derektank

Just today I asked Claude Fable to take an SVG map and add a circle with a 150 mile radius around a specific city, cutting off the circle at the edge of certain boundaries. It came back a minute later with more or less exactly what I wanted, saving me maybe 5 to 10 minutes of photoshop time. It’s almost certainly not perfect, but I didn’t need it to be perfect, just a legible representation for a group of 20ish people.

Yes, “the talent” is waiting out in their trailer and needs you to talk to them

It’s a great time to be in computer hardware if nothing else.

There’s no concrete evidence that anyone besides Epstein (and by extension Maxwell, who assisted Epstein) actually abused children. Besides the testimony of Virginia Giuffre, nobody else has claimed they were sexually assaulted as minors (Sjoberg was groped by Prince Andrew at Epstein’s home when she was in her early 20s). And neither the FBI nor the Palm Beach PD found physical evidence of such or communications between Epstein or others indicating this was going on.

Why would you expect anyone else to go to jail under those circumstances? Proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt seems very unlikely

The only reason why the US is so extremely lax on firearms is because people keep blathering on about how guns are the last line of defense against a tyrannical government

No, it’s because the right to own firearms is very explicitly stated in our constitution and the constitution requires an extreme super majority to update. A 50%+1 majority is all that’s required to ban civilian ownership of guns in most parliamentary systems, not so in the US. The culture is downstream of the law.

When did we start making good people? I thought we were still using the base model.

There’s some debate as to whether the Red pyramid itself is even a tomb at all, given the same Pharaoh (Sneferu) also constructed the Bent and Meidum pyramids and there’s no evidence of a sarcophagus or other burial equipment in any of them. Which we wouldn’t know if we had never explored them.

Those Chinese companies are being funded by a substantial amount of government financing, I think at least 20% has come directly from state owned investment firms or government entities and probably more now. You obviously lose precision when you’re talking in sweeping terms like “China” but I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable in this case. The Chinese government is playing a much more direct role in AI investment and research than other nations.

I think trying to tease apart the private and public sector is very hard in China. Setting aside state owned enterprises, even nominally private companies that employ at least 3 CCP members are required by law to form a party committee within the company to represent party interests. And given the party functionally is the government, you have a situation where the government has representatives inside every major private company. There’s no obvious parallel to this in western countries.

Presumably the line is whether or not the publisher is getting paid for the writing.

The Atlantic does do branded content from time to time, but they always explicitly label it as such. I would bet a substantial sum that this article is not an advertisement.

Hmmm, maybe but I wouldn’t expect a sea change myself. The reason insurance is able to get away with not covering pcsk9 inhibitors is because statins in theory provide a similar benefit for a fraction of the price, and so they can gatekeep access by requiring patients to take statins first before providing prior authorization.

Now, structurally Repatha is straight up more expensive to manufacture and deliver to patients than a peptide like enlicitide, as the former is a biologic. And if a competitor decides to manufacture a biosimilar when Repatha comes off patent in 2030 that could also help cut the price of drugs in this category. But there’s really nothing cheaper than statins, so I would expect insurance agencies to continue to withhold prior authorization.

Not really a new kind of pharmaceutical, pcsk9 inhibitors have been on the market for a while now. What’s new is that it’s an oral medication rather than an injectable

Yeah, I would be curious to know what kind of returns they’re seeing from Isomorphic labs given AlphaFold itself is publicly available. From what I’ve read, the deals they’ve reached with the major Pharma companies could result in billions in returns, but they come as royalties or are tied to performance metrics. It’s going to be hard to know how valuable the investments made in this space will be for probably another decade.

Nobody can tell if your opinions are “weakly held”

It’s pretty easy to tell if your opinions are weakly held. Do you change them in the face of new evidence? If so, they’re weakly held. And this applies to not just the big opinions of the day, but all the way down to the mundane. Do you admit that your partner was right when they suggested you do more stretching before exercising? Or do you tell your coworker that they were right and you were wrong when you had an argument over documentation?

