mhardcastle

I found myself accidentally behind the secured area of this solar installation while driving in the Mojave National Preserve. It is truly bizarre to see up close - the glow that you see around the towers in the photo on the article is quite bright in person.

I wondered when I saw it - is that glow the air turning into plasma? Are otherwise-invisible dust particles reflecting the absurd amount of light hitting them? Is the heat enough for the air to start scattering light?

It's no surprise that it would incinerate birds, in any case.

“However, it is important to note that this does not impact our results,” [lead study author] Liu told National Post."

So an order-of-magnitude difference has no impacts on the result? How can that be?

Why include that capacitor at all if it doesn't matter whether it works?

This goes massively against the consensus of experts in this field. The modal AI researcher believes that "high-level machine intelligence", roughly AGI, will be achieved by 2047, per the survey below. Given the rapid pace of development in this field, it's likely that timelines would be shorter if this were asked today.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/1/10/24032987/ai-imp...

In 2022, the median ML researcher surveyed thought that there is a 5% or 10% chance of AI leading to "human extinction or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment of the human species," depending on how the question was asked.

https://aiimpacts.org/2022-expert-survey-on-progress-in-ai/#...

In most companies, "operations" staff is among their lowest-paid: customer service, cashiers, bank tellers, factory workers, etc. They are used to constant adherence to strict metrics.

Medical care is strange in that the operational staff includes doctors, who will bristle at their expertise and years of schooling culminating into being judged on how many reviews (or appointments) they can churn through.

It's an interesting issue that I sense naturally causes this kind of conflict.

For what it's worth, "play money" betting site Manifold is currently at a 69% chance of sale versus 31% of shutting down.

https://manifold.markets/mint/conditional-on-the-tiktok-ban-...

Separately this is generally not a great idea economically. You do kill inflation in Argentina (replaced with American inflation but that is extremely low and stable by Argentine standards). But you have no control over your monetary policy or your exchange rates. If your economy is export driven to (e.g.) China, you now have to worry about the dollar-yuan rate, which is not under your control.

"generally not a great idea economically" is true, but this specific case is one of the few where it could be a fantastic idea.

Control over one's currency > pegging to or using USD >>>> historic Argentinian monetary policy. If (1) is impossible, then (2) would represent monumental improvement over the status quo.

Social status is positional and follows arms race dynamics. Everyone would have more money and nobody would suffer worse ring-positional-status if everyone spent proportionately less.

Also, there is a deep body of economics and psychology literature describing how individual spending decisions are sometimes suboptimal in predictable ways, particularly that we under-value experiential purchases.

It doesn't contradict general "live and let live" principles to think that cultural emphasis on positional goods is bad, nor that individuals might be better off if they made different consumption choices.

Traffic is a function of how many cars go through a road/intersection per unit time, which is reduced if cars keep shorter following distances, which self-driving cars can do because of faster reaction times.

In the extreme, imagine if a light turns green and all cars in line accelerate at the same time. Intersections would let through a lot more cars.

Or think of freeway speeds where the length of a car is near-negligible. A one-second following distance means almost 60 cars pass a given point in a minute, versus almost 30 cars per minute for a two-second following distance.

Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner had similar sentiments. A very interesting interview along these lines:

https://jameswphillips.substack.com/p/s-and-t-a-conversation...

Somebody using your social security number and other information would be able to apply for credit. As soon as they do that, the bureau(s) called by the lender would have a file on "you".

The federal government requires that all three major bureaus (Experian, Equifax, TransUnion) provide you one credit report each per year, for free. You can request it here, the official source for these mandated free reports:

https://www.annualcreditreport.com/index.action

People respond to incentives. If you make something harder, people will do less of it.

New barriers include: the actual work of moving money around to and from friends and family and directing trades, counterparty risks in doing so (e.g. sibling dies and leaves money to someone else or takes the money and runs), tax complications, or reputational risk if found to be violating "spirit of the law" that might harm election odds. There are surely more frictions and barriers like these that I'm not capturing.

People respond to incentives, why wouldn't they respond to taxes on alcohol?

"Public policies affecting the price of alcoholic beverages have significant effects on alcohol-related disease and injury rates. Our results suggest that doubling the alcohol tax would reduce alcohol-related mortality by an average of 35%, traffic crash deaths by 11%, sexually transmitted disease by 6%, violence by 2%, and crime by 1.4%."

From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2951962/

If you're donating because you know your levels are elevated then I'd agree with this thought.

(While also agreeing with those in the thread saying that high-PFAS donations are likely often better than no donations)

Donating blood or plasma has evidence of reducing pfas. If I knew I had high measured levels, I'd certainly think about doing it more.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8994130/

I also had a pixel begin to boot then make 911 calls upon getting moisture in it. I damaged the sim slot prying it out so it wouldn't dial 911 any more.

