wlxd
2yr ago
And yet, after 60 years, despite the truly massive advances in both hardware and software represented by projects like stable diffusion Minsky's problem remains far from solved.
What sort of advancement would you need to call this problem "close to solved"? What kind of abilities would the models need to have? Can you give a few examples?
wlxd
2yr ago
None of the reserves in Western Europe are viable at current prices. In practice any Uranium used in Western Europe would probably be imported.
Of course you’d want to buy cheapest product you can get, but that is orthogonal to the concern /u/Southkraut raised, which is whether this would make you dependent on foreign sources of uranium. If you could mine your own uranium, at even twice the cost, you are not really depend on imports, and the final energy price will not even go up all that much.
wlxd
2yr ago
Gravity storage with water as a medium is actually quite practical, and there are plenty of operational sites already, some with GWhs worth of capacity. You don’t have to lift 1 kg of water 4000 kms, you can instead lift 40 000 kg of water by 1000 meters.
This is practical and done in production, the problem is that you need a lot of water, and a lot of space to store this water in two separate reservoirs, which also need substantial difference in altitude. Because of this, it simply doesn’t scale: good sites are already mostly used, and we can’t build many more.
Synthetic hydrocarbons would make excellent store of energy, being very dense and already integrated in existing economy. The problem with those, though, is that the round-trip efficiency is really bad.
wlxd
2yr ago
This is not a “water tower at sea”. This is something different, actually quite smarter. I read their paper, and it doesn’t seem as immediately impractical as “water tower at sea” would, though it is still very much impractical.
According to their own analysis, the construction cost is something like 2-3x the cost of LiIon batteries per kWh. It’s something like $8M for storage equivalent to 2 minutes of operation of a single coal power plant. To build enough storage to replace one coal power plant for base load for half a day, you would need to build 400 of these, at a cost of $3.2B dollars. Coincidentally, this is about as much as it costs to build a nuclear power plant reactor of a similar size, which will keep generating the energy after the deep sea storage solution runs out of juice in 12 hours.
wlxd
2yr ago
It’s basically impossible to make a closed loop hydro system with practical capacity. You need constant water replenishment. You’ll be losing 10-30 cm of water per month to evaporation and seepage, depending on weather and soil condition. Without plentiful source of water, this is not viable.
And if we exhaust THOSE, water towers at sea
This one is extremely impractical, which you’d see if you even did a back of a napkin estimate. The fact that you mention this implies that you did zero legwork to verify if your ideas have even modicum of practicality.
wlxd
2yr ago
I read Cribsheet, and while I wouldn’t exactly say I trust her, I can say that she is way more diligent, honest, and scientifically minded than most. She approaches the evidence with appropriate amount of skepticism, and is aware of many common pitfalls in scientific reasoning. I would definitely recommend her, but I still recommend using your own judgement as well, especially in areas where the social desirability bias is particularly strong.
wlxd
2yr ago
You are evading my repeated question, and unlike me, who asks for public messaging, instead ask me to give you an example of some private person’s tragedy, of a kind that mainstream media would not want to cover, as it goes against the narrative. This is in itself very telling.
wlxd
2yr ago
I know that. Do the victims of the trangenderists know that? Can you point me to an example or two of clear messaging, saying that you can only take “puberty blockers” for a limited period of time before it will lead to irreversible outcomes, with some clarity on how long is this limited period?
wlxd
2yr ago
nobody who claims blockers are reversible would claim they're reversible after 50, they're claiming blockers are reversible within the bounds of normal use, delaying puberty for a few years.
No, that’s not what they claim. I address that down the comment. They claim that it is reversible, full stop. They do not claim that they are reversible for a while until they aren’t, and if you miss this highly vague moment, your maturation will be screwed up forever.
You are of course welcome to point out to me explicit examples of messaging coming from pro child sex modification activists that taking puberty for longer than.. what exactly? (nobody really knows) will cause irreversible damage to the maturation process of your body. I have never seen this.
wlxd
2yr ago
I remember sitting at the table with an M.D. who's doing some kind of fellowship at Harvard and hearing her say airily, "Yeah, blockers are safe and totally reversible." Even with my rudimentary freshman bio understanding, this never sounded plausible to me.
Indeed, this is extremely implausible a priori, and so people repeating this must have crimestop in their mind preventing them from doing any thinking on the subject at all.