There are always some heresies — some opinions you'd be punished for expressing. But there are a lot more now than there were a few decades ago

I think the trend line has reversed a bit since 2022. Whether it be simply because public events have overwhelmed public attention, or there’s been a genuine retreat, it certainly feels as though (in private institutions at least, setting aside the federal government for a moment which has fumblingly attempted to enforce norms against criticizing the president) the Overton window on what can be said has never been wider in my memory. And not entirely for the good. People are out in public endorsing wild conspiracy theories, supporting political ideologies from Stalinism to Juche to Fascism, and outright criminality often while publishing under their own names. Maybe some of these people are getting fired, but for the most part there seems to be a tolerance for just spouting off on almost any topic in a way there wasn’t in 2020 or even before.

Claude’s logo is closer to a dandelion than an aperture (though closer to a butthole than either)

No, but I do think modern medicine occasionally grants a few people more time than they would have had otherwise. New cancer therapies, evolving treatments for cystic fibrosis, etc.

Very hit or miss if you’re in a group whose life expectancy sees substantial improvement in your lifetime though.

Yeah, we live finite lives. Time is the one thing the vast majority of us aren’t getting more of. Of course speed is a priority. This isn’t a “capital” thing, it’s a fundamental part of the human experience.

it becomes like those blurred photos that make cities look like a small model

Tilt-shift photography for those wondering.

It’s only possible for Dead Man valorizing politicians to be elected because much of the electorate worships the same. They all have parents too, naturally.

Any word on which entity was trying to trademark it first?

We’ve had the ability to destroy the world since roughly 1970, maybe 1975. Nothing but biological intelligence required.

Does he even need to care about that at this point? He retains majority voting control over SpaceX so nobody can stage a hostile takeover. And he’s given his employees an opportunity to cash out if they wanted to.

European countries didn’t flip some magic switch where they saved a bunch of money by just “cutting out the profit.”

They sort of have with pharmaceuticals (which to be clear is only maybe 10-15% of overall healthcare spending) by having the government negotiate drug prices nationally, instead of having individual insurers negotiate. This has monopsonistic effects, which really does cut the profit margins of drug manufacturers substantially. Of course, in many ways, they’re free riding on drug discovery funded by profits made overseas (particularly in America) but it does result in appreciable savings.

Yeah, I'm not sure about the efficacy of those, my understanding is that blocking blue and green light is more important than exposure to red light, but not an expert.

I do still use my phone, and more importantly for me my computer, basically right up until bedtime. I have probably decreased my usage some but it’s not a huge factor.

I wouldn’t say cutting out all caffeine is conventional wisdom. Every sleep specialist (sample size of 3) I have spoken to has basically said, while they don't recommend caffeine, if you only drink it early in the day it’s probably fine.

I have had a similar experience. I would find my sleep schedule constantly drifting later and later, which made it harder to wake up in the morning, so I would self medicate with caffeine which made me anxious, which contributed to the same cycle. But even when I stopped taking caffeine I always found it difficult to actually go to bed at the same time every day.

What finally worked for me were red light glasses. I wear the True Dark Twilights Classics (though I’m sure there are other brands on the market) for 2-3 hours before bed time and I’m actually sleepy. Way more effective than taking melatonin tablets ever was in my experience. And I haven’t even had to substantially change my screen usage either (though the glasses do make everything come out monochrome, which makes it difficult to use anything that’s not in color blind mode).

Attending department faculty meetings

Data centers pay taxes don’t they? That money presumably goes into funding government services which would necessarily raise the local GDP

The electricity supply is probably a lot less elastic than the gas and oil supply at this point. Also, there’s no global price of electricity like there (more or less) is for oil. Residents suffer a localized cost when a large electricity consumer moves in, and they benefit when they can force the consumer to move to another locality. Definitely NIMBYism, but the reaction is understandable.

It’s really just a question of saliency.