Links and short notes, 2024-12-27

Clinical trial abundance, grid-scale fusion, permitting vs. compliance, crossword mania, and more

by Jason Crawford · December 27, 2024 · 3 min read

Much of this content originated on social media. To follow news and announcements in a more timely fashion, follow me on Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, or Farcaster.

Contents

• My essays
• Fellowship opportunities
• Announcements
• Events
• News
• Questions
• Live gloriously
• Where being right matters
• Off-grid solar for data centers
• Permitting vs. compliance
• Mirror life FAQ
• Crossword mania
• Do we want to democratize art-making?
• Polio
• How many people could you feed on an acre?
• Verifiable video
• Links and tweets

My essays

In case you missed it:

• A progress policy agenda: Elon says that soon, builders “will be free to build” in America. If that promise is to be fulfilled, we have work to do. Here’s my wishlist of policy goals to advance scientific, technological, and economic progress

Fellowship opportunities

• “FutureHouse is launching an independent postdoctoral fellowship program for exceptional researchers who want to apply our automated science tools to specific problems in biology and biochemistry” (@SGRodriques). $125k, apply by Feb 14
• No. 10 Innovation Fellowship (UK) is “10 Downing Street’s flagship initiative for bringing world class technical talent into government for high impact tours of duty.” “Huge opportunity for impact,” says @matthewclifford
• Sloan Foundation / NBER fellowship for “PhD students and early-career researchers interested in the fiscal and economic effects of productivity policies—particularly R&D, immigration, and infrastructure permitting” (@heidilwilliams_)

Announcements

• The Black Spatula Project is “an open initiative to investigate the potential of large language models (LLMs) to identify errors in scientific papers.” A recent paper caused a bit of a panic about health hazards from black plastic kitchen utensils, but was wrong because of a basic arithmetic error. Ethan Mollick found that GPT o1 caught the error when asked to “carefully check the math in this paper.” Steve Newman (RPI fellow) said, “clearly someone needs to try this at scale,” the suggestion generated a lot of energy, and a project was born
• The Clinical Trials Abundance project is a series of policy memos from IFP. Ruxandra Tesloianu (RPI fellow) and Willy Chertman wrote the intro/manifesto. Launch thread from @Willyintheworld
• The second cohort of Cosmos Ventures includes “award-winning philosophers, a category theorist, an existential psychologist, a poet, a national champion debate coach, and Silicon Valley veterans” (@mbrendan1)
• All Day TA, an AI course assistant. Launch thread from @Afinetheorem
• Teaser for a new project: The Techno-Industrial Policy Playbook (via @rSanti97)

Events

• Edge Esmeralda 2025 is May 24–June 21 in Healdsburg, CA (@EdgeEsmeralda)

News

• Commonwealth Fusion has “committed to build the world’s first grid-scale fusion power plant, ARC, in Virginia” (@CFS_energy). “We’ll plug 400 megawatts of steady fusion power into the state’s electrical grid starting in the early 2030s.” Note that Helion has previously announced a plant to provide at least 50MW before the end of the 2020s. With two independent efforts expecting production plants within a decade, it feels very possible that fusion could finally happen
• Google introduces Willow, a new quantum computing chip (@sundarpichai). Scott Aaronson (my go-to source for quantum computing, never overhyped) gives some reactions. This is a real research milestone, but still very far from having any practical impacts
• Boom Supersonic “has raised >$100M in new financing, fully funding the first Symphony engine prototype” (@bscholl). “This company is important for America. … No one else is anywhere near having a supersonic airliner,” says @paulg

Questions

Reply if you can help:

• “Who do I know who works in threat intelligence or analysis? Have a very high quality team working in this space who are keen to speak to relevant people” (@matthewclifford)
• “If you were building a campus for the robotics startup community, what are some things that would make it great? Machinery, courses, events, housing options, everything is fair game” (@audrow)
• “‘Young people in America aren’t dating any more, and it’s the beginning of a real social crisis’ is—I mean, let’s be honest—exactly the sort of social phenomenon I would want to report the shit out of. But … what’s the best evidence that it’s true?” (@DKThomp)
• “Who is the best combination of futurist + economist? The economic implications of (in particular) Humanoid Robots and AI are extremely interesting” (@EricJorgenson)

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