matthewdgreen

There’s no such thing as an easy short. Going short doesn’t mean predicting a downturn, it means being precise in your predictions about when that downturn will happen. Look at the last few major stock market drops and try to retrospectively time when they would happen from the moment all of the underlying causes of the upcoming crash became apparent: in most cases you get a huge range of values.

I feel like it adds a huge layer of opacity. If you buy a private company, you have to monitor its financials and potentially report them. If you buy a private fund, you have to report the valuation of the fund. If the valuation of the fund just tends to go up (as many such funds do), you won’t necessarily know if this actually reflects the prospects of the underlying companies or just the impression of other investors. The impact of adding these layers is not necessarily efficiency (each layer of management adds more cost), but it is increasing distance from the messy short-term ups and downs of real businesses.

The real problem here is the lack of accountability. We invented a huge pile of regulations forcing public firms to be transparent, largely because the lack of transparency was easy to abuse and small investors don’t have the resources to do their own investigatory work. Now those regulations are being undermined by this new backdoor approach, and so even public and regulated investments are becoming more risky. It’s a bad trend and it will only reverse when people inevitably follow the incentives and there’s a big crisis.

My assumption is that the military supply chain in any country is a tiny percentage of rare earth supply, compared to the huge fraction that’s used in commercial applications. And since the military is prioritized and a perfect embargo doesn’t exist, “choking off the supply to crush the military” is almost impossible.

I’m a fan of managed capitalism, which is the only capitalism we’ve ever known. I’m very nervous about what happens when unrestricted capital is allowed to consume all its guardrails and re-write all the rules to advantage itself. I imagine it leads to something extremely not-like the kind of capitalism that brought all those benefits you’re citing. I guess we might get to find out for ourselves!

Again, there were a couple of instances of fraud in one sub-branch of a sub-branch of a field ages ago, and The Internet has decided to turn it into a conspiracy theory.

On the off chance that you're actually a decent, honest person, I urge you to actually go learn about this theory that you're promoting. Go out and actually figure out the truth, because if it turns out that you're wrong about the impact and intentions, you're helping to harm a lot of people.

Again, I urge you to read this article and stop promoting conspiracy nonsense. I take this very personally because my mom has this disease, and people who clearly don't understand what they're talking about fuming about conspiracies really doesn't help anyone, and probably hurts them immeasurably. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-the-amyloid-h...

I really urge you to read this article. It was posted elsewhere in the thread as well: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-the-amyloid-h...

I'm simply arguing that the plaques could be the proximate cause and the problem addressed by this treatment could be the remote cause. The OP is being vague in the way they stated it, but it feels like they're saying the plaques are irrelevant. That doesn't seem to fit what we know: the evidence that cognitive symptoms are downstream of plaques is pretty compelling.

I also don't think "fraud" should be used in this discussion at all.

With all that said, if this One Weird Trick can clear/prevent the buildup of plaques (and thus the cognitive symptoms downstream of them), that's just a best possible outcome.

This article is incredibly informative and I wish the folks in this thread would read it. Doesn’t make the current result any less exciting.

Whoa there. Is that what’s happening? Cause an alternative theory is cause -> plaques -> cognitive disease. You seem to be arguing cause -> cognitive disease -> plaques, and I’m not sure this research demonstrates that. Does it?

There’s been a long-running Internet movement to cast the beta-amyloid and beta-amyloid/tau hypotheses as an evil plot by scientists to siphon money away from research that works. It’s a whole thing. I anssume it’s because Alzheimer’s legitimately sucks (my mom has it) and that means there has to be someone we can blame.

It is very hard to look at the P/E of TSLA and run with the idea that the market is pricing things rationally. Even if you somehow feel bullish about that company, the massive rise in stock price at the same time the concrete sales news started to get worse should be a pretty big alarm bell.

Which raises the question of whether there are any results so surprising that it's unlikely that any other scientists would have stumbled onto them in a reasonable time frame.

I think the exponential works in the opposite direction. Let’s say your manufacturing capacity is increasing by 30% per year. That means hypothetically at the end of a 15 year period you’re building fifty times what you were able to install in year one. We don’t know if that will happen for batteries, but for solar PV the rate was about a 37% average yearly increase over the past 20 years.

All new construction should have it, at least. The cost differential for building a new home's roof and outfitting that roof with solar just isn't high enough to justify doing it differently. Plus it improves cooling/heating costs and protects the roofing materials from direct sunlight.

Also, sodium batteries are now coming online. Slightly lower energy density, but potentially vastly lower cost. From looking at cost trends and increased production, it also seems pretty obvious at this point that we probably are going to get those vast quantities of battery storage everyone is so surprised about.

But I think that's basically the problem here. We've decided, as non-experts, to meddle in a field that we don't understand. And so obviously we're making a mess of it.

