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Ursula von der Leyen x.com
Back in New York for the @UN General Assembly. New geopolitical realities. New troubled waters. But the same urgent priorities for Europe and our partners. Peace for Ukraine. Stability in the Middle East. Climate action and a clean energy transition that powers our industries. The world is changing fast. But cooperation and multilateralism remain our best answer. Proven time and again, especially in difficult times. A busy week of hard work ahead. And I’m looking forward to it.
The subjects this post names, from the same vocabulary the directory files beliefs under, and the word it uses that this site has seen least often elsewhere. Posts are matched on those words alone — nothing here is a summary of this one.
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20 September
19 September
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Their words
actually, there are three economic superpowers in the world by this measure. There’s the United States, there’s China, which is clearly number one, and then there’s the EU, which are roughly co-equal.
18 September
17 September
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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
From one piece @levelsio on X 2 beliefs · x.com
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Their words
I think we should use this kinds of data to completely turn around Europe's immigration policy: - We should have super easy inflow for immigrants from countries whose previous immigrants have shown low crime rates You're from Japan? Just fly here and you can stay forever - We should then almost completely ban any inflow from countries whose previous immigrants have shown high crime rates with instant deportations
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Their words
I think this is the most common sense policy and it'll make Europe much safer
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Their words
The European Union is big - the third largest economy in the world, but it has great difficulty in transforming economic strength into geopolitical clout.
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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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Their words
AI data centers resulting in lower electricity prices for consumers
13 September
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Their words
Making trade deals with EU is good for Canada. Anything beyond that is just anchoring ourselves to a block who’s economic ambitions aren’t much higher than being an “open air museum”.
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Their words
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.
12 September
11 September
10 September
9 September
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korrents.com
Most commercially produced black pudding today is made with dried blood imported from Europe rather than fresh blood.Their words
Fruit Pig are one of the few black pudding producers at scale who use fresh blood - most black pudding these days is made with dried blood imported from Europe.
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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.
8 September
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
To my mind, if progressive policy hopes to engage with such voters at all - and it is open question whether it should - it must address not just the material realities of relative economic disadvantage, but above all the "outsider" credentials of the AfD.
4 September
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Their words
Worse, U.S. officials now openly support and encourage politicians from far-right anti-European political parties, partly because they are ideologically aligned, but partly because Americans now want to weaken the European Union so that U.S. tech companies can evade any regulation, or even taxation.
The Myth of the “Censorship Industrial Complex”anneapplebaum.substack.com
3 September
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korrents.com
Europe's dominant cultural spirit is anti-tech, anti-AI, anti-entrepreneurship, anti-business and anti-progress.Their words
Portugal's choice is cultural though and completely fits the general spirit in Europe which is fully anti-tech, anti-AI, anti-entrepreneurship, anti-business and anti-progress
From one piece Why you won’t get a flying car 2 beliefs · noahpinion.blog
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Their words
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.
2 September
1 September
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Their words
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.
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Their words
And yet, life expectancy about two years more than the national average is rather common in rich regions with selective migration, even in European countries with even access to health care, like France and Spain.
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.
30 August
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Their words
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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Their words
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
26 August
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korrents.com
Small European states can demand a war with Russia only because they assume somebody else will fight it.Their words
It is also hypocritical because it is based on the assumption that somebody else (in this case, the United States) will fight for them.
On European hypocrisy and warmongeringbranko2f7.substack.com
25 August
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Their words
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.
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korrents.com
The Trump administration's approach to Greenland is widely perceived as threatening across Europe.Their words
The Trump administration's ongoing obsession with Greenland feels menacing to everyone in Scandinavia, indeed everyone in Europe.
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
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korrents.com
After a European exit tax, the EU will try to tax its citizens' worldwide income wherever in the world they live.Their words
European governments and thus the EU too is losing lots of tax income from Europeans fleeing Next on the agenda is the European Exit Tax and after that I think they will try to add Worldwide Income Tax (like the US already has) meaning it doesn't matter where you live in the world as a European citizen, the EU will tax you for your entire income!