The image I have in my mind is this: we have someone who is taking “puberty blocker” from age 10 to age forty 50. He never went through puberty as a teenager (or at least, I am led to believe this is the outcome of taking these drugs). Because of this, he now looks and behaves as… well, definitely not a middle aged male. Am I really expected to believe that once he stops taking these drugs, he goes through normal puberty at 50, and his body ends up the same as if he never took these drugs, and went through puberty around 15? This is simply ludicrous on its face.
Or, even better, consider a woman in post menopausal age, who finally gets off puberty blockers. Will she now finally begin menstruating, and be able to bear normal children? Highly unlikely.
I would expect the typical retort to this from pro sex modification side to be “but you are not supposed to take this drugs for so long”, which is a tacit admission that the effects of these drugs are only reversible for so long, until they aren’t. This much makes sense, but then repeating the mantra that they are reversible without saying loudly that this is true only if you stop taking them until they are no longer reversible (which might very well only be a couple of doses!) is criminally deceptive.
wlxd
2yr ago
Gary Marcus
Wait, what? Wasn’t his shtick that GPT, DALL-E, etc are very stupid and not worth much? That there is no genuine intelligence there because it cannot draw a horse riding an astronaut, or solve some simple logic puzzle? Now he is so concerned about the capabilities that he wants a moratorium? Is there some sort of post somewhere where he explains why he got it so wrong?
wlxd
2yr ago
I have never been to a drag show, but as I understand it, classic drag shows are guys dressed as Marilyn Monroe singing show tunes.
Only time I was at a drag show was when I was getting shitfaced with my mates at DNA Lounge during a bachelor party, and suddenly, a bunch of drags went on stage and started squirting the crowd with milk from their huge-ass fake breasts.
Now, a night club like DNA Lounge is obviously not going to have children present, but drug shows appealing to prurient interest is very much not something of an exception: if you follow right wing Twitter accounts, you'll see sexually explicit clips of drag shows with children in audience on a regular basis.
Kids being demoralized by the tens of millions by reading Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers is a bridge we can cross when or if we ever come to it.
I find this to be supremely amusing, because in the country I grew up, this was in fact a mandatory reading in every single high school, as set by the Ministry of Education, which fixes the syllabus across the entire country.
I won't say that everyone actually reads the whole thing (I gave up halfway through, and skipped to the end to enjoy reading about how he offs himself, which was a consolation to me for suffering the first half), but the national equivalent of the SAT exam very much assumes your familiarity with this work. For example, in 2018, half a million of high schoolers were expected to read a fragment in which Werther recounts his meeting with Albert, during which he broke the first rule of gun safety (by putting it against his own head), and, based on this, and your knowledge of relations between Werther and Albert, write an essay describing potential causes of lack of mutual understanding between people.
Thanks for reminding me about it -- now, half a life later, I actually I want to reread it, to see if added life experience will change my perception of the work.
wlxd
2yr ago
Why would anyone take a 15 minute bike ride to the closest supermarket?
The context of the discussion was kids living allegedly isolated lives in the suburbs. We don't expect kids to drive, but they very much can and should bike. Adults will, of course, just drive.
wlxd
2yr ago
This is not Europe, this is everywhere. As for explanation, I like how Charles Murray's wife has put it:
We decide exactly what we're hungry for and make it for dinner, every day, from a far longer list of favorites than people had 60 years ago. The perfect way to generate weight gain. And we are not alone.
Even if you refrain from eating snacks or sweets (and these also have been extremely optimized for palatability, with many different local maximums to choose from), we are no longer constrained by difficulty of obtaining ingredients, or cost for normal breakfast/lunch/dinner sort of food. Everything is available close by (or can be ordered online), and everything is very cheap relative to our incomes.
wlxd
2yr ago
Except, of course, the ones who were evicted to have their homes razed to build those lanes.
First, this is not something that routinely happens for traffic mitigation projects. Second, people who get eminent domained are compensated for this, typically more than their house is actually worth. Third, this is just as much of an argument against densification, upzoning, and public transit: those also displace people.
infrastructure that the suburbs can't afford and need subsidies for.
Somehow I knew without clicking that this will be a link to Strongtowns. I knew it, because nobody else is making this argument, and this is because their entire argument is completely bogus. I wrote about it years ago, see also this more detailed one.
