This is a linkpost for https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2023-04-05
The Progress Forum
- Wizards and prophets of AI. I posted this for comment, then decided to rewrite it, then ended up posting the core argument of the new essay as a Twitter thread, then got replies to that thread, and now I don’t know what to write anymore. I’ll post something about this on the blog at some point, but if you want my half-baked, outdated thoughts, you can read those links
- AMA: Allison Duettmann, Foresight Institute
- AMA: Mark Khurana, author of The Trajectory of Discovery: What Determines the Rate and Direction of Medical Progress?
Opportunities
- Loyal (longevity) hiring a full stack software engineer (via @celinehalioua). Also they are looking for founders/execs to speak at their onsite
- Nat Friedman wants to meet people who are doing technical alignment work
News
- RIP Gordon Moore. “We at Intel remain inspired by Moore’s Law and intend to pursue it until the periodic table is exhausted.” Gordon’s 1965 paper: “Integrated circuits will lead to such wonders as home computers… and personal portable communications equipment.” Also, the story of the microprocessor
- Last Energy to sell 24 small modular nuclear reactors to UK, $5/W (via @Atomicrod)
- Law firm Cooper & Kirk accuses regulators of an attack on crypto
Announcements
- Discord for discussion of futuristic tech: nanotech, longevity, etc. (via @kanzure)
- A proposal for NEPA reform (by @elidourado)
- ChatGPT plugins (via @sama and @gdb). Example: processing a video clip
- Worldcoin launches “proof of personhood” (via @sama)
- Lindy, the AI assistant putting your life on autopilot
Interviews
- Sam Altman on Lex Fridman
- Marc Andreessen interviewed by Erik Torenberg
- World’s Fair Co. founder Cam Wiese
- Nat Friedman interviewed by Dwarkesh Patel
- Ilya Sutskever (cofounder of OpenAI), also by Dwarkesh
- Nathan Myhrvold interviewed by Shane Parrish
AI
- Bill Gates: AI is the most impressive technology since the GUI (via @BillGates)
- Scott Aaronson on AI risk (or see my excerpt)
- How do you integrate your API with an AI? You just give it your docs
- A GPT prompt: “no-nonsense teacher with an ambitious, self-directed student”. And another GPT prompt, to cut the caveats and pleasantries
- AGI and nanotech as “the last two big general technologies”
- “GPT-4 saved my dog’s life”
- Ben Evans on the Jevons Paradox applied to AI
- GPT has trouble counting backwards (or maybe it’s just Markdown?)
Other links
- Lithium, once expensive, is cheap again. Hooray for markets (via @scottlincicome)
- 50 years of the supersonic flight ban (by @elidourado)
- The evidence for smartphones / social media harming kids’ mental health is weak
Queries
- Evidence for GPT-4 building a world model?
- Good examples of tight 1-page proposals in simple language for technical projects?
- Quantifying scientific efficiency in time elapsed from when a discovery becomes possible to when it happens?
Quotes
- “The shapes arise!” Walt Whitman and the poetry of progress. Also, Hart Crane
- The evolution of our buildings: from exoskeletons to internal skeletons
- The amazing talent center of early 16th-century Florence
- The use of mathematics in biology was important as early as 1616
- “They don’t make ‘em like they used to,” 1540s edition
- “A crisis of values confronted liberals in the mid-thirties”
- “Industrialization is the only hope of the poor”
- “What matters in the long run is whether growth is sustained”
- In 2006, Steven Johnson predicted what happened during covid
- America used to care about running trains on time
- “On average, buildings that are being blasted with a firehose right now are significantly more likely to be on fire than the typical structure, but this does not mean we should ban fire departments as a clear fire hazard”
More tweets
- Biomolecular glass (!)
- A positive vision for biology: “what we’ll create and do once all disease is gone”
- Twitter created a socially acceptable way to publish a single sentence
- Collider bias
