When we put the world economy back together after this thing is over, I'd like the engine of it to be American/Canadian/British/Aussie robots, not sweatshops in undeveloped countries.
I forgot about this particular episode of institutional collapse
MIT got sued by a group of deaf activists because opencourseware didn't have captions on a bunch of lecture vids so MIT's administration was like "bet, we'll just delete most of it" and settled the case
Being somebody who has actually read a trivial amount of history I can say confidently that the establishment of a state "Disinformation Board" is a substantially stronger signal of inbound authoritarianism than something like the Jan 6 riot
I think it may be hard for some people to appreciate how pissed off engineers and hard scientists are about the discovery that medicine/public health, economics, and a bunch of other prestige fields have been operating with a fraction of rigor expected in our fields
If we had switched to nuclear in the 1970s there would be negligible risk of global warming
Instead the green movement collaborated with the oil cartel and petrocrats overseas to lock us into infrastructure that cooked the planet
The greens and their financiers did this
An incredibly rare black deer spotted in the forest of the Barycz Valley, Poland.
Most estimates guess that only about 1 in every 500,000 deer is melanistic.
[πΉ Jakub Wencek]
Setting the economic barrier to entry equal to a mid three figure monthly car payment and gas bill and calling the resulting state of affairs "freedom" is pretty screwed up
I've been working on an N95 mask production project with a team for about a week now.
We just got off the phone with NIOSH. They told us that approval for a new mask production facility in the US will take at minimum 45 days, but more likely 90.
A lot of people are gonna die.
This is really shocking. We live in a nation of such wealth. And we have effectively run out of such a basic protective device at a moment of such need. CDC is offering advice on how medical staff can survive during a contagious disease outbreak without proper facemasks. Wow.
Therapy language is inherently manipulative, the point of therapy is behavior modification
It is a highly effective tool for both psychopaths and chronically irresponsible people and has no place in healthy interpersonal relationships
Twitter has cultural relevance because it is one of the only places where "experts" are on a level social playing field with the rest of the population
And it turns out that when you level the playing field the "experts" are often revealed as shockingly inexpert
We should open US borders to anybody with an HK, Macau, or PRC passport who wants to resettle here permanently. Australia/UK/NZ/Canada should do the same. Our ability to trigger massive brain drain is a weapon we should start using immediately.
You could easily have found this with an 1890s lab, which means that weβve been fucking up the search process over the space of possible room temp superconductors in profound ways for over a century
Vox then vs Vox now.
Hard to see this as anything other than journalistic malpractice to be quite honest. The data were there, everybody in my world was aware of it and acting on it. So instead of actual reporting, they trotted out the "eccentric techbro asshole" narrative.
This is one of the only places in the world where it was possible to see a Johns Hopkins dept chair get circles run around them by people with handles like "Illuminati42069" on things directly relevant to said dept chair's nominal expertise
That has immense social utility
People who are saying "it's over" every time there's a lukewarm or conservative statement from a lab working on LK-99 have a bad model of academic research
A lot of the big university and state labs have an incentive to slowwalk this for a couple different reasons
Ross Ulbricht's work was one of the largest contributions to harm reduction in narcotics distribution ever
The systems that he created removed violence from the drug trade by anonymizing and physically dislocating transactions
He almost certainly saved thousands of lives
I turned 38 yesterday, my 9th birthday in prison.
I made a timeline of my life, with my death estimated at 80 years old. Prison has been a major phase of my life so far. Iβm not the man I was when I came in. Iβve learned from my mistakes and the harm Iβve caused.
It's doubtful that people who are habituated to driving would actually "prefer" it in a situation where the rest of us who experience suburban scales of infrastructure as a nontrivial economic burden weren't forced to pay for their lifestyle choices via taxes
Looks like PRC authorities cracked down on Naomi Wu, a prominent Shenzhen hacker on YouTube and elsewhere
I really like a lot of the people over there and it would be great if we could get more of them out, but it doesnβt look like thatβs in the cards for now
In the past I have given credit where it was due to Eliezer Yudkowsky for not explicitly advocating violent solutions to the problems with AI development that by his own admission only he and a few other (mostly nontechnical) people see on the horizon
He crossed that line today
Lol the guy who dumped the original LK-99 paper on arxiv deserves a medal
Not for all that much of the science from what it sounds like, but definitely for breaking the ice on the dumping of incomplete papers on preprint servers
β Prof. Kim Hyun-tak on email
"We will define March 4, 2024 as the day of RTSC. Because it's the day we prove superconductivity such as levitation and zero resistance."
Wow. He's confident. I'm really looking forward to this meeting.
APS meeting 9 hours to go
Either our discovery process is unacceptably inefficient or our allocation of resources to research and development is much too sparse, if the minds that actively work this discovery are the only ones who can - they need to get better, if not - we need more people doing it
Lmfao if this turns out to be real (big if true) the Mexican govt presumably just broke an enormously consequential agreement with USG and we can probably call *that* (and not alien reveal in and of itself) the end of the 20th century order
Prof. Galetskiy noted that the aliens appear to lack nasal cavities.
This suggests that their anatomy does not require them to warm the air that is entering their body.