Here's one more reason why it's entirely wrong: observe that every year, dozens of new master planned communities crop up. The development of these is basically entirely funded by the sale of the properties. The developers can't just come to some adjacent or local government and ask them to just build roads, water mains, electricity lines etc. This is not paid for by "someone else", it's the homeowners themselves who cover all of this cost, when they initially buy their new construction houses, and then later when they pay property taxes and/or HOA fees. Local governments do not build stuff for the developers, typically they actually ask developers to pay extra taxes and fees, labelled as "impact fees" and such.
At some point the harm from the externalities starts to outweigh the benefit of people living "where they want to live"
What externalities, exactly? On whom they fall? Where is the assessment that honestly tries to measure these, balance positive vs negative externalities, and compares to the balance of externalities of any alternatives? I've never seen anything of this sort, at best I see tendentious, motivated reasoning of the StrongTowns variety, one sided assessments that only calculate costs, do little to actually determine who pays these costs, and does not even attempt to assess the benefits.
wlxd
2yr ago
So when you add lanes, more people get to live where they want to live. Isn’t it great?
wlxd
2yr ago
What about most normal suburbs, which were built way after streetcars left the living memory, and still allow kids to bike to a store?
This conversation is revolving around some archetypes, but why don’t we focus on a specific example? For example, let’s focus on DC metro mentioned by /u/ResoluteRaven. How far do we have to go from the White House to find a place that’s more than 15 minute bicycle ride to closest supermarket?
wlxd
2yr ago
Sure, I don’t dispute that places like that exist, but if the argument is “some far exurbs are too remote for kids to even bike to the store”, then it is much different than claiming that this is a typical suburban experience, that it is hell for kids, and we need to change zoning rules across the board to fix it.
wlxd
2yr ago
That’a certainly one of the drawbacks, but it’s also worth considering this in both historical and global contexts.
From historical perspective, Americans have been driving a lot for many decades now, but obesity rates have only shot through the roof relatively recently. This means that other factors contributing to obesity might have much bigger impact than driving.
Second, it is worth observing that European countries, which allegedly are more walkable, and where people drive less, are rather quickly catching up to obesity rates of Americans. The upward trend is clear and is not looking like it is plateauing in most countries. See eg. Germany or UK.
wlxd
2yr ago
I have lived in Seattle metro for a couple of years, and I am yet to encounter a location within it which is more than 15 minutes bicycle ride from a normal grocery store. I just tried to find one using Google Maps, and only places I can find are at the very edges of farthest exurbs.
My experience with suburbs is exactly the same as /u/TIRM . Ability to form social relationship with your neighbors, and for your kids to play outside with other kids is one of the things that’s attracting people to suburbs, not repelling them!
wlxd
2yr ago
No, the 100th family is just going to move somewhere else.
You are using terms originating from economic theory, but you have an apparent lack of understanding what these terms mean, given that you describe reality which simply does not exist.
wlxd
2yr ago
J.R.R. Tolkien, back in his mostly ethnically homogenous home before any real science on intelligence was done
In the 60s, when this letter was apparently written, real science on intelligence has most certainly already been done. This was already decades after Galton, Spearman, Cattell, Terman, just to name a few. Just read the Jensen’s seminal article of 1969, and observe that by then, most of our current understanding of intelligence has already been established. We already knew about positive manifold, g-factor, heritability, polygenicity, impact of assortative mating, inbreeding depression, adoption studies, twin studies (including twins reared apart, he quotes a study from 1937), and, ultimately, race gaps and the fundamental constant of sociology.
In fact, I can scarcely come up with something that’s really material to our today’s understanding of intelligence, but has not been known already and mentioned by Jensen in 1969. Only thing that comes to my mind is Flynn effect, but this one is, arguably, quite irrelevant for most intents and purposes (because Flynn gains are hollow, so they do not represent material differences in intelligence, and are rather mostly indicative of the deficiency of our research tools). Really, since then we have mostly just been filling the gaps using better data and better statistical methods.
wlxd
2yr ago
The burden of proof is on people calling for regulation and complaining about SVB lobbying to actually show that the stress tests they were allegedly exempt of would actually have prevented the situation. Otherwise, this is just pure partisanship without any substance: if you claim the problem here is lack of regulation and stress test, you better show that what you propose is more than empty quasi-religious ritual to appease the regulation gods, and that it would actually causally achieve substantial outcome.
Caplan had a very strong incentive to fail the AI. He publicly bet against AI passing his exams a few years back. He has a very long and unbroken streak of victorious bets, and it looks like this one is the first one that he will actually lose.
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