Every time jamming defeats drones in the Russia-Ukraine war, the case gets stronger for full autonomy. Once a drone can carry out its mission without communication, it can't be stopped by jamming. Fully autonomous drone warfare seems inevitable.

Our reputation as a leader in technology & innovation is because we embrace new ideas & serve as a sanctuary for research & development. With the slowest post-COVID economic recovery of any major US city, we shouldn't over regulate an industry so early. nytimes.com/2024/08/14/tec…

Quite a weird error message to get inside my text editor while I was sitting there doing nothing. Surprisingly enough, following the link made it perfectly clear to me what was going on.

New plan: eat so many brownies I defeat climate change

This fall, our society is starting a large-scale Turing test. Thousands of students taking media studies classes will write essays for their homework. Thousands of other students will use ChatGPT to write those essays. Can their professors tell the difference?

The mistake here is thinking that if you prevent large companies from working on open source software, it only hurts large companies. When you stop open source software, you hurt everyone who would be using it. Startups, academics, and individuals.

Good example of when prediction markets go wrong. 1. Emotional issue which brings in irrational bettors 2. High risk of “insider information”, which discourages rational bettors (even if nobody actually has insider info)

I guess the British still have difficulty with such abstract thinking

Founder mode, in the 1850's

Is there important but lost knowledge? Something that some segment of people used to know, or used to be able to do, that now we don’t or can’t?

SB 1446 would essentially ban self-checkout in California.

What if a Moore's law happened for military drones? Every few years, you get twice as many of them for the same price. Eventually there would be more drones than people. Instead of "zone defense", you'd have "man to man". Each person with a drone tracking them.

In 1812, the largest American company besides banks was a fur company.

Which would be a better political system: A. Two random Americans are chosen as presidential candidates. Then people vote like they do now, to decide the winner. B. The Republican and Democratic candidates are picked like they are now. Then the winner is decided by a coin flip.

One day the sky will be another screen, every pixel filled by drones.

Reading a book translated from French, I was first puzzled and then entertained to read the word “gigaoctet”

Reading about the 1980 elections, it seems clear that we’re still missing something. How exactly did the race go from tossup to Reagan landslide? I wish we had prediction markets back then, that could now offer us more historical clarity.

The o1 model is evidence against the "bitter lesson". It's better at some things than others, and is not simply a scaling up of GPT-4. The right idea is the "boring lesson" - scaling up is good, but better algorithms are also good, and the right mix depends on the problem.