tony_cannistra

To those interested in these dynamics - particularly the interactions between massive wealth, inequality, and the natural world – I'd recommend "Billionaire Wilderness" by Justin Farrell.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691176673/bi...

nice, but some of these are very old!

SAR = Synthetic-Aperture Radar. Radar bounces off of metal very well. Some strategically-placed radar reflectors, or a metal-lined fabric, could do it easily. It would also show up _very_ brightly on the resulting images.

hey now - that's like, 86% accurate. ship it!

I shudder to imagine an AI tuned with individual ad-tech fingerprints, especially one without our knowledge –– and yet, I'm certain it's already mostly developed.

I already have a hard time trusting ChatGPT, etc., but mostly for factual-accuracy reasons.

The potential for LLMs to be tuned to give me responses that I'm likely to like (or manipulate me to buy something) is truly unfortunate.

Advertising: why we can't have nice things.

> No one is going to push back against OpenAI meaningfully.

Couldn't, perhaps, one of the more famous people on Earth be responsible for "meaningfully" taking OpenAI to task for this? Perhaps even being the impetus for legislative action?

Very interesting interview, but aside from that – what a true joy to read an article with so many words I'd never even seen before!

I had the same experience, except I was definitely not a Phil major. He had a "class for every major" where we read chapters of the book he was writing (Toolkit for Thinking) and basically gave him feedback. It was an amazing strategy for him to get reviews on his book that way from totally non-Phil folks. And my name is in the book!

That's the way it seems to me as well. Curious too about the business implications. My guess is that they wanted to bite the bullet and commit to provisioned capacity but wanted to do so in a way that didn't require massive overprovisioning for API requests.

Yeah this makes sense. I do wonder though how it changes the dynamics around provisioned capacity, if at all.

Yah, that's what I'm saying. In those low periods they could just scale down the infra, but perhaps there's a constraint that doesn't allow for that. This lets them not waste it.

Yeah, that's another good explanation.

Totally. There are other explanations (like wanting to offer a discount), but my mind initally went to "they have a lot of provisioned compute that they pre-paid for, and they want higher-utilization when API request rates are low."

Just hypothesizing.

Suggests to me that they have a LOT of compute that they can't, or have decided not to, scale down. Interesting way for them to keep the infra up and cover costs.

Don't mean to single you out at all, but I find this comment to be a great example of how the "ML Hype" is perceived by a certain segment folks in our industry.

The development of this chip shows that it doesn't (and shouldn't!) matter to the ML teams at Meta how 'fast ML is evolving.'

Indeed what it demonstrates is that a huge, global, trillion-dollar business has operationalized an existing ML technology to the extent that they can invest into, and deploy, customized hardware for solving a business problem.

How ML "evolves" is irrelevant. They have a system which solves their problem, and they're investing in it.

My partner is from one of those small Colorado ski towns too, and I feel the same exact way when we visit it. It's really sad.

Take a minute to consider what a small mountain or beach community that you appreciate would be like if development became more flexible in the ways you're considering.

Would you actually want to go there anymore?

Exactly.

I'm not going to argue the point that housing supply is woefully inadequate - you're right about that.

But, at the same time, these city and town governments have an obligation to sustain a reasonable amount of housing for their residents.

AirBNB is of course not itself the issue (though one might argue that their aggressive anti-community lobbying is).

I believe that town administrators have a duty to severely curtail the presence of STR businesses like AirBNB in their towns as one of the several paths to maintaining a healthy community with adequate housing.

Hell Yeah.

Honestly it's wild that they publish live prices online. Can they be _that_ confident that they're under-cutting competitors all the time?

Thank you. Indeed we are like-minded folk – I've followed nearly the same method, for much the same reasons.

Thanks for sharing this.

I'm curious – how did you decide where to put down roots, after all that travel? Someplace you visited and liked? A relationship or job?

For those Americans among us, there is an interesting short Patagonia adventure film about this in Scotland called "Right to Roam."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilmhR_EgK8Y

Certainly true.

   "And in any case, these effects are based on hypothetical scenarios. Our Sahara scenario was based on covering 20% of the entire desert in PV solar farms, for instance, and though there have been ambitious proposals, anything on that scale is unlikely to happen in the near future. If the covered area is reduced to a more plausible (though still unlikely) 5% of the Sahara, the global effects become mostly negligible."

All that, then this. Hard to take this seriously outside the realm of academic curiosity.

As a somewhat interesting aside, the transmission line associated with this project (the "SunZia" project) has been a bit mired in a web of (legitimate) complexities, mostly related to environmental protection and Indigenous sovereignty.

The San Carlos Apache Tribe and the Tohono O’odham Nation in particular have protested the line's route in Arizona, and it's currently in Bureau of Land Management review.

https://www.hcn.org/articles/south-landline-bidens-push-for-...

I'm just not that compelled by that argument. If cars are at the center, then so are a hundred other things that are impacting biodiversity at least as much.

I'm really not trying to be a car stan here, I don't really care about cars. But focusing on cars is kindof a dumb distraction, in my opinion.

I don't really know. I live in Washington, though, and we sure have a lot of man-made storage ponds.

This is most definitely the case. It has also caused enormous problems for places where flooding was already a threat, by removing the natural buffering capabilities that places like wetlands have.

In fact, a whole field (stormwater engineering) exists to mitigate this.

Unseenlabs is an example: https://unseenlabs.space/