21 August
18 August
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Their words
have to abide by this rule that was written before LLMs were even a thing. And that shows how challenging sort of the the the situation is if you try to set the line too firm to begin with.
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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
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Their words
The USA has kept dribbling small amounts of military support for Ukraine because it gives the USA a great deal of leverage, the ability to both shape how Ukraine fights its war and even how European states prepare.
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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Their words
Nuclear energy is the safest form of energy empirically. If you look at the amount of power generated versus the amount amount of deaths, um it's even safer than solar, which is very strange because how does someone die from solar? that actually most solar is installed on roofs and people sometimes die falling off of a roof installing solar and if you add those deaths up it is actually a higher death per energy than the totality of nuclear energy in the world.
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Their words
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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Their words
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?
+ 2 more
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Their words
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.
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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Their words
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
13 August
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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Their words
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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Their words
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.
8 August
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Their words
All of these grand visions hide truths that are messier, more sordid and more contingent.
7 August
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Their words
I think one of the things that makes science the company very special is that it has both of those cultures and is able to integrate them and we're able to simultaneously do some really cool research that I think is really at the edge of the Overton window while simultaneously running clinical trials in six countries now with an approved medical device in Europe and clinical trial results in the New England Journal of Medicine.
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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Their words
Which is why the lever that actually matters most is the carbon intensity of the electricity.
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Their words
Unlike aviation, this is an end-use we already know how to decarbonize.
2 August
1 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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Their words
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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Their words
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.
From one piece Chartbook 462: China shocked - beyond 1.0 and 2.0 to the "Big One". 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
China shock 2.0 threatens high status manufactured goods: European cars and engineering.
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korrents.com
The second China shock is landing on Europe, where the first one landed on the United States.Their words
In China shock 1.0 the key target was the US. In China shock 2.0 it is Europe.
28 July
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Their words
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.
27 July
26 July
22 July
From one piece Chartbook 460 Greedflation meets China shock: Can Europe's car industry be saved without making the cost of living crisis worse? 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
To put this same story another way, the European car industry in the early 2020s was a prime example of greedflation i.e. companies taking advantage of the COVID shock and other disruptions and to hike profits at the expense of consumers.
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Their words
The two seemingly contradictory trends connect, because the relatively low rate of productive investment leaves European industry vulnerable to its most vigorous competitors whose firms are contending with an even more deflationary macroeconomic situation at home in China.
20 July
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Their words
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.
16 July
15 July
14 July
13 July
11 July
9 July
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Their words
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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Their words
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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Their words
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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Their words
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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Their words
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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Their words
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.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Everybody's PerfectTheir words
And now it's Everybody's Perfect, a book that pretty much defines what it means for one text to be "in dialog" with another text. In this case, it's Ada Palmer's Inventing the Renaissance, a stunning magnum opus that tells not just the story of the Renaissance, but the story of the story, all the different ways the Renaissance has been used, abused, revised and recovered, starting with the Renaissance itself. It's a book that will make you rethink everything you know about European history, about the world today, and about the very idea of history itself
29 June
28 June
From one piece Europe Needs Air Conditioning 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
American overregulation and labor-market rigidity make elevators far more common in Europe than in the US.Their words
elevators are the rare part of the economy where Europeans have embraced market dynamism while Americans choose overregulation and labor market rigidity.
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Their words
European leftists explicitly advocate that people should be kept poor, uncomfortable, and literally sweating.
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korrents.com
European countries are wealthy enough to afford widespread air conditioning, comparable to Japan.Their words
Europe is not actually poor. Japan is about as wealthy as Europe, and almost all Japanese homes are air-conditioned. Europeans could afford to air-condition their homes (and their hospitals!) just like the Japanese do.
