c54

The guy in question knew very well about the negative effects of lead[0]. The way in which you're right is that under capitalism, the profit motive distorts and chews up any moral precepts of any individual. The machine demands efficiency no matter how many lives it consumes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.

What’re some of the military applications of LLMs?

That’s the kind of thing Britain thought they were being smart about with Brexit and look where that’s gotten them

The economy wide productivity gains from having tax funded roads mean it doesn’t make sense to have roads be profitable or break even as an individual entity.

Similar thing probably goes for internet access.

Neat story. Agreed that animals are already communicating without some kind of newfangled AI. But also most meat consumption isn’t roadkill and doesn’t involve reasonable conditions for the animals while they’re alive. I see it as a big spectrum with factory farming on one side and {insert better conditions farm} on the other, and it seems worthwhile to move things to the right side of the spectrum.

Basically the idea is whether one’s accumulation of wealth is actually tied to their positive impact on society: does wealth accrue in a morally correct manner?

In Capital, Piketty argues no. For cases like bezos (or Gates, Musk, etc) it’s at least the case that they did give something to our society. However those people benefitted from countless other inventions before them whose inventors did not benefit from to the same tune as the super wealthy. For every computer billionaire there are hundreds of researchers who worked on transistors, internet protocols, and so on, in order to make something like Amazon possible. SpaceX benefits incredibly from NASA research. Etc.

And those are the ones where we can at least contend they did something. On the other hand you have people like Lillaine Bettancourt, the daughter and heiress of the L’Oreal fortune. Piketty writes:

> Between 1990 and 2010, the fortune of Bill Gates—the founder of Microsoft, the world leader in operating systems, and the very incarnation of entrepreneurial wealth and number one in the Forbes rankings for more than ten years—increased from $4 billion to $50 billion. At the same time, the fortune of Liliane Bettencourt—the heiress of L’Oréal, the world leader in cosmetics, founded by her father Eugène Schueller, who in 1907 invented a range of hair dyes that were destined to do well in a way reminiscent of César Birotteau’s success with perfume a century earlier—increased from $2 billion to $25 billion, again according to Forbes.

> In other words, Liliane Bettencourt, who never worked a day in her life, saw her fortune grow exactly as fast as that of Bill Gates, the high-tech pioneer, whose wealth has incidentally continued to grow just as rapidly since he stopped working.

In other words wealth does not accumulate in line with what you’ve done for humanity. It’s not a “tremendous deal” without bounds.

We’re told that rich people got rich because they deserve it, and that’s just a pernicious self-aggrandizing lie we’ve inherited from Calvin and others. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology)

I definitely think accumulation is an incentive and some people do greater things than others, but I think our system is distorted in that it considers some to have done so so so much more when that’s not really the case.

Synthetic rubber is a type of plastic

Yes agreed fair enough

Metabolism converts sugars and oxygen to carbon dioxide and water. Fire has the same inputs and outputs too! You can think of metabolism as releasing the same energy as fire but with more steps so our bodies can harness and use the energy via various other chemical reactions.

Most of the water from metabolism is released in your breath. Water you pee is mostly water you ingested via drinking and eating.

You’re right, the scientist example is benign as you say

The difference is when there’s a profit motive for the person to inflate the actual numbers or distort their recommendation.

If the example was “professional climate scientist selling cloud seeding chemicals suggests we should do more cloud seeding to fight climate change” then there would be cause for skepticism.

I love airship ideas! In your message you don’t comment on safety and fire risk, which is what I’d bet most people want to hear about given the public perception of H2 airships.

How are you addressing safety with your design?

I’d agree with this except that France seems to be getting way better prices per mile, as mentioned in the article. What is France doing differently?

What are the trades between synthesizing ammonia for combustion versus synthesizing methane?

It's fairly colloquial english to say you have "some of something", I think this matches the ocaml language convention pretty nicely

Neat! Ordered a pair. I especially love the dishwasher safety and lead-free elements

There’s a handful of efforts like this which I find really exciting and hopeful. It’s clear we can do damage to the environment but I think it’s important to try to learn and take positive restorative steps given our position of stewardship of the planet. I’ve heard this kind of effort be called “ecomodernist” as it’s a step after the idea that all human intervention is only destructive and the best option is to do nothing.

Pleistocene park in siberia https://pleistocenepark.ru/

American Prarie plains rewilding in Montana https://americanprairie.org/

Ecomodernist manifesto http://www.ecomodernism.org/

Ha! I think i know what company you’re referring to

Is this a gpt summary

I have a kinesis advantage 360 and hadn’t heard of the Glove before. What do you like about it versus the Kinesis?

