Good tokens 2025-01-10
A message from my sponsor:
OceanMade has announced pre sales of its Kelp Pots. These seed starter pots use kelp pulp to retain water instead of the traditional peat. The kelp pulp used in these pots is a byproduct of Macro Oceans beauty ingredient, Big Kelp Hydration. I’ve gotten a chance to see some of these up close and I’m really excited to see them coming together. It’s a small example of a big dream: using traceable, ocean farmed kelp products as an alternative to higher impact terrestrial sources. Due check them out if you’re a gardener.
Worth your time
Michael Lewis’s story about Chris Marks, a public servant who “led the development of industry-wide standards and practices to prevent roof falls in underground mines, leading to the first year (2016) of no roof fall fatalities in the United States”, is fantastic. Some gems:
At the height of the Vietnam War, a coal miner was nearly as likely to be killed on the job as an American soldier in uniform was to die in combat, and far more likely to be injured. (And that didn’t include some massive number of deaths that would one day follow from black lung disease.)
And
People facing a complicated problem measure whatever they can easily measure. But the measurements by themselves don’t lead to understanding.
And
Roof bolts were indeed more efficient and effective than timber supports in preventing chunks of roof from wounding miners. But they were expensive to install. The coal mine companies had, in effect, figured out how few roof bolts they needed to use to maintain the same level of risk their miners had endured before their invention
Materials we have run out of by Ed Conway
Noah Smith on Japanese urbanism. Having zones that restrict certain activities rather than prescribe what can be done seems like a small change with a big impact.
From Zheng Dong Wang’s fabulous 2024 letter:
The first awesome conclusion of the model does the eval is that we will achieve every evaluation we can state. Recall that evaluations must be legible, fast, and either a good approximation of a wanted capability or useful itself.
And:
Two years ago, ~Demis Hassabis enumerated~ three properties of problems suitable for AI: a massive combinatorial search space, a clear objective function to optimize against, and lots of data or an efficient simulator.
Things I learned
Chicken tikka masala originated in Scotland; kilts did not — Jason Crawford
Squirrels are becoming carnivorous — Smithsonian Magazine
All of the world’s gold is estimated to fit in one 20 meter cube — BBC
There are more people under the age of 25 today in Africa than there are in all of Europe — Stephen Kotkin
Musings
All large scale changes should be presented as a return to the past.
I wonder what it would look like to restructure local government around an escalating set of reviews. Imagine filing for a building permit where:
The first level of the form is evaluated by AI with the ability to appeal
The second level goes to a human
The third level goes to a supervisor
The second and third levels become new evaluation cases. This already happens today at places like YouTube, but imagine bringing it to your local government.
Quotes
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat
— F. Scott Fitzgerald via The Browser
2025-01-10