I'm not suggesting we should butt out entirely as non-experts. I'm saying we should defer to people who really understand the field. In this case, we have plenty of experts who actually know what they're talking about, some on the pro-GoF side and some on the anti-GoF side. The commonality is that I've never once heard any expert from either side express concern about techniques that induce resistance to non-human-use antibiotics. And I suspect the reason I've never heard anyone complain about this is that there isn't really much risk here at all.

So instead of getting upset about how it's scary, and then demanding researchers stop doing research to make us non-experts feel better, we should turn to a stable of people who understand what's happening to help us make these decisions, and stop demanding researchers make us feel better.

My biggest concern when I saw the political controversy around GoF research was that new rules would be used inappropriately to stop important research that keeps us safe. That seems to be happening in this case, more or less as I feared.

As others have pointed out, this is a fairly routine practice that happens even in schools. It’s the nature of the experiment that makes it relatively safe. The fact that it happens in a protected lab is just icing on the cake (they’re dealing with TB bacteria, so it’s inherently non-zero danger just because of that.) You seem to be pointing to the icing and arguing that because one part of the cake might not be perfect, the whole thing is unsafe. But it’s the entire cake that the author is pointing to in their argument. And then rather than engage with the article, you’re arguing that, rather than engage on the substance, we need to engage on the level that some non-experts (who don’t understand the protocols) are scared and hence the correct standard is that we need our practices to reassure them.

But we’ll never be able to reassure terrified, scientifically under-informed people to their satisfaction, particularly when they’ve already decided that GoF is somewhat scary and maybe even partisan. So the result of this attitude is that we can’t do relatively safe but important research on diseases that might save your life or the life of someone you love.

What car? I’ve tried it with a Honda Prologue and it didn’t do this stuff.

The part of CarPlay I’m unhappy with is the (in)ability to plan EV trips with charging stops. Adding charging in a good native nav interface is simple: you enter the route and it picks chargers for you if the distance exceeds current range. In standard CarPlay this doesn’t happen automatically. Presumably it could, but in addition to charging station search and planning, CarPlay would need an interface to take current battery level and some other preferences that would tune the algorithm for specific cars. Not sure if that exists, but the cars I’ve used haven’t exhibited it.

See the first comment in this thread about aluminum oxide and the ozone layer. It’s not so much the amount, but what it is.

The word “famine” does not have a clearly-defined statistical meaning outside of some very specific circumstances. We abhor the idea of famine whether it occurs at 12% or 14% or 23% of children because we see all of these things to be very bad circumstances. One particular organization chose a 15% threshold for a legalistic definition in their framework, and the government is lawyering this because they can lawyer an arbitrary threshold and they think that will help them win some PR points. Thats all this is.

PS Do you really think the number “15%” is some natural value that nature or the Bible or teams of scientists chose to define “famine”? It’s an arbitrary threshold that someone picked because it’s a bit larger than 10% and less than 20% and divisible by the number of digits on the human hand.

It really is pretty simple. The courts have repeatedly ruled that Federal Aid can't be use to force Universities to teach specific political viewpoints or ideologies. The exceptions that exist are very narrow, and involve either (1) conduct that isn't speech or viewpoint, or (2) declining to subsidize specific activities in the case where this doesn't require Universities to adopt a specific viewpoint or ideology.

No doubt this Court will dispense with those precedents because it's not really a Court of law anymore. But that's how you make Federal funding work within the bounds of a nation that has a First Amendment.

I think that's fair. But I also think table stakes for conservatives to expect an honest discussion and respect is to criticize and distance themselves from deeply wrong and unconstitutional proposals like the one in TFA.

A quick reminder that the First Amendment of the Unites States Constitution bars the Federal government from forcing private institutions to participate in chosen political speech. The question of whether you get funding from the Federal Government should not matter, since it's the Federal Government that's constitutionally constrained from doing this.

Of course if we're no longer in a place where the rule of law applies, then sentences like "if it's private and does not get funding..." hardly matter.

Yes. And partisans who control the United States government will ensure their preferred political ideas get taught by private institutions under the guise of “ideological diversity”. No diversity will be required from conservative organizations. None of this is constitutional and none of it should be happening in our country.

Well, in fairness, the kind of deep neural architectures needed to do this stuff have only been available for a relatively short period. The robotics researchers in my institution are basically racing to put all this new capability to work.

Eg: https://hub.jhu.edu/2025/07/09/robot-performs-first-realisti...

There is "fake" as in, we offer the thing at $22k but this is a made-up price and we'd be losing tens of thousands per unit if we couldn't upsell the necessary tooling. Then there's "not fake" as in, the hardware is profitable (or at least break-even) at a list price of $22k, and the tooling is expensive because it makes sense to charge a lot to developers. These things put you at different places when scale starts to increase.

It's extremely common for dev tooling to be extremely expensive, even for widgets that sell for a few bucks at the retail level.

Seems like the kind of problems that would be amortized by scale. Anyone running a fleet won’t need to assemble one set of tooling per robot.