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
18 June
16 June
From one piece Europe's housing shortages are even worse than America's 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
In fact, zoning was invented in Europe, in Germany and Austria-Hungary, in the late nineteenth century.
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korrents.com
Europe's housing shortages are worse than America's, and Europeans do not discuss zoning as their cause at all.Their words
In fact, European housing shortages are generally worse than America’s.
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Their words
I suspect the same is often true in the rest of Europe: NIMBYism is the ultimate reason why the French and German states don’t solve their housing shortages through unbanning densification, but since the claims of the NIMBYs have been preemptively conceded by everyone, NIMBYism has basically remained latent.
+ 1 more
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Their words
But this effect is far too small to explain the increase in house prices in Europe since 1914, when, after all, most urban continental Europeans lived in flats.
From one piece Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time – Ada Palmer 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
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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Their words
Machiavelli is the first person that we have ever in the European tradition to suggest that it could be viable for there to be more than one political party in a state at the same time.
13 June
10 June
9 June
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Their words
They're the only uh power in Europe that doesn't need to maintain a large standing army because if Britain could maintain a competent navy, no army's going to reach British shores cuz they're going to be drowned at sea.
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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Their words
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
28 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
10 May
From one piece Is Europe in Economic Decline? 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Europe, along with China and the United States, is an economic superpower. And, at this point in time, it is arguably the world’s only democratic superpower.
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korrents.com
Europe is not in economic decline; by the measures that matter most it is keeping up with the United States.Their words
Moreover, by many measures — arguably the most important measures — Europe is, in fact, keeping up with the United States.
8 May
From one piece David Reich – Bronze Age shock, the Neanderthal puzzle, & the sudden spread of farming 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
And so, maybe what you're seeing is that this group of people in Europe and the Middle East over the last 10,000 years has moved into a a period of relatively more stable food, where building up stores of fat are not as advantageous, and there's been selection against this combination of traits.
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Their words
So we just could not see a way this could happen by chance and once we saw that we really felt quite convinced that this was a real signal and that really somehow there has been natural selection to increase the genetic changes that today manifest themselves as more years of school at predicting more years of schooling.
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Their words
but it is the tracer dye, right? Like it tracks into European languages and important aspects of Indo-European culture are coming through Yamnaya.
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.
24 April
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Their words
Canada and much of Europe have adopted different interrogation techniques — such as the PEACE method — which emphasize collecting reliable information over coercion. These approaches still garner confessions; they’re just more reliable.
22 April
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Their words
So, what if geopolitics was to go horribly wrong and tensions escalate and Europe find itself suddenly locked out of US cloud services? I hope that doesn't happen. I still think it's fairly unlikely, but it's no longer unthinkable.
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
9 April
7 April
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Their words
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.
2 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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Their words
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
20 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.
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
18 January
1 January
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Likedrcmnd.app
1913: The Year Before the StormTheir words
1913: The Year Before the Storm presents a whimsical slice of Central Europe. Art historian Florian Illies collates fragments of leading figures month by month, diary-entry style.
23 December 2025
12 December 2025
9 December 2025
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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
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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.
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Their words
Storing electricity for months is economically difficult, but storing heat is easy.
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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
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Their words
Do we need to drastically expand the grid in order to metabolize renewables? No.
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Their words
By 2045, natural gas will be used as LNG primarily for high performance supersonic aviation, shipping, and industrial heat.
1 December 2025
27 November 2025
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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.
20 November 2025
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Their words
Learning loss is a global phenomenon, exacerbated by a catastrophic event, not a structural flaw unique to the American education system.
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
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.
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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
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
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Their words
When the Ukrainians say that they are defending Europe’s borders they are correct.
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.
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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.
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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.
8 October 2025
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.
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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
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Their words
Because today, if you take France for example which is a beautiful country with a lot of talented people, but public expenses are 58% of the country's GDP, it's maybe as much more than in the latest stage of the Soviet Union.
27 September 2025
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.