I figured my experience was a freak occurrence - how is this a (n=2) failure mode when getting wet!?

Regarding (1), for blacktails I'd add meadow encroachment. Parts of their range have sees a sizeable portion of the meadows where they browse taken over by conifers and shrubs. These were kept in-check by fires pre-1500.

Self-driving cars, particularly if they communicate, can safely keep shorter following distances. All-else-equal, this means that many more cars can drive on the same amount of road.

If you take the precepts of the parent comment at face value, then you have an intelligence far greater and faster than humans.

Can something like this persuade humans with whom it freely communicates to do things not in the interest of humanity, in the same way that less intelligent and slower people have convinced humans to, e.g., release sarin in a crowded Japanese subway? Given its speed and intelligence level, what are the physical bounds of the nuclear, chemical, or biological agents it could teach radicalized people to create, and on what timeframe?

Can it amass funds through scamming people on the Internet, defrauding financial institutions, super-intelligent high-frequency trading, or creating digital-only art, code, information, or other services that people voluntarily pay for now? Something that, again, people less intelligent and slower have done very successfully for decades? And with that money combined with superhuman persuasive power, can that AI buy services that align its digital-only goals to real-world actions counter to the goals of humanity?

To ask a more specific question: if an AI meets the conditions of "many multiples smarter and faster than humans," "capable of persuasion and creating things of financial value," and "wants to end humanity", what stops it from coordinating mass utility shutdowns, nuclear strikes, chemical attacks, destruction of Internet-accessible transportation and farm equipment, release of smallpox, and/or anything else humans are currently capable of and choose not to do?

How does it work now? When I did it twice before (including semi-recently), I could only do it via chat or over the phone - either option took about 5 minutes and required talking with somebody.

This is a great way to think about it, and upon reflection I definitely operate in this way.

I'd love SiriusXM at the promo rates they offer, or even at full price in a month where I know I'll be on the road for a while. I will never re-subscribe because they make cancelling so hostile.

"However, if it would restrict my freedoms in any manner, state must leave it to parents. I shouldn't be punished because some people can't find the time for their kids."

This seems like drawing a very, very firm deontological line in the sand around your freedoms. Are there no conditions in which this would not be the case? You would literally never give up the tiniest amount of freedom to benefit children other than your own, no matter how dramatically?

This is truthfully a very unfamiliar concept to me. Tax-funded programs (fundamentally an elimination of freedom through controlling how one's income is spent) and/or regulations that solve genuine coordination problems - starting with national defense and criminal justice - are fundamental to any civilization run through anything other than pure anarchy.

If you use that baton, or even if you are seen with it by the wrong person, there is a good chance that you will be charged with a crime. Look up penal codes 12020 and 22210, possession of a club or baton in California is not legal.

(To say nothing of the desirability of such a law - just as a FYI)

Companies will only get better at creating addictive products for children. This represents an ever-increasing burden for parents.

Also, there are some times when coordination would result in better outcomes than single disorganized actors. I talk to parents who say they WOULD prevent their kids from using social media, but it would have negative social impacts on their kids for them to be the only ones without it.

Animal feed makes demand for food highly elastic. Simplest example, you can convert #2 corn to cow feed and make 1 calorie out of 7, turn it into chicken feed for closer to 1:2, or turn it into corn-based food directly. People can and do shift consumption to cheaper substitutes, like chicken instead of beef (or oatmeal instead of eggs for breakfast).

Is this not a statement fully generalizable to tighter regulations on food and medicine, no matter how tight current regulations are?

"Federally qualified health centers" (FQHC) are required to treat people regardless of ability to pay, and are able to provide preventive care to non-citizens. A list of such health centers is available here, and there are quite a number in Houston (where the subject of the article is based):

https://www.findahealthcenter.hrsa.gov/

Whether would-be patients are sufficiently informed of this opportunity is another question, but resources for preventive care are not completely unavailable to these folks.

I don't disagree with the limitations of Teams, but Microsoft improved their video call/conferencing software substantially when they moved from Skype for Business to Teams. At least things haven't been entirely stagnant.

Here is a lecture by Robert Sapolsky, an extremely well-regarded researcher, that goes over some evidence on depression being a disease: https://youtu.be/NOAgplgTxfc

It's been a while since I've seen it, but I recall his evidence including some rather striking non-behavioral symptoms, like changes in sleep cycles.

To address your specific thoughts on it, his position (paraphrased from memory) is that social stressors like you describe cause elevated cortisol, which causes depression - such that your position that "modern life really sucks" is not incompatible with a biological cause.

It's extraordinarily interesting in a lot of other ways - definitely worth a watch in spite of the length.