spending. But a wealth of research suggests these fail to mitigate the downward trend.
16 October 2024
-
Their words
We cannot say that we are free if we allow our government to dictate to us what experiences we may or may not have in our inner consciousness, while doing no harm to others.
27 September 2024
-
Their words
Each shift takes its toll, and everyone has a limit of how much energy they’re willing to expend on a new platform that will eventually, like its predecessors, join the graveyard of defunct websites.
10 August 2024
13 June 2024
-
Their words
I think for me, the frontier in modern physics, where the new physics lies is not in high energy particle physics, it’s not in quantum gravity, it’s not in any of these sort of traditionally sold, “This is going to be the newest deepest insight we have into the nature of reality.” It is going to be in studying the problems of life and intelligence and the things that are sort of also our current existential crises as a civilization or a culture that’s going through an existential trauma of inventing technologies that we don’t understand right now.
10 June 2024
From one piece How to Build an AI Data Center 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
-
Their words
But many of these gains have already been achieved: the best data centers already use just 10% of their electricity for cooling and other non-IT equipment.
-
korrents.com
Available power, not land or capital, is what now limits how many data centres get built.Their words
In particular, operating a data center requires large amounts of electricity, and available power is fast becoming the binding constraint on data center construction.
-
Their words
But there's also reason to believe that data center power consumption will nevertheless rise substantially.
+ 1 more
-
Their words
Utility companies see major electrical infrastructure as a long-term investment to be built in response to sustained demand growth.
2 June 2024
29 May 2024
3 May 2024
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korrents.com
Fabs take roughly a third longer to build in the United States than in Asia, largely because of environmental review.Their words
Fab construction time in the US has increased from just over 650 days on average in the 1990s to over 900 days on average in the 2010s, compared to around 600-700 days in Asian countries, in part because of increasingly stringent environmental review processes.
How to Build a $20 Billion Semiconductor Fabconstruction-physics.com
25 April 2024
From one piece Speech on Europe, Sorbonne, 25 April 2024 (Elysee English transcript) 2 beliefs · elysee.fr
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Their words
And so yes, the era when Europe bought its energy and fertilizers from Russia, had its goods manufactured in China, and delegated its security to the United States of America, is over.
-
Their words
We cannot sustain the most stringent environmental and social norms, invest less than our competitors, have a more naive trade policy than them and think that we will continue to generate jobs. This no longer holds together.
22 April 2024
From one piece Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #428 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I tear my hair out when people who are not physicists accuse physicists, like you say, of losing the plot because they need dark matter and dark energy. I don’t want dark matter and dark energy; I want something much cooler than that. I’ve tried. But you got to listen to the equations and to the data.
-
Their words
I think this is one of the biggest things that physics can help with, and it’s an obvious kind of low-hanging fruit situation where the heat generation, the inefficiency, the waste of existing high-level computers is nowhere near the efficiency of our brains. It’s hilariously worse, and we haven’t tried to optimize that hard on that frontier.
18 April 2024
From one piece How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordable 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
The optimal scenario is typically when the generators supply 1% of yearly electricity (shown below).
How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordableaustinvernon.site
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Their words
The cooling systems in most data centers are energy hogs and contribute no direct value.
How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordableaustinvernon.site
15 April 2024
29 March 2024
1 December 2023
27 November 2023
25 October 2023
14 July 2023
29 May 2023
28 November 2022
27 September 2022
31 August 2022
3 January 2022
14 May 2020
2 April 2019
19 September 2018
10 September 2018
5 January 2018
1 August 2016
1 May 1977
1 October 1975
Nothing matches.
What is a korrent?
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