Social security (has flaws but basically solved the widespread pre social security problem of poverty amongst the elderly)

Food safety, leaded gas and paint, restricted chemicals lists (for safety reason, less of a fan of drug bans).

Bank deposit reserve requirements. Obamacare. Antitrust legislation.

Seat belts (extremely controversial at the time, people protested the loss of their freedoms etc etc).

Alaska’s Permanent Fund. Norway’s government pension fund.

I could imagine something like the Consumer Product Safety Commission tasked with recovering and open sourcing IP from shut down companies with products in people’s hands.

Interesting that coffee isn’t on there.

I’d be interested in learning about drug use not during programming tasks too, especially for something like weed or psychedelics there’s going to be much more use not at work, compared to adderall and caffeine.

I think everyone agrees that SpaceX launched too early and messed up in terms of unsafe destruction to their pad, rocket, and surroundings (above pics included).

However I think we should keep some context & perspective on exactly where we're more and less OK with certain kinds of environmental destruction.

I think when you look closely at any part of this planet, every action you take causes disruption. This is part of the miracle of life on earth, it's everywhere. Paving a square yard of road causes destruction to the soil habitat, surface and deeper insects and bacteria, the birds and other animals eating those insects, plant and fungal life in the are, etc. Does that mean we shouldn't make roads at all? Probably not. Does that mean we should make fewer roads? Probably! Does that mean we should rely on trains instead of highways where possible? Absolutely!

But we can do this same exercise for a rail! The same soil is under the bits of rail and railroad ties too. Railways also divide up landscapes, causing the deaths of various grazing animals. Should we not make railways...?

I think the extreme is the Jainist perspective of sweeping the ground ahead of your feet before taking a single step. I don't think that view is a reasonable idea for all of us.

> Glaser had noticed that a satellite in geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO), 35,786 kilometers above the equator, would pass through Earth's shadow for only a few minutes each year.

The article addresses this. To my mind 4 minutes per year is equivalent to the parent’s layspeak “no night” comment.

Clever name!

I agree with the point you're making here, but it’s also funny that the description of someone passing a test but not being able to do much without a lot of human supervision is… exactly the description of a human college graduate.

+1 to this. I've been learning Supreme Commander FAF, which has a cool little community and open source matchmaking servers. I read this blog post recently which piqued my interest: https://anarchonomicon.substack.com/p/the-most-beautiful-gam...

Might be worth checking out!

It’s really surprising to me the amount of doubt that’s been voiced over the last few weeks that a technology could possibly be dangerous.

For me the perspective is straightforward: even if chatgpt is not it, there is the physical possiblity for a relatively small improvement on human intelligence just like we’re a relatively small improvement on chimps, or on neanderthals. That’s just simple for me to get my head around.

Along with that, there are easy to follow “monkey’s paw” scenarios: the easiest way to end poverty is to extinct all humans, the easiest way to end suffering is to extinct life on earth. I can’t quite formulate a straightforward way to eliminate suffering while maximizing my humanist values. This is the alignment problem.

We’ve got Yan LeCun saying that slowing down or thinking about safety would just mean the chinese get ahead. He’s also saying we understand LLMs more than we understand airplanes.

We’ve got people completely ignoring past examples of technological destruction or technological safety like nonproliferation or Asilomar.

We’ve got people saying GPT is simultaneously revolutionary and going to change everything, thus it’s critical we forge forward… but also is too dumb to change anything (makes up info, etc), and thus we should not worry about being concerned with safety.

What is it about our field that is so gung ho? Are these all bad faith FOMO arguments? It’s hard to understand.

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The one way i can make sense of it is as a religious experience. Our culture has deep persistent roots in christian eschatological mythology, and of course the coming of a benevolent next wave of intelligence slots into this nicely. Taleb states this clearly[0] that those who are pure of heart will be welcomed into the kingdom of heaven. Not a huge fan of this style of accidental religiosity.

[0] https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1642241685823315972?s=20

Both are electron apps. I think the parent poster meant just to say "Here's an example of an Electron app that's quick, I'm not sure that Electron itself is the issue"

Part of the story is that solar electricity will soon become (indeed, in many places already is) cheaper than coal or natural gas.

China in particular depends on long fragile trade routes from the Middle East for crude oil, and is already the world’s largest producer of solar panels.

Technology like this will get to enjoy the plunging cost of solar and wind power.