abeppu

Thanks for pointing that out; I was not aware of it.

At the same time, when I helped with research in a cognitive psychology lab in school (much closer to the present than to that law), our PI said our funding came partly from a grant from the US Navy. We worked on Bayesian models of human learning and reasoning -- so "direct or apparent relationship to specific military function" has perhaps at times been interpreted somewhat loosely?

Ok you say rockets and space were "worthwhile" and missiles are "a different question".

But of course the space race proceeded from work on missiles. ICMBs are rockets that go high and fast and then happen to complete less than one full orbit.

And my understanding is that early ICs were for missiles because it was acceptable for the ICs to be very expensive in exchange for them being very light and small. Only a context that was optimizing for a tiny package (b/c extra weight also required more fuel) and was relatively cost insensitive would justify them at first. The point is building weapons sometimes _does_ turn into tech that can be used more generally. Does that justify the risk?

I do think that for those of us who got into tech in the last couple of decades, the history can be rather obscured, but from the Fairchild semiconductor days, the military was a main customer, right?

I think there's a real question: would the world be a better place had Fairchild and peers e.g. refused to build ICs for missile systems (including the minuteman), for example? Would the same tech have been developed with purely civilian funding? Would missiles built with other tech have caused some awful disaster?

To the extent that the internet descended from ARPANET, and the internet is now both how we access a range of information and also hospitals get shut down by remote attackers, would the world have been better if researchers refused to build it b/c it was from military funding and motivations?

In retrospect it does seem like in the 1950s-70s the military was willing to fund some stuff that was actually not especially close to applications of killing people. I don't know that the kinds of things listed in this research are likely to lead to broad other applications in the future like microchips and networks did. But neither do I think it's straight forward to just condemn this stuff as purely evil and say we shouldn't do it.

> Self-driving cars will never be safer than human drivers.

You're responding to something that actually brought data to the table to answer the question, though one can quibble with details.

Yet you're saying that self-driving cars will _never_ be safer, which is a much stronger claim, and you don't bring any evidence to back up the assertion.

I do think that currently we're at the stage where Waymo is trying to convince most of the world of the _quality_ of its offering, so for the moment, things are well aligned.

But in 5 years if there are multiple self-driving offerings competing on things like price, door-to-door time, OPEX (e.g. does a camera-only system with no moving parts need less skilled maintenance?), then someone may try to be the cheap but good enough self-driving service that cuts corners -- and we should want some execs to actually go to prison rather than just some cost-of-doing-business fines.

In my neighborhood there is an optometry place with a dark blue lighted sign. At night, it looks fuzzy, and I have to assume they knew this would be the case. People walking by squint at it and inevitably think "maybe I _should_ get my eyes checked!"

I think we gotta get people to see past the false dichotomy: part of their increased cost of living is due to climate change:

- your home insurance is more expensive b/c fire/hurricane/etc risk is worse in your state

  - and you probably don't have flood insurance but the risks there are worse too

- your electricity bill is worse b/c you're using AC more b/c it's hotter

- climate change does have healthcare impacts, including expanded geographic range of a bunch of vector-borne illnesses, as well as acute issues during heat events. Even if you're not directly one of these patients, your health insurance costs will increase in part due to these risks.

- replacing key infrastructure which is damaged by extreme weather is expensive

- during extreme weather events, your ability to earn may be disrupted

- and every business you spend at also has increased costs due to the same factors, which they pass on to you

It turns out that multiple generations of emitting without paying attention to the externalities has created literal costs that we _all_ now bear, and these costs will continue to increase.

> I strongly believe that video games have a higher ceiling for storytelling quality. There are several reasons underlying my newfound evangelism: a larger built-in audience, a more robust market with hundreds of games appealing to many different types of fans, and, most importantly, demographic variability.

So none of the things listed here are clearly related to "storytelling quality" -- those are marketing advantages.

I think the real questions for _quality_ for comics vs games are things like:

- do games, which force players to explore and interact, forcing better world-building by front-loading some consideration of internal logic and mechanics?

