thejdizzler
2d ago
The average finishing time for most marathons is in the high fours. So it's not awful, but it's not good.
Wow, I'm hoping it's the jet lag, but my Spanish speaking ability hasn't been doing great on this trip so far. V depressing. Hanging out with some people more one on one in the next few days, so hoping it's just jet lag+ anxiety + not knowing the customary short greetings.
Edit: Update it's the jet lag. Much better today and yesterday.
thejdizzler
3d ago
I love IJ as well. Apparently the footnotes are to simulate a tennis match. Talk about pissing off the reader. I wrote a large review of the book here, and would love to discuss with you.
https://deusexvita.substack.com/p/review-12-of-2024-infinite-jest
Temple of Debod is closed right now, but I'll head to the churches for sure. Have a ticket for all three of the art museums, and am going to go to Toledo and El Escorial for the day sometime this week.
thejdizzler
3d ago
Yes! It's been a revelation so far, although that's probably just the jetlag+ anxiety!
thejdizzler
7d ago
I’m there for a week before I go with my family to visit our extended family in north England. I haven’t made a detailed itinerary because that feels too much like work. Have a few restaurants and museums I want to go to, a run club on Wednesday night (classic Spaniards not even starting until 8pm) and day trips to Toledo and Él Escorial).
thejdizzler
7d ago
Anyone on this forum live in Madrid and want to meet up next week? I’ll be in the city from 15-22.
thejdizzler
10d ago
Okay but AI can't break the laws of physics. We just hit peak copper, have been at peak oil for 5 years, and the Co2 that we've added to the atmosphere has already caused the planet to warm by 1.5 C. We know what the solutions to these problems are, we just can't do them. I guess AI can help psyop these things but that's not a positive development.
thejdizzler
11d ago
Guess I’m curious about the timing. When are you eating these meals?
thejdizzler
11d ago
Can I get more specifics about your IF practice? Wondering if this will help me lose weight without experiencing cravings
thejdizzler
11d ago
Why? You’ll be dead and humans probably won’t exist anymore, or have existed for millions of years
thejdizzler
12d ago
See this is why I can't take space colonization advocates seriously anymore: you're extrapolating from trends on earth that have no real analogy in space. Colonizing space looks absolutely nothing like either the British Empire or Julius Caesar invading Britain because in both of those scenarios the various groups involved don't have to bring every single thing they need for their survival with them. There's just no real pressing reason to go to space: there's nothing super valuable we could get there that we can't get on earth for much cheaper (filtering sea water is probably cheaper than asteroid mining), if we really needed living space, seasteads or even colonies on Antartica would be far easier to supply and to make self-sufficient, yet we have done neither.
There are just certain things that are physically impossible and/or biologically impossible that will never come to pass. No one "has to" colonize space. We have no evidence of extraterrestrial space colonization (the Fermi paradox isn't a paradox if space colonization isn't biologically possible). You are giving evolution far too much credit. There are some boundaries that have never been crossed here on Earth in 4.2 billion years of life existing, there's no reason to think that life would necessarily be able to make it into space and expand throughout the universe. This is more of a reflection of our Faustian culture rather than of how life actually works. Life can just end with the sun evaporating the oceans on earth, and that's probably what will happen.
Current space exploration efforts are almost entirely the result of the one time fossil fuel burst we had as a civilization. We still haven't returned to the moon since the 70s, and the ISS was built in the early 2000s. We haven't made serious attempts at space colonization, other than a few probes, since Apollo. Yes SpaceX has made great strides in increasing efficiency and decreasing launch costs, but the vast vast majority of those launches are for satellites, not humans because there aren't actually that many reasons to go to space.
thejdizzler
12d ago
I'm pretty sure we are at Peak Oil right now. We've been on a long plateau since about ~2018 and certainly since 2022.
Pretty sure you're right about oil reserves, but you're missing the EROEI part: a lot of that oil requires a lot of energy to extract, meaning that we are effectively getting less net oil than we used to be because it takes more energy to get oil out of fracking or tar sands than it does out of gushers in Texas and PA. Of course if we have fusion this doesn't matter, but I have yet to see convincing evidence that we will ever have fusion.
thejdizzler
12d ago
Intellectually I really like Nate Hagens and Erald Kolasi on the energy front. I feel like both of them are genuinely trying to find a way that humans can flourish and make it through our current list of challenges.
In sport, I like a lot of what I'm seeing out of Norwegian triathlon (Kristian Blumenfelt, Gustav Iden, etc.) and Nils van Der Pol (speed skating olympic champion and world record holder).
thejdizzler
12d ago
Man I love that song. We used to sing it at summer camp when I was a kid not understanding any of the innuendos.
thejdizzler
12d ago
Looks like I'm wrong about Russia! They have actually an increasing share of nuclear power as a percentage of total electricity mix and are building a number of new power plants that will be online later this decade!