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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
From one piece 2025 State of the Union Address by President von der Leyen, 10 September 2025 2 beliefs · enlargement.ec.europa.eu
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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.
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korrents.com
A new world order based on raw power is being drawn right now, and Europe has to fight for its place in it.Their words
Battlelines for a new world order based on power are being drawn right now. So, yes, Europe must fight. For its place in a world in which many major powers are either ambivalent or openly hostile to Europe.
6 September 2025
18 August 2025
13 August 2025
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Their words
One interesting point is that, in China, you ask the companies to innovate first, and then you regulate after, right? So, that has led to things like P2P platforms. It’s led to lots of kind of financial innovations, some of which has actually been very helpful and good, some of which had been disastrous, but the intention to regulate after the fact is to really not slow down or hinder the innovation. This is a very different approach from Europe. You regulate first, and then companies have to work around that.
7 August 2025
31 July 2025
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Their words
We really don't have any well-documented case of anybody, say, from China visiting Europe or Europe visiting China before the Mongols. But since Chinggis Khan, there's never been a year without contact between east and west. It was permanent. Once he created it, it was permanent.
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.
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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 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.
1 June 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.
14 May 2025
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korrents.com
Germany will provide whatever money the Bundeswehr needs to become the strongest conventional army in Europe.Their words
Die Bundesregierung wird zukünftig alle finanziellen Mittel zur Verfügung stellen, die die Bundeswehr braucht, um zur konventionell stärksten Armee Europas zu werden.
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.
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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.
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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.
30 April 2025
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Their words
I am not here to tell you that the medieval period is a specifically peaceful time, but it pales in comparison to what goes down in the early modern period, in which both the apparently beloved Renaissance and Enlightenment periods lie.
On what Americans know about medieval historygoing-medieval.com
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.
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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.
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.
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Their words
Since the year 2000, US electricity generation per person has been flat.
31 March 2025
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Their words
But, tariffs are unavoidable, even within the ringfence that is US energy trade, and even within electricity trade more specifically.
3 February 2025
From one piece DeepSeek, China, OpenAI, NVIDIA, xAI, TSMC, Stargate, and AI Megaclusters | Lex Fridman Podcast #459 2 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.
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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.
2 February 2025
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Who We Are and How We Got HereTheir 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
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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
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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
+ 2 more
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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
-
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
21 January 2025
From one piece No, South Korea Was Not Poorer Than Kenya in 1960 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
The relative absence of pre-colonial states meant that the newly independent African states were largely European inventions; modern Kenya, for instance, inherits the boundaries of British East Africa, which was created by pulling together the Kikuyu, Luo, Luhya, Kalenjin, and Kamba ethnic groups.
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korrents.com
Japanese colonial rule built a far deeper state in Korea than European rule ever built in sub-Saharan Africa.Their words
The Japanese empire reached far deeper into its colonies than any European empire ever did in Sub-Saharan Africa.
20 January 2025
From one piece The Inaugural Address 2 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.
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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.
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.
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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.
20 December 2024
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korrents.com
China now starts about a quarter of the world's new clinical trials, more than Europe does.Their words
Chinese companies are now responsible for about a quarter of new trial starts — more than Europe.
17 December 2024
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The New MapTheir words
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Yergin explores the changing landscape of energy, geopolitics, & climate change.
16 December 2024
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Usesrcmnd.app
Tech Lead JournalTheir words
discussions from software engineering leaders, with a focus on Asia and Europe.
7 December 2024
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Their words
In truth, the UK shares high costs with more decentralized countries, and Spain shares low ones with more centralized ones.
Low Spanish Costs are not About Decentralizationpedestrianobservations.com
1 November 2024
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korrents.com
Europe is losing the competition for talented migrants because it is not an attractive enough destination.Their words
Europe’s real problem is that we are not a competitive destination.
