Opportunities

• Animator needed for a molecular biology illustration project (via @kanzure)
• Heidi Williams seeking a biotech VC co-author on improving university tech transfer

Announcements

• Foresight Vision Weekend 2023 (via @foresightinst). I’ll be speaking!
• Helion has sold some fusion energy, to be delivered in 2028. Buyer: Microsoft. WSJ has coverage. My guess: the most important impact of this is to focus Helion employees on an external deadline. (Via @Helion_Energy, @sama)
• Hannah Ritchie’s new book: Not the End of the World, “an optimistic, data-driven look at how we solve our environmental problems” (via @_HannahRitchie)
• ThereCraft has a 20-lb drone that can carry 10 lbs of cargo 180 miles

Links

• Patrick Collison interview with Sam Altman. And a summary
• Derek Lowe on a promising trial of an mRNA-based cancer treatment
• Anthropic’s Claude gets ~75k-word context length (via @finmoorhouse)
• OpenAI attempts to use GPT-4 to explain individual neurons in GPT-2 (via @blader)

Queries

• What’s the most wonderful textbook you’ve ever read? (@michael_nielsen)
• Max Roser crowdsourcing suggestions for improvements to Our World in Data
• Can desalination plants be started and stopped (to use intermittent power)?
• Is there any sense of economic “waste heat?”
• Average number of math authors per paper 1900–2000?

Quotes

• “What man has done, cannot man aspire to?”
• In praise of clear thinking: “it makes life easier for those who disagree with you”

Tweets & threads

• We eradicated smallpox for less than the cost of one mile of subway today in NYC
• Why does it seem easier for humans to drive than fly, but opposite for machines?
• Build a canal from the sea the desert, create a new lake. No, it’s not the Salton Sea
• Why don’t whales get more cancer? Maybe their cells are good at DNA repair
• Classics + progress studies would be a powerful curriculum. Maybe like this?
• “Machine Assisted Thought”, a seminar on AI for middle and high school students
• Kevin Kelly writing a book on feasible, desirable AI-enabled futures for humanity
• An inadvertent, uncontrolled experiment in reverse geoengineering
• The idea of a social tradeoff between GDP and “traditional values” is wrongheaded
• Outlier events drive policy conversations, but solving for outliers makes bad policy
• “Average” does not mean “typical.” The average Canadian lives in the US
• Joyce Carol Oates reacts to Derik Parfit’s ideas about bereavement

Charts

• The inexorable decrease in kids’ ranges

• Kondratieff waves