Quadruple nuclear still puts China at only 20% of electricity from nuclear which is comparable to Russia right now. This does represent a big difference from the US still, but I'm not sure it will be enough. What we need to start seeing is a decline in the total amount of fossil energy in the electricity mix, which we haven't even seen in Russia. I actually don't think we've seen this anywhere except for maybe Germany/UK, but the renewable buildout in those locations has obvious problems of intermittency.
Nuclear is better than I thought though, so I stand corrected.
thejdizzler
12d ago
I'm not sure I believe that regulation is the reason why we don't have fission. US has more fission power by GW than China and so does France. France's electricity mix is actually 70% fission and is dealing with various climate change related problems such as being unable to run the reactors in the summer because the water level is so low in the various inflow rivers to the nuclear power plants can't be used for steam generation. Even with a government that doesn't give a shit about safety regulations (China and the Soviet Union) fission clearly actually isn't that effective of a technology. Fission has actually declined as a share of China's energy mix recently (probably because of build out of solar), so I have a hard time believing it is a wunderkind energy source. @FirmWeird has posted a lot about this in this in the past.
I should clarify my view on AI. I don't disagree with any of your points, but I don't think AI will be materially transformative in the way that people seem to think around here. It's all incremental improvement (and destruction). It's not going to solve the energy crisis or help us discover genuine new knowledge.
In the long run it's also not going to last. We are going to run out of cheap energy or AI is going to rot everyone's brains enough that it can't self perpetuate.
thejdizzler
12d ago
Sure, that seems like a good replacement for lithium actually! However, we still will have issues with copper supplies (although I suppose with unlimited energy you can just mine that from sea water) and rare earth minerals that are necessary for other electronics.
thejdizzler
12d ago
Sovietistan. Norwegian journalist visits ex-Soviet Central Asia. A little annoying in some ways (she's a pushy liberal that's shocked by people not giving a fuck about democracy), but it's been really cool to learn about a part of the world that I didn't know anything about before.
Based on an exchange in the main thread, I've been reminded by how different some of the views I hold on technological progress are from the rest of this forum (and I suppose society in general). I don't think we will ever colonize space (and have started to view people who take space colonization seriously in a negative light), AI will be an expensive nothinburger, and we will spend our lives in an environment of declining energy availability and increasing ecological catastrophe. I'm not full doomer by any means, but I find the vague nature that many on the forum treat the material basis of our reality to be baffling. One of the best and most palatable speakers I find on this topic is Nate Hagens and his Great Simplification podcast. Every week he has a variety of guests on the show that deal with various aspects of our predicament, many of whom strongly disagree with him. I would really recommend that almost everyone here check him out.
What views do you hold that you feel are orthogonal to most people on this forum (or society at large)? Who is the best speaker/writer that you feel like captures your point of view?
thejdizzler
12d ago
Sometimes I forget how much of a different information world that I seem to live in than a large part of this forum.
In what world are we nearing "escape velocity on energy"? We are not particularly close to fusion: there have been recent advances, but the EROI is still less than 1, and this is with a calculation that doesn't include the construction of the reactor or obtaining tritium (note that current fusion reactors only work with tritium to start the reaction, which is exceedingly rare in nature). Even if we were close, we'd have to have a massive buildout of new reactors in a declining energy environment (fossil fuel extraction is level or declining, which is not a good sign for the future of energy, even if reserves are large). Even if we do somehow manage a soviet style five-year plan buildout of reactors across the globe, there is still the electrification problem. Most of the global transportation fleet, heavy industry, and mining equipment currently requires fossil fuel usage. Many of these have electric alternatives, but again replacement takes time, and metal supplies that we do not have on earth (Simon Michaux calculated that current estimated lithium reserves are not sufficient to even replace the global fleet of personal transportation vehicles with electric cars).
So basically consider me very skeptical that your suggested way to avoid Peak Oil relies on a technology that doesn't exist yet (and may never exist), a rapid buildout that has never been done before in history that relies on declining reserves of metals and fossil fuels.
thejdizzler
12d ago
I think that philosophy is silly. AI is still going to be materially constrained. The energy has to come from somewhere.
thejdizzler
12d ago
How is it meaningless? Being off by a decade or two is not a huge deal in terms of miscalculations because the end result for the oil industry and its dependents is the same: phasing out of fossil fuels and a probable decline in EROI and QOL for most of the globe.
Cool writeup! Almost sold me on this, but I think it'll interfere with running!
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