30 September 2024
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korrents.com
Maya hieroglyphs must have been readable across several spoken languages, the way Chinese characters or Latin were.Their words
There must have been a way that multiple languages understood the same writing system. Or maybe there was something like Latin. You know how there was a period in Europe where most people were illiterate and there was this priesthood who all understood Latin and they wrote in Latin? Maybe the hieroglyphs represent a kind of Latin in the ancient Maya world.
27 September 2024
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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.
13 June 2024
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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
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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.
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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.
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Their words
But there's also reason to believe that data center power consumption will nevertheless rise substantially.
+ 1 more
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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
25 April 2024
From one piece Speech on Europe, Sorbonne, 25 April 2024 (Elysee English transcript) 3 beliefs · elysee.fr
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korrents.com
Europe is mortal — it can die, and whether it does depends entirely on choices Europeans make now.Their words
My message today is simple. Paul Valéry said, at the end of the First World War, that we now know that our civilizations are mortal. We must be clear on the fact that our Europe, today, is mortal. It can die. It can die, and that depends entirely on our choices. But these choices must be made now.
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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.
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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.
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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
2 April 2024
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Likedrcmnd.app
The Little House on the PrairieTheir words
There are children's books that have summoned this energy for us—Torbjørn Egner, The Little House on the Prairie, Harry Potter—but generally speaking, children's books are a drag.
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Likedrcmnd.app
Harry PotterTheir words
There are children's books that have summoned this energy for us—Torbjørn Egner, The Little House on the Prairie, Harry Potter—but generally speaking, children's books are a drag.
18 March 2024
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Their words
But compute is different. Intelligence is going to be more like energy or something like that, where the only thing that I think makes sense to talk about is, at price X, the world will use this much compute, and at price Y, the world will use this much compute.
4 March 2024
From one piece Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War | Lex Fridman Podcast #415 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
And each major accident, that means global freeze on the nuclear reactor production for at least another 10 years. So that’s what I mean that nuclear industry is politic, not just in terms of technology and not just in terms of radiation, impact on health, but also politically a very, very unreliable option.
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Their words
And then guess what? A few years later, the Soviet Union collapses very much also thanks to the mobilization of people over the issue of Chernobyl and nuclear energy.
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Their words
My understanding is there are Nazis in Ukraine and there are supporters of white supremacy theories, but also my understanding is that they are extremely marginal and they are more marginal than the same sort of groups are in Central Europe, maybe in the U.S. as well.
22 February 2024
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Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
JamesTheir words
Briefly, James is Huckleberry Finn retold from the perspective of Jim. It has all the energy and humor of Twain's work—in Everett's own unique voice of course—and adds a whole new level of depth to the story.
6 February 2024
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korrents.com
Most projects fail before they even begin because the activation energy required to start is too high.Their words
Most projects fail before they start. They fail because the activation energy is too high.
14 December 2023
From one piece Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin | Lex Fridman Podcast #405 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Compromise, the advantage of compromise as a resolution mechanism is that it's low energy, but it doesn't lead to truth. And so in things like the height of the ceiling where truth is a noble thing, you shouldn't allow compromise to be used when you can know the truth.
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Their words
So if I generalize what you're asking, you are talking in general about truth-telling and we humans are not really truth-seeking animals. We are social animals.
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Their words
I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system. If we had a trillion humans, we would have, at any given time, 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins. That our solar system would be full of life and intelligence and energy.
3 December 2023
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korrents.com
Physicists actively want the standard model to break down, because only the deviations can tell us what underlies it.Their words
One of the things we do as physicists is we actually want it to break down at some level, we’re looking for the precision measurement or the energy or whatever it will take where the standard model is no longer working. Not that it’s not working approximately, but we’re looking for the deviations.
27 November 2023
25 October 2023
3 August 2023
28 November 2022
27 September 2022
6 June 2022
1 March 2022
3 January 2022
14 May 2020
2 April 2019
19 September 2018
10 September 2018
5 January 2018
1 May 1977
1 October 1975
Nothing matches.
What is a korrent?
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