Announcements

• Stripe Press is publishing Poor Charlies Almanack (via @patrickc). Also, Londoners: sign up for events from Stripe Press and Works in Progress (via @WorksInProgMag)
• Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast The Lunar Society now taking applications for advertisers. Also, Dwarkesh would really love to interview Robert Caro

Links

• The Ascent of Man turns 50. Here’s the premiere (via @BBCArchive & @drbronowski)
• Celebrating Smallpox Eradication Day
• How photographs could be sent by telephone in the 1930s (via @asallen)
• Brian Potter on nuclear power plant construction costs (via @calebwatney)
• The Hunterian Museum, on anatomy & the history of surgery (via @salonium)

Quotes

• Sears was basically Amazon one century earlier
• “Humanities bros need to take more STEM classes”
• Child labor was once seen as a good thing
• Evidence for the use of water wheels early in the first century
• Autopilots have been on airplanes for a long time
• The Pasteur Institute was privately funded
• Something to keep in mind the next time you contact customer service

Queries

• What are the best reasons for optimism about AI risk? (@MaxCRoser)
• What lessons can we learn about reasoning from Bayes’ rule?
• What are the most impressive things we could build if we all really wanted it?
• What to read to understand the history of the US electrical grid? (@_brianpotter)
• What is going to enable $1/day continuous hormone monitoring?
• Is there progress-studies work on the home/family dimensions of flourishing?
• What’s the best way to help someone learn to understand another’s POV?
• What are some of the most useful impossibility proofs?
• Who is going to create the Cshirchive?

Tweets

• John Carmack: “the world is better than it has ever been… and the derivative is still positive… get on board the progress train.” Fortunately the malaise is not universal
• Sam Altman’s “alternative path for society”
• Dustin Moskovitz: “By 2030, I expect ~everyone will have a personal AI agent”
• India building nuclear at < $2/W?
• How LLMs can be used for causal inference
• Could protein folding be ready for its fundamental theory?
• Life in America 40 years ago vs. today
• Adam Thierer’s progress bookshelf
• Robotaxis were perhaps over hyped in 2017, but opposite is true now
• Until 150 years ago people lived in a permanent power outage
• We accept “the community decides” for land use, but not elsewhere
• A neutron star is like a cargo ship crunched down to the size of a cake sprinkle
• After all the banks fail, who provides liquidity?
• How to use social media
• “I am a language model of a modern major general”
• The Stanford Torus, a space settlement megastructure

Charts

• Infant mortality has improved so much that these J-curves have been straightened out

• Staphylococcus killed by far-UVC light. Imagine using this in public spaces

• Why LLMs will not “demolish white-collar employment overnight”