Links and tweets, 2022-12-29

by Jason Crawford · December 29, 2022 · 1 min read

Links

• City size is determined by transportation technology (Tomas Pueyo)

Tweets

• Did any sci-fi predict that when AI arrived, it would be unreliable, often illogical, and frequently bullshitting?
• Sam Altman: in the next decade the marginal cost of intelligence and of energy will trend to zero
• Where to, Mr. Chemist? “To a thousand untouched shores” (Du Pont, 1939)
• Longevity escape velocity
• Study by Philip Tetlock finds “a pervasive tendency… to see things as getting worse than they really are”
• “Scientists may find themselves reporting only successful experiments”

Quotes

• Sustainability is the disease, people are the cure
• For the first 40 years of photography, handheld cameras were impossible
• How communication and transportation networks help eliminate famine

Queries

• Data on European pipeline gas and storage? (@Atomicrod)

Retweets

• “Abundance is the only cure for scarcity… Everything else merely allocates scarcity” (@samhinkie, quoting @patio11)
• Converting coal plants into nuclear with small modular reactors. But: Congress ordered the NRC to provide a pathway for new reactors—and they made the process more burdensome (@AlecStapp)
• Photographer uses AI to generate image variations from his own photos (@jonst0kes)
• If you want home values to go up, you don’t want homes to be affordable (@JerusalemDemsas)
• The bureaucracy feedback loop, green card edition (@nabeelqu)
• How Theodor Engelmann demonstrated that chloroplasts are the site of oxygen production in plants (@strandbergbio)

Comment: Progress Forum, LessWrong, Reddit