itishappy

Huh. Still happening. On my desktop too! Works on mobile.

Wow, I've never seen a site break chrome this badly. I get a black screen then it stops rendering the entire window, even when opened in the background.

Maybe, but that's a "simple" resource problem. The Earth radiates 20x more heat than that today, and it has not been optimized for purpose. Remember that the initial assumptions were that AI has already designed and manufactured tens of thousands of these plants.

The problem at hand is not just getting rid of heat however, it's getting rid of heat without cooking the Earth. I still fail to see how generating the heat off planet fails to solve that.

Many instincts require self control to override, and character is your ability to to so.

Snap judgements are human and inevitable, but acting on them isn't.

I'm agreeing with you!

That's more-or-less the definition, no? First principles thinking and higher order thinking are both methods of problem solving.

That is not the problem being discussed. Radiators can be scaled up, but the thermal mass of Earth is finite. GPUs can survive at temperatures the organisms of Earth cannot.

Not quite the same problem, because only a small portion of that energy radiated from space will make it back to the environment on Earth. For convection that is 100%.

> Using an entire Mars only nets us about a 2x multiplier for our energy expenditure budget.

We don't need to care about cooking Mars.

Maybe, but there are counterexamples today. The processing of raw materials can be done all over the world, but it's not. Modern nations actually disassemble their blast furnaces and ship them out at a certain point.

Humans seem deeply tied to Earth in ways the AI that's to be designing these powerplants is not.

Even today we're recognizing that compute does not need to happen here.

When we're talking about creating powerplants equal to roughly 5% of the insolation of Earth, I think we're sci-fi enough to discuss orbital datacenters or Mars datacenters or Jupiter fusion candle datacenters.

The greenhouse effect is not what's cooking the planet in this example, it's the heat that results from turning all that energy into work.

This assumes we're still building them on Earth.

Calculators hallucinate! Mine did not come with error correcting RAM. (Though you might not know from the price.)

> If the LLM is operating at such a high level that it never actually constructs a useful product for humans to use, then how will that be good for humanity?

If you replace "LLM" with "mathematician" than this is the state of the world today. Stuff like Galois theory is beautiful mathematically, but what has it constructed or enabled for you and me?

> AI doing math for math’s sake? And doing what with it?

Stuff! Inscrutable stuff, maybe, but that's not "doing math for math's sake."

Fair point, I'm skipping over the need itself. The titular first principle.

First principles: "We need X, how can we accomplish that?"

Higher order: "We need X, what would accomplishing that do for us?"

Yes, thanks!

Damnit, I rewrote that sentence twice and still got it wrong.

> That’s not the surveillance state.

Why not?

> That’s just me as a private entity snitching.

... to the state. You are surveilling for the state.

Domestic surveillance took off with McCarthyism.

Agreed about the companies, but academic journals provide value to students long-term in ways that cameras do not.

Yes. They have borders, government, and a police force.

Might as well just smash them if you're already vandalizing. Spray painting is not a lesser offense here.

First principle: How can we accomplish X?

Higher order: What if we accomplished X?

Your last sentence says it all. Just get good at first principles thinking. Higher order thinking is first principles thinking when applied to first principles thinking.

And who should first principles focused on? Your customer, your manager, your company, yourself? All of these are valid and often give competing answers!

Nuclear fuel cannot be recycled. Nuclear fuel is consumed during use, that's why it's fuel.

A spent solar panel contains the exact materials needed to make a new solar panel. Chemical changes are cheaply reversible, so you can turn an old solar panel into a new one for less energy than it will produce during it's lifetime. A solar panel factory can operate indefinitely. (Or at least for as long as their is solar energy available.)

Nuclear fuel must be mined. Nuclear changes are reversible, but that requires the same amount of energy you would get back out. The Earth has a finite amount of nuclear fuel. (To be fair, there's a lot. The Earth contains enough fuel to last roughly the lifespan of the Sun.)

This supports your point even more!

> String theory had a generation of great science communicators writing its books and singing its praises...

I would argue that has done more harm than good. Strong media personalities shouting "the next big breakthrough is here!" followed by 25 years of zero practical results have not done good things for public perception of field of physics. A layperson could be mistaken for assuming the field is literally regressing.

After which they can be recycled.

Bounds do not imply bounds. There are an infinite number of numbers between zero and one. Heck, with our finite minds in finite time we have created uncountable infinities!

As a concept, sure. As a formal proof structure?

I would argue that novel and/or valuable results are not necessarily interesting!

I (a human) am interested in things that are applicable to my realm of understanding, but I see a very plausible future where novel and/or valuable results leave that realm.

I'd further argue that's already the case for most math for most humans. What's interesting to Terrance Tao is rarely of immediate interesting to me.

It seems likely that there are an infinite number of math problems but only a finite number of interesting ones.