- do games, which put players more directly in the perspective of characters, at the level of having to choose actions, force writers to create more compelling dilemmas?

- do comics, which have to give consideration to static visual images, make for better posters than films?

- do comics, which world-build over long sequences, make for stories that feel too compressed in films?

I think also it's extremely hard to fairly judge high level decisions whose outcomes may not materialize for a very long time. This makes it genuinely hard for humans to get better (and one gets the impression that most of them don't) with more experience at the helm of a large and complex org. But it also means that it's hard to evaluate or train a machine on the task. You can maybe automate getting something plausible out, but how would you know if it was _good_ in a timely way? So how do you review a configuration or prompt change in this repo?

Wait, wait, gerrymandering messes with the House, but how does gerrymandering impact control of the Senate? Don't senators need to be elected by their whole state?

> If all this sounds like wishful thinking, consider the polar case where housing deregulation drives the price of housing to zero. Yes, this wipes out the value of whatever housing you already own. But it also means that you can move to a palace anywhere on Earth for free. Indeed, it means that you could own a palace in every location you desire for free. Lose the value of your home, gain access to every home of your dreams. It’s not just a fair trade. It’s the deal of a lifetime.

Umm, what? If you start with "If this all sounds like wishful thinking", maybe departing into even more unhinged fantasy isn't the next step that helps you? The supposition that _deregulation_ could cause the price to go to zero is crazy; houses are built with labor using materials, on land. In the absence of regulation they shouldn't cost significantly _more_ than their labor+materials+land value, but they shouldn't cost _zero_. If you wanted the world where you don't pay for housing, I think you need a _lot_ of regulation -- after all building millions of Stalin blocks took a lot of intervention.

Throughout the piece, Caplan seems to assume that the only impact of regulation worth discussing is on prices, which seems suspect. But assuming that the only source of prices is regulation is worse.

If you think that NIMBY policies are ultimately harmful, maybe the only thing rougher than talking to NIMBYs is seeing a supposed expert try to argue against them but do it really really badly.

> Worse, it, to my ear, very clearly is written in a style that's extremely reminiscent of LLMs. In that way, it directly invokes that feeling of inauthenticity when he claims authorship.

I get that and also find the style annoying. But, e.g. when I wear a garment that was clearly machine sewn, sit on furniture made with powertools, look at a photo (where a mechanical process determined what pigments appear where, with what intensity), if I eat a taco whose tortilla was industrially rolled ... none of those things seems like a reason to challenge someone taking credit and responsibility for creating a thing, even if 250 years ago they would have had to engage in a much more onerous manual process to create something similar.

So what is it about writing that feels so inauthentic when the human delegates the word choice and sentence structure to a machine? Is it just cultural expectations, and we'll get used to it as LLMs exist longer?

I wonder if partly there's a feeling of disrespect on the part of the reader -- if the author couldn't be bothered to write every word, it's presumptuous to think that other people's time is less valuable and they should read word by word.

Cummins doesn't expect anyone to examine the details of every poppy; we look at the overall effect and maybe admire the detail on one or two flowers. Koons doesn't leave enough evidence of the individual welds for audiences to inspect them; that would destroy the effect. But the default way to consume a language based work is at the word level, and you can't just take in the gestalt in a moment, so the implied demands on attention are greater?

So, maybe this is not quite a fair analogy but a lot of famous modern artists don't do a lot of the actual execution of their work. If Jeff Koons relies on a team of artisans and technicians to make a balloon dog, and if Dale Chihuly depends on a workshop of glass blowers to make a chandelier, and if Paul Cummins used a team of ceramicists to make poppies, what did the headlining artist contribute? Not everything, certainly, but also not nothing. Ideas, vision, feedback, guidance?

I think we're used to the idea in math of generally every idea coming from a specific contributing human. In code, maybe less so, but still we generally we find it useful to attribute at least _lines_ to who touched them last. But maybe, if Claude were just less annoying in the prose it made, and could better imitate an actual human, we'd be able to get used to the idea of humans claiming credit for something that the human guided the software to create?

Why should intelligence _other_ than motor-planning be tied to the degrees of freedom of their movement?

