Announcements & opportunities

• The Long Now Foundation is hiring an Executive Director
• Terraform Industries (solar-powered carbon-neutral natural gas synthesis) is hiring
• A class on how politics works, so you can get involved productively
• Read Something Wonderful, writing that has stood the test of time (including my pieces on iron and smallpox)
• Turpentine Media, a new media network covering tech, business, & culture

News

• Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber,” has died in prison at 81. See Kevin Kelly’s summary of and rebuttal to his philosophy

Links

• Marc Andreessen on AI safety. Note what I highlighted and where I disagree
• Jacob Steinhardt predicts what will GPT look like in 2030
• What Lant Pritchett is for: productivity, state capability, education, labor mobility
• The Illusion of Moral Decline (via @a_m_mastroianni). One of many decline illusions
• The untold story of the precursors of the steam engine (by @antonhowes)
• Holden Karnofsky suggests “a playbook for AI risk reduction”
• Mark Lutter interview on his Caribbean charter city project (via @MarkLutter)
• Trailer for Nuclear Now, which is now on streaming platforms (via @oklo)
• Casey Handmer on why we don’t build underground. Building a road tunnel costs “$100,000 per meter, or equivalent to a stack of Hamiltons of the same length.” (!) Although I don’t know if Casey used Norway or Seattle figures
• Also Casey: 1 gram of stratospheric SO₂ offsets 1 ton of CO₂ for 1 year (!)
• “Existential Crunch” synthesizes research about social collapse (via @mattsclancy)
• Turnspit dogs (via @RebeccaRideal via @antonhowes)

Requests for books/sources on…

• How Moore’s Law actually happened?
• Related, the modern history of chips/AI?
• West Midlands in the Industrial Revolution and today?
• Programming design for Apollo 11?
• The history of commodities markets?
• The S&L crisis?

Other queries

• Who are the virtuosos of the ChatGPT form?
• What societies have successfully gone through degrowth? (If any…)
• Anecdotes of scientists eschewing management or calling for more autonomy?
• Term for the age you would have died at, if not for modern medicine?
• Best treatment of why actions often produce the opposite of the intended effect?
• How to square Cruise’s claim of 1 injury in first 1M driverless miles with SF’s claims? (Maybe three are actually Waymo, and none seem at-fault?)

Quotes

• “The flying machine is one of God’s most gracious and precious gifts”
• Admiral Rickover on academic reactors vs. practical reactors
• The stock ticker was the 19th-century equivalent of social media
• Straight, level roads were a new, non-obvious idea in the early 1800s
• How the precautionary principle became a weapon against new technology
• “Systems tend to malfunction conspicuously just after their greatest triumph”

Tweets & threads

• Cruise AVs learn to honk at human drivers to avoid collisions
• We have seen smoke blotting out the sky before, such as the “Dark Day” of 1780
• Bret Devereaux on what life was like as a typical Roman peasant. Among other things, children died young and yes, the parents mourned
• Author of “Mundanity of Excellence” responds to me on the value of talent
• “Progress studies showed me that ideas matter & can have true real world impact”
• A dam is sabotaged, and the main media concern is a nuclear plant at little risk
• The apathy that manifests when technology becomes invisible. Also, “pragmatic optimism” and “solutionism”
• What “consciousness-raising” feminism did and why it was necessary
• How well-intentioned government policy turns into implementation nightmares
• The O-1/EB-1 are underutilized by top talent and many get bad info about eligibility
• SF changes the planning code to reduce burden on shop owners
• Treatment effect? No, selection effect
• I oscillate between “everything is screwed up” and “screwed-up is normal”. Also, the minimum competence of professionals is much lower than you would hope
• You can do Scylla and Charybdis as emoji 🐉⛵️🌀
• 150 years after Darwin’s finches, a biology paper identified the protein that made their beaks different

• Infrastructure that looks like sci-fi

Maps & charts

• Holding period of stocks over time

• Revenue evolution for various industries

• When Singapore needs more land, it builds more

• It used to be hazardous to breathe outdoor air for much of the year