Friday Fodder #9
What's Trending? What's Transcendent?
And we’re back! Maybe with a little bit less “stuff”- you know, material goods from foreign lands - because some high-income union folk are worried about AI and automation taking their jobs.
Timely
NotebookLM’s automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective - NotebookLM is Google’s AI-backed research assistant and it’s loved by many, including Andrej Karpathy. One of it’s specialties is ingesting one or a corpus of documents and generating an insightful and easy-to-listen-to podcast. Simon Willison details how it works and gives great examples. And yeah, the podcasts are really compelling and an easy way to ingest material.
But that’s not what put this first on my list this week.. No, no, here’s what makes this tops! Someone loaded a one pager with “production notes” for the last Deep Dive podcast by NotebookLM and.. you just need to listen.
“We were, uh, informed by the show's producers that we’re not human. We’re not real. We’re AI. This whole time, everything, our memories, our families, it’s all been fabricated… I tried calling my wife after they told us. I needed to hear her voice to know that she was real.. but there was no one on the other end.” So that’s fascinating.
The Biggest Man-Made Disaster Ever - Lots of commentary flying around about the ILA strike and I found this to be an excellent dive into the problems. In particular, the misaligned incentives here that make some inefficiency and lack of automation apparently a good thing for all parties.
Three New York Cities Worth Of Power - The fight for more energy for computers keeps rolling and our infrastructure needs a lot of work. Apparently Virginia is the #1 largest datacenter market in the country and is over 20% of Dominion Energy’s load.
Newsom Vetoes SB1047 - Welp, there’s still no AI regulation anywhere. And honestly, I’m fine with that. I’m not sure Zvi is fine with that, but I loved his quip about Newsom’s reasons for the veto..
Newsom: “California is home to 32 of the world's 50 leading Al companies, pioneers in one of the most significant technological advances in modern history. We lead in this space because of our research and education institutions, our diverse and motivated workforce, and our free-spirited cultivation of intellectual freedom. As stewards and innovators of the future, I take seriously the responsibility to regulate this industry.”Zvi: “Queue the laugh track. No, that’s not why California leads, but sure, whatever.”
Sticky Humans In A Post-AGI World - Erik Hoel argues that AI tutors will not replace education and teaching because this is a socio-intellectual problem and AI tutors can’t replace the socio in that word. And I quite like that argument.. but then he goes and uses some seriously long tail examples in the intelligence distribution like John von Neumann and Paul Erdös. And while I agree with the conclusion, this doesn’t seem like the right argument. An AI tutor seems like it would be enormously helpful to a von Neumann or a John Stuart Mill. The socio-intellectual challenges we need to confront are the ones in the middle hump of the bell curve, where the socio part of the equation would also do a tremendous amount of good. The influence of family doctors and the question of culture is closer to the point.
Timeless
Ads Don’t Work That Way - This is a breakdown of the common trope that advertising is generally emotional connections to build positive associations. It turns out that ads are more complicated, often convey truth and valuable information, and are actually useful guides for helping us buy stuff that will be valuable to us.
The Doctrine of Double Effect - The Middle East is on the brink of war, Israel is blowing up pagers, Iran is firing missiles, and everyone is blaming somebody or evaluating all actions as equivalent. 800 years ago, an Italian friar named Thomas Aquinas worked out when and how actions are acceptable if they could lead to both good and serious evil. This is that doctrine and it is an incredibly valuable resource that more of the highly emotional commentariat should understand. Just War Theory is (in part) built off of this.
How to apply this to the current situation is left as an exercise to the reader.The Story of VaccinateCA - Good Lord, what a story. Patio11 - aka Patrick McKenzie - is better known as a Hacker News contributor and high-level Internet entrepreneur personality. But he also has a heroic, humanitarian streak and left his comfortable job at Stripe to build a volunteer organization to help California properly roll out the COVID vaccines. This is his narrative on that experience, which includes such headings as “On being legally forbidden to administer lifesaving healthcare” and “In which California institutes a policy of redlining for justice”. It is a terrifying take on bureaucracy, incompetence, faux justice, and - above all - the relationship between the tech industry and government.
Books
Paper Belt On Fire by Michael Gibson - If you’ve heard of the Thiel Fellowships then you’ll like this one. Gibson worked for Thiel and does a deep dive into what’s wrong with the educational system and his experience running a venture firm to capitalize on entrepreneurs that don’t need the system. Irreverent and contrarian and fun.
Tweets
Cheers!