- snakes have a high number of degrees of freedom but aren't especially bright

- squid have 2 more limbs than octopuses and aren't as smart

I think the shallow-water vs deep-water thing mentioned in the article is important; reef and similar environments give a lot more opportunities for smart camouflage, complex navigation, tool-use opportunities etc than the open ocean.

So their photoscan bodyfat % has a lower RMSE in predicting (DXA) body fat than their BIA bodyfat % ... but what BIA estimation did they use? I've been told that not all BIA is equal. They tell us:

> Fitbit Sense 2 was used to measure BIA on the wrist. It implements a 4-wire sensing mechanism using a 50kHz excitation frequency and utilizes two bottom electrodes, two top electrodes, and TI’s AFE4500 chip.

... huh I wasn't aware that fitbit offered wrist-based BIA? And I've heard that systems that have sensors across a long path in your body are better (e.g. foot and hand contacts)? But most confusing, the specs for Fitbit Sense 2 [1] don't say anything about BIA, just cEDA. I'm not an expert by any means, but google's own AI tells me that EDA sensors cannot be used for BIA. So did they basically use an especially low quality BIA measurement?

[1] https://store.google.com/us/product/fitbit_sense_2_specs?hl=...

> It has been exceptionally well preserved because it was reused as a Roman-era paving stone on a colonnaded street

The sculpture is very 3-dimensional. I don't get how it made a good paving stone, or how being used as a paving stone didn't end up conflicting with the "well preserved" part more.

So the 1970s oil crisis caused a shift that included fuel efficiency rules. For like, the whole time I've been a software engineer, memory footprints of a lot of software have crept up, even when they aren't really doing more.

The memory situation currently is a mess. But ... is it bad enough to get us to _change_ how we build?

You can quibble with the specific projected savings, or the projected lives saved. But it kinda doesn't matter? If we can have net savings of half what this paper said, or a quarter, and still have more lives saved, that would still be a strong argument to do it.

Somewhere there's a pareto-optimal frontier where one can't possibly save more lives without spending more, or spend less without more people having negative health outcomes ... and the question is whether universal health coverage would be a step towards that frontier (b/c we're all pretty sure we're far from the frontier today). And the fact that plenty of countries have both lower costs and better outcomes through such a system is highly suggestive that it is a more efficient policy regime.

Maybe the big quibble is whether the American penchant for creating corporate givewaways to powerful organizations that lobby politicians would create an especially toxic public-private-partnership monopoly in which the biggest existing private healthcare networks are granted regional monopolies and set crazy prices (or some other dystopian warping of an initially reasonable idea) so costs actually balloon. I do think that would be a risk and so we need to be careful about the specifics of how we implement this.

Why do you expect an AI developed in the same economic system would optimize for your preferences rather than their revenue? I think this only works if people can run, fine-tune and update their own models -- otherwise the giant AI vendors have every incentive to nudge you towards whichever retailer is bidding most on your Sponsored Responses, right? I think the only difference will be that instead of advertising to target a query, they'll eventually need to target a vector and its neighborhood, and there will be some greater opacity facing advertisers trying to match "middle-income US users shopping for airfryers who have product height limits posed by kitchen upper cabinets" or something.

> US copyright law (currently, sorta, kinda) requires that only one copy of the book you purchased exist. If you scan it, you must destroy the other copy.

What's the "sorta, kinda" as you understand it? Has any judge, or law, created a requirement to destroy copies?

From what I understand, depending on the purpose, making digital copies may be fair use if it's "transformative". In a decision involving Google's book search feature, the court's decision highlighted that the amount of text displayed in the product was limited and not a "significant market substitute" [2]. The AI firms aren't trying to show you a digital copy of the books, and in a bunch of contexts already, if their product regurgitates too much verbatim text, that's going to be a liability (e.g. educational uses and plagiarism). I've also tried prompting LLMs to finish a paragraph from inside a novel from a well-known author, and they have not been able to get the next sentence typically. You can't easily and with confidence just extract back a book. I have not tried the experiment of seeing how many tokens you need to spend before a books is reproduced and what the cost is relative to the original work -- and you would already need the digital text to recognize when you had succeeded.

