Links for 2023-07-21
Energy Startup Says It Has Achieved Geothermal Tech Breakthrough https://fervoenergy.com/fervo-energy-announces-technology-breakthrough-in-next-generation-geothermal/
A Vast Untapped Green Energy Source Is Hiding Beneath Your Feet https://www.wired.com/story/a-vast-untapped-green-energy-source-is-hiding-beneath-your-feet/ [https://archive.is/4Jpq0]
The sun beneath our feet: Crustal thermal energy reserves are estimated to be at 15 million zetajoules. To put this in perspective, there is "23,800 times as much geothermal energy in Earth’s crust as there is chemical energy in fossil fuels everywhere on the planet". And even if you include the planet’s reserves of uranium, seawater uranium, lithium, thorium, there is still "41 times as much crustal thermal energy than energy in all those sources combined." https://www.elidourado.com/p/geothermal
Update on the paper claiming that GPT-4 got worse over time (no evidence of capability degradation): 1. A new paper going viral has been widely misinterpreted https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/is-gpt-4-getting-worse-over-time 2. “June GPT-4 started surrounding code with ```python markdown, which you didn't strip. I forked your code, removed that markdown, and re-submitted the output to Leetcode for judging. Now the June version does significantly better than the march version of GPT-4.” https://twitter.com/Si_Boehm/status/1681801371656536068
Towards A Unified Agent with Foundation Models: "Language Models and Vision Language Models have recently demonstrated unprecedented capabilities in terms of understanding human intentions, reasoning, scene understanding, and planning-like behaviour, in text form, among many others. In this work, we investigate how to embed and leverage such abilities in Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents." https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.09668
Why AI doctors should not be FDA regulated https://moreisdifferent.substack.com/p/why-ai-doctors-should-not-be-fda
“The application of physics-informed neural nets enables an estimation of the solar coronal magnetic field in quasi-real-time. Comparison to EUV observations reveals a realistic approximation & clear relationship with flaring activity.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-023-02030-9
“San Francisco officials and supervisors are lying about self driving cars, a technology home-grown in SF that will save millions of lives.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjgUPUKD-Sc
Graphic notes on Gilbert Strang's "Linear Algebra for Everyone" book. https://github.com/kenjihiranabe/The-Art-of-Linear-Algebra
“Principia Qualia, by Michael Johnson, is a long document describing an approach to theorizing about and studying consciousness. I have heard enough positive things about the document to consider it worth reviewing.” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nurQ3X2oRH4Ms7YKi/a-review-of-principia-qualia
A video about the evolution of cooperation, from cells to civilizations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bbwp4PbWYzw
Singapore has less policy accumulation https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/07/singapore-has-less-policy-accumulation.html
This is your regular reminder of the actions that should be taken by people who believe that climate change is a serious problem:
1. Immediately begin building as many nuclear power plants as possible and invest heavily in next-generation nuclear and geothermal power research.
2. Research and create plants that are genetically modified to be drought and heat resistant.
3. Build lots of dikes to protect infrastructure and people from rising sea levels.
4. Make cities resistant to flooding by improving drainage systems, building flood barriers, and equipping buildings with backflow prevention devices and watertight doors.
5. Prevent wildfires by clearing underbrush and building camera masts that rise above the treetops, automatically detecting smoke and alerting local fire departments so that any fire can be smothered before it gets out of control.
6. Build and subsidize air conditioning in buildings to protect the elderly and vulnerable.
And here is what people should also do if they believe that climate change is an existential risk:
7. Research and then mass produce portable air conditioning.
8. Invest heavily in geoengineering research.
9. Massively invest in research into how to cheaply build large numbers of [underground] vertical farms [powered by geothermal energy] and genetically engineered crops optimized for such an environment.
Very little of the above is advocated by people who claim to believe that climate change could endanger human civilization. Ask yourself why this is so.
Over the course of human evolutionary history, there may have been some independent-minded women who thought things through and decided to avoid the pain and risks of motherhood. These women are not our ancestors.
— Lesley Newson and Peter Richerson in A Story of Us, A New Look at Human Evolution
Checkmate, infinite ethicists!
Unironically, this is why we will still prefer certain actions to others, even if it objectively doesn't matter.