People who were paying attention to this predicted significantly hotter weather this year
We were right
Itβs time to start putting dust in the upper atmosphere to stop the oceans from cooking
Scott Alexander is about to be doxxed by the NYT.
This is ethically outrageous.
If
@puiwingtam
and the other NYT editors choose to run with this they are crossing a clear line in the sand in front of a lot of people who will not take it lying down.
If econ is all you've ever studied, or if the only jobs you've had have been inside the medical guild, you might not even know that people with a minimum of scientific literacy can actually evaluate your literature
See institutional macroecon's reaction to mounting criticism
GPT successfully kicked out a correct diagnosis for my grandmotherβs autoimmune condition on a three sentence description of her symptoms
Irl it took nearly two years of fighting with doctors at a crappy regional hospital and eventually going to Mayo to reach the same conclusion
based on my experience with doctors, not only do i believe this article but i think GPT is probably already a better diagnostician than many doctors working today.
we could probably be doing more with this than we are.
They took these videos down right as lockdowns were hitting back in 2020
Wonder how many people never learned something important because of that decision
I'll be honest, I don't really find left-right political distinctions to be descriptive or interesting anymore
The core question right now is whether you're a friend of the future or not, ie where you fall on the growth/degrowth spectrum
If you encounter a group of people who
- live in compounds together practicing polyamory
- have an ornate selfreferential ideology
- expect a vague doomsday scenario "soon"
do you expect this to be a millenarian cult or an institute that researches machine intelligence?
These fields produce huge volumes of literature on the back of often shoddy data (which is usually sourced from govt organizations subject to political influence), an approach designed to drown critiques in an unaddressably large number of dubious claims, each requiring attention
Key point here, we're probably looking at an entire family of radically more practical superconductors irrespective of the performance of LK-99 at a given temp, pressure, and purity
@mattparlmer
LK-99 is just the tip of what I suspect is a giant new iceberg in material science.
I'm more excited about future iterations and their properties.
Wind turbines and solar panels are just a way to cut the aerospace and semiconductor industries in on the energy game at the infrastructural level
They will never replace oil and gas
Nuclear will, so it has been the target of one of the greatest institutional psyops in history
People who do shoddy work in a field so habituated to shoddy work that it can't even differentiate shoddiness from rigor are able to produce literature much faster than it can be debunked
Fields that operate like this must assume a much higher burden of proof for future claims
Tbc the implication that I'm making is that MIT administration were very keen to use any excuse to curb what was a wildly popular diffusion of knowledge
Gatekeeping in service of a misfiring selfpreservation function in academic institutions as the internet starts to compete
This whole "sit on Slack and don't do more than five hours of real work a week" thing isn't actually gonna be economically viable for quite some time
The number of people I know who do this give me the impression that we're gonna see some major layoffs in the coming years
"any little piece of information can be used by the worst people on the internet to destroy your life"
It's even worse than that, hugely powerful cultural institutions will literally pay idle surplus elites to do this sort of thing to random private citizens all day
I think 95%+ of the people chirping about how Twitter is gonna die due to recent changes have no clue whatsoever how little it actually takes in terms of money and personnel to run a site like this
Chickenshit behavior on the part of Cloudflare management to cut headcount, pretend that it is an individual performance thing, and then run it all thru dedicated HR staff instead of tasking direct managers with axing people on their teams
Absolutely based video. Someone should hire this chick.
> Cares about her work
> Can read bullshit
> Isnβt afraid to tell it like it is
Recording is questionable but sheβs prob never been fired before and I would have done something equally as stupid
ROOM TEMPERATURE AMBIENT PRESSURE LEAD APATITE SUPERCONDUCTOR
ROOM TEMPERATURE AMBIENT PRESSURE LEAD APATITE SUPERCONDUCTOR
ROOM TEMPERATURE AMBIENT PRESSURE LEAD APATITE SUPERCONDUCTOR
ROOM TEMPERATURE AMBIENT PRESSURE LEAD APATITE SUPERCONDUCTOR
ROOM TEMPERATURE AMBIENT PRE
This sort of stuff is what locks in genetic engineering more than the ability to make superbrights ever could
Once it's available the public will demand it
Since he has graduated from begging the question to openly stating that blowing things and people up is a reasonable thing to do I think we should dispense with the politeness that has been the norm around these discussions in the past
EY does not know what heβs talking about
We have seen this movie before
Myopic cowards who have never worked a real problem seriously in their lives assume that all problems are unworkable and ban people who can actually solve problems from doing so
Applying this to nuclear energy directly caused global warming
The LK-99 will probably be really brittle, we're gonna have to build underground utility tunnels for conductive wires all over the country
Might as well make them big enough to drive in, this would not be that hard
He and the other hardline anti-AI cultists are out of their depth, both in terms of command of basic technical elements of this field but also in terms of their emotional states
This is a multidecade anxious fixation asking calling for air strikes in Time, not a rational person
I'll go back to engaging seriously with mainstream macroecon when it starts producing models that are predictive and core datasets that aren't obvious piles of manure
Until then I'm taking establishment Keynesians about as seriously as I take doctrinaire Austrians or Marxists
We're seeing the first steps towards formalization of the previously informal network of pseudo-feds working on censorship and surveillance while drawing paychecks from universities and think tanks
This absolutely leads to the establishment of our own MiniTrue