What's transformative? Previously the courts have said that scanning to offer a search product was transformative, given some limitations on how much of the matching book is shown to the user. I think there's a decent argument that training an AI model is at least as transformative as search indexing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._HathiTr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,...

All the offense is that books are being destroyed. They're being destroyed b/c that's slicing off the binding to get flat pages is most convenient way to scan them. But ... could AI firms sidestep all the vitriol by paying to rebind the guillotined pages? I have no experience with such things, but if they were willing get the machines to do paperback thermal bindings (even if they sliced open a hardcover) and then donate or resell the books back into the marketplace, a lot of the "destroying rare books" emotions could be avoided.

But did the judge make the decision? I think there's a real question of whether this is a failure of due process rights. But I also think supreme Court Justices need to be awake for the court to actually hear arguments, so what do I know.

How about large scale fossil fuel emitters (including power production) who have lobbied against their own clean replacements (e.g. solar, wind, weakening net metering)?

I do think that ICE car drivers who have ever, e.g. voted against public transit are guilty of _something_ but I don't think it's manslaughter.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/05/opinion/utility-bills-cle...

I think we should start charging the worst emitters with manslaughter now. We shouldn't wait for the crisis to be halted; the law should be part of how we force firms to recognize part of the harm.

I think it's surprising that the article predicts the impacts of gene editing to be relatively small.

> Even so, the prospects for exceeding current records through gene editing are slim. Today’s racehorses are already tightly optimized for speed, balancing strength against the cost of carrying additional muscle mass. Adding more muscle is relatively low-hanging fruit, and if this were the key to unlocking greater speed, selective breeding would likely already have brought it about.

It's a whole new tool in the toolbox, and can introduce mutations that didn't first arise by chance in order to be then spread with selective breeding.

In the US market, where union participation is also very low, it's weird to me that this is an important reason people stay in their jobs, may influence what kind of jobs you take (full time vs contracting?), but:

- job offers generally do not want to get into details on the health insurance offering. it's not a main "competition" point

- except when subject to some kind of union negotiated contract, the employer can change their insurance options from year to year as they try to save costs, but it's not regarded as a mass pay cut when they do

- there's no standard metric on "how much do our employees pay on healthcare" (i.e. employee premium contributions, deductibles, copays), "how much time do employees spend on the phone with the insurance company", and certainly no way to feed in your last year's records of health-care to see "on plan Y you would have paid C"

Though I think the private health insurance system is a dumb waste of overhead and paperwork and misaligned incentives, I do think that people would be more willing to switch jobs if they could know their plan was at least as good as the one they were leaving, both in money spent and in employee satisfaction. Opacity, in part owing to lack of commitment from employers, makes this harder.

In the early 2000s I saw a gubernatorial candidate talking to an audience of over achieving high school students and when asked about what he would do to make college more affordable. He told a story about how he waited tables to pay for college.

Totally not on his radar: changes in tuition over time, portion of budgets of public colleges that were coming from state funds (his tuition wasn't free but was close), vs changes in median hourly wages over the same period.

Very clearly on his radar: those students were not gonna donate to anyone's campaign regardless of what he said.

Before the IPO there was much concern that the changes in rules to allow fast inclusion in indices like Nasdaq-100 and Russell 1000 would mean that there would be an artificially elevated price. Was that effect just over-estimated? Or should SPCX have dropped even further without that support?

Or if it had any kind of measurement across a range of tasks

I think this is silly. This is a product designed to deliver nicotine, and that's going to continue to be the important part for health considerations. Had the FDA become concerned about the pouch material, and a different pouch material had been swapped in, it would still be a product designed to deliver nicotine.

If it's used in a way that gets people away from smoking, maybe it can have an impact of decreased cancer risk. If used by people who weren't going to smoke, then maybe the impacts to blood pressure, heart rate, and heart disease risk are going to dominate.

The "maybe you accumulate more microplastics" impact is a rounding error.