Links and tweets, 2023-06-21

Stewart Brand wants your comments

by Jason Crawford · June 21, 2023 · 1 min read

Opportunities

• Dwarkesh Patel is hiring a COO for his podcast, The Lunar Society
• Join a new campaign for nuclear regulatory reform (via @BuildNuclearNow)

Announcements

• Stewart Brand is serializing his book on Maintenance and inviting your comments
• Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization, a new book by Ed Conway (via @lewis_dartnell). Conway also has a blog
• Dan Romero is offering Twitter subscriptions, will donate it to The Roots of Progress (thank you, Dan!)
• The OpenAI API now supports function calling (via @gdb)
• Waymo now covers all of San Francisco 24/7

Links

• A coffee mug full of nucleic acids could store all the data from the last two years
• Why Mark Lutter is building a 21st Century Renaissance charter city in the Caribbean (via @JeffJMason). A followup to the interview in last week’s digest

Queries

• A curriculum that motivates science through engineering/technology projects?
• Who should Anastasia talk to at the forefront of ambitious cardiology research?
• What’s the earliest depiction of nuclear waste as green ooze in a drum?
• Books on all things economics & finance? Seeking a really wide overview

Quotes

• Speculation from 1900 about how short skirts might help prevent disease
• A complaint about tech stagnation… from 1926

Tweets & threads

• AI “decelerationists”
• The “good old days” of anything was always 50 years ago (via @johanknorberg)
• The experiment that measured the rotation speed of ATP synthase
• Should we destroy all malaria-carrying mosquitoes now?
• ChatGPT seems to have gotten worse? (Not the only similar comments I’ve seen)
• “I am only afraid of death since I became convinced that it is optional”
• The O-1 and EB-1 are wildly underused visa categories for top talent
• Individualized education will reduce variance at the bottom but increase it at the top
• Lectures are better than “interactive discussions”
• When Lydia Williams died at age 43 in 1858, only five of her ten children were still alive. “Of all 10, just two survived to adulthood. This used to be normal”

Comment: Progress Forum, LessWrong, Reddit