ghostcluster's comments

OpenAI has the best cross-thread memory system in ChatGPT amongst all the frontier LLMs and it's not even close.

It's not just weight loss that Ozempic and the other GLP-1 drugs encourage. They also help people stop drinking to excess, and help lower pangs for other harmful drugs like heroin.

I believe that these attributes are so promising, that the idea of government subsidized Ozempic just seems like great domestic policy to me. I believe that whichever politician pitches this idea first will get a ton of support from the public and the press.

It feels to me like another one of Elon's stubborn whims. Sometimes these result in great innovations, like Tesla's giant car part 'gigacasting'. Other times, they result in deciding to rename Twitter "X" and forcing a team of engineers to spend over a year combing meticulously through the codebase to remove all references to "twitter.com"

My guess is that most of their ad business relations are managed out of their New York offices, and ads being the overwhelming majority of Twitter revenue, that's where he is now.

Pretty gruesome reading.

I had never heard of this either:

> During the final months of World War II, codenamed Cherry Blossoms at Night, the plan of Unit 731 was to use kamikaze pilots to infest San Diego, California, with the plague. The plan was scheduled to launch on 22 September 1945, but Japan surrendered five weeks earlier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731#Biological_warfare

Staffing humans on the moon requires efficiencies and innovation in rocket launches, landing, inhospitable settlement, and transport of goods and people between the Earth's surface and the moon.

It is a good stepping stone towards further exploration farther out.

My great hope in these cold war-esque times of tension between China, Russia, and the US is that the field of battle becomes competition in Great Achievements for science, engineering, and space exploration.

Permanent human-staffed moonbases are a good goal to strive towards.

Chrome is still the most popular desktop browser in China by far, and has a significant chunk of the mobile market.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/china

MIT Technology Review interviewed the new CEO recently:

> Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation and our moves are reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation. The kinds of things that we do about this is, focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed. One of the changes today that we see is speech is easy on the internet. Most people can speak. Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard. The scarce commodity today is attention. There's a lot of content out there. A lot of tweets out there, not all of it gets attention, some subset of it gets attention. And so increasingly our role is moving towards how we recommend content and that sort of, is, is, a struggle that we're working through in terms of how we make sure these recommendation systems that we're building, how we direct people's attention is leading to a healthy public conversation that is most participatory.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/11/18/1012066/emtech-s...

Sounds like he advocates an emphasis on how to algorithmically "guide" the conversation and shape public opinion....

> Around the same time that Kambhampati’s latest application was turned down, another arm of the government, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, gave Dr. Lana Ray, a professor at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ont., a $1.2-million grant to study cancer prevention using traditional Indigenous healing practices. When the award was announced, Ray said “We need to stop framing prevalent risk factors of cancer as such and start thinking about them as symptoms of colonialism.”

By way of comparison, China has administered at least 2,232,088,000 doses of COVID vaccines so far

https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m...

And Xi has consolidated power and purged all competent up-and-coming potential successors that threaten this power. He shepherded through a modification in Chinese law to allow him to serve for life. Previously, the vaunted governing expertise inside the CCP had an age cap for its leaders. Not inspiring much confidence in their system.

https://in.news.yahoo.com/xi-jinping-undertakes-fresh-round-...

Another thing that doesn't inspire much confidence is looking at Hong Kong. The people there have unambiguously and collectively spoken about their desire to live under this system, often at grave personal risk.

China's carbon emissions are still growing and even by their own forecasts won't stop for at least another ten years. I think it's premature to take them at their word when they've been so publicly dishonest in other arenas.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/World_fo...

The problem is a benevolent dictator only lasts part of one lifetime. Then you have to deal with the problem of succession, which in a dictatorship likely means unpredictable chaos

China isn't ignoring climate change in their rhetoric. What they are actually doing is building record amounts of coal power plants, right now, this year.

https://www.wired.com/story/china-is-still-building-an-insan...

The US' greenhouse emissions peaked years ago and have been in steady decline. China is the #1 emitter, #1 coal consumer, and building record amounts of new coal domestically. And not just in China, but all over the developing world through their Belt and Road program.

Nuclear Winter was the scenario most widely used to justify a hypothetical total worldwide collapse, but we now know that this particular scenario is unlikely, even in the case of the most violent possible global exchange.

In my mind, the most likely candidate for a nuclear war right now comes in a chaotic escalation of the conflict between Pakistan and India. I think this scenario would be horrible, but its damage to the rest of the world's supply chains? Probably less than COVID?

The other conflict that worries me is a major provocation by China towards Taiwan. This is the foreign policy scenario that frightens me most, and feels like the most likely potential 'Franz Ferdinand execution'-type event that could lead to a global world war. But in such a war, would we be likely to see a total nuclear back-and-forth between factions? I think this is less likely than in current day India v. Pakistan. But I could be totally wrong. As Francis Fukuyama illustrates, it's hard to predict future foreign policy scenarios with any accuracy.

Between the Kuwaiti oil fires of the first gulf war, and many more country-sized forest fire events, we've learned that Nuclear Winter is not a likely scenario. In fact, the very scientists who coined the term in the 1980s have backed away from it.

Nuclear war would be awful, and certainly the radioactive fallout would be bad, and the damage to thriving historical cities, not to mention the human toll. But extinction level? Unlikely.

One thing this pandemic has taught me is the resilience of the modern supply chain to huge unexpected disruption. It's much stronger in that dimension than I initially feared in early March.

It is not the present social dynamic that creates these "preferences".

This set of characteristics has evolved over millions of years, beginning before humans had even branched off the evolutionary tree.

> In a study of 34 rhesus monkeys, for example, males strongly preferred toys with wheels over plush toys, whereas females found plush toys likable. It would be tough to argue that the monkeys’ parents bought them sex-typed toys or that simian society encourages its male offspring to play more with trucks.

I'd urge anyone who's questioning this to read the overview of the science from Stanford's School of Medicine: https://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-...

It seems these researchers have potentially zeroed in on the specific neural regulatory system behind the adage that 'you can't teach an old dog new tricks'.

That they are able to administer drugs to manipulate the gradual deadening of this risk/reward learning mechanism is incredibly cool. I wonder if there is an adaptive reason for this circuitry to cool with age, and if there will be any serious unintended side effects from artificially boosting it. In any case, this new finding is exciting, with potentially broad applications for future medicine, and the tantalizing ability for more people to continue to live life to the fullest in older age.