Links and tweets, 2023-05-09
by Jason Crawford · May 9, 2023 · 2 min read
Announcements
- Stripe Press is publishing Poor Charlies Almanack (via @patrickc). Also, Londoners: sign up for events from Stripe Press and Works in Progress (via @WorksInProgMag)
- Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast The Lunar Society now taking applications for advertisers. Also, Dwarkesh would really love to interview Robert Caro
Links
- The Ascent of Man turns 50. Here’s the premiere (via @BBCArchive & @drbronowski)
- Celebrating Smallpox Eradication Day
- How photographs could be sent by telephone in the 1930s (via @asallen)
- Brian Potter on nuclear power plant construction costs (via @calebwatney)
- The Hunterian Museum, on anatomy & the history of surgery (via @salonium)
Quotes
- Sears was basically Amazon one century earlier
- “Humanities bros need to take more STEM classes”
- Child labor was once seen as a good thing
- Evidence for the use of water wheels early in the first century
- Autopilots have been on airplanes for a long time
- The Pasteur Institute was privately funded
- Something to keep in mind the next time you contact customer service
Queries
- What are the best reasons for optimism about AI risk? (@MaxCRoser)
- What lessons can we learn about reasoning from Bayes’ rule?
- What are the most impressive things we could build if we all really wanted it?
- What to read to understand the history of the US electrical grid? (@_brianpotter)
- What is going to enable $1/day continuous hormone monitoring?
- Is there progress-studies work on the home/family dimensions of flourishing?
- What’s the best way to help someone learn to understand another’s POV?
- What are some of the most useful impossibility proofs?
- Who is going to create the Cshirchive?
Tweets
- John Carmack: “the world is better than it has ever been… and the derivative is still positive… get on board the progress train.” Fortunately the malaise is not universal
- Sam Altman’s “alternative path for society”
- Dustin Moskovitz: “By 2030, I expect ~everyone will have a personal AI agent”
- India building nuclear at < $2/W?
- How LLMs can be used for causal inference
- Could protein folding be ready for its fundamental theory?
- Life in America 40 years ago vs. today
- Adam Thierer’s progress bookshelf
- Robotaxis were perhaps over hyped in 2017, but opposite is true now
- Until 150 years ago people lived in a permanent power outage
- We accept “the community decides” for land use, but not elsewhere
- A neutron star is like a cargo ship crunched down to the size of a cake sprinkle
- After all the banks fail, who provides liquidity?
- How to use social media
- “I am a language model of a modern major general”
- The Stanford Torus, a space settlement megastructure
Charts
