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You can do the Temu version of this with any decently sized screen and a few minutes. Stygian Blue in particular is a surreal experience. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossi...

I really hope it’s more that we think this about the concept of a context window at all. But recurrence has been taking a decade of L’s.

we told our model with no internet access to hack a fictional company. unfortunately the model had internet access and the company was not fictional

It’s nice to be able to say “I really didn’t like Perdido St Station because…” after being recommended it and not have the conversation be about my obvious poor taste

Yeah, *skilled* humans in my experience typically run into the judgement issue more than the quality one. One offs are fine, but I have not had many good interactions where someone said “You should check this out” and I came back later and said I didn’t like it.

Even if you had perfect foreknowledge of the Chernobyl disaster, building a nuclear plant there instead of coal was a net public health win

And you can follow up! Unlike with people, you won’t ruin a friendship by telling Claude its strong recommendation wasn’t for you. In fact, the total lack of judgement is one of the best parts of the process. It’s not world changing but it’s a lot better than any previous method I’ve found.

LLMs are really good at book recommendations—the larger models especially. Giving a bunch of books you like and a few in the same vein you don’t with brief explanations has consistently gotten me interesting new picks…

A different sort of dual-use tech

I mean it’s a great time to be a physicist who wants to leave the field! Directly transferrable skills to ML. But otherwise it hasn’t been a good time to be physicist since 1989

8 years of simulation / study did nothing to make the scale more comprehensible. Like the milky way is already incomprehensibly vast. Zooming out to Large Scale Structure is something I can make sense of only in an abstract mathematical way

With many bodies gravity is *effectively* dispersive (fluid drag comes from EM which is just as conservative), but the relaxation time is much longer than for other forces. It’s how we rule out hot dark matter. It doesn’t have enough to cool down by the present to the structure we see

Weighing against this conclusion is that Chernobyl could have been *much* worse if it had been handled more incompetently. Weighing against *that* is that it was much worse than any disaster in a western plant could realistically be. A completely irresponsible design.

To be clear here, deciding to apply the LNT for radiation and not air polution like this is overwhelmingly against the evidence, which is *much* stronger for harm from low-dose chemical pollutants.

Also feel like I have to point out that Chernobyl is *by far* the worst nuclear accident we’ve had. Like, Three Mile Island’s primary mode for causing harm was “excess stress from hearing about it on the news”. There are restaurants with higher body counts.

And this is making assumptions that actual pro-nuclear people would describe as laughably pro coal. Possibly correctly. It doesn’t matter. Coal is awful even when we put our whole hand firmly on the scale

I’m much more of a renewables guy than a nuclear one, but switching from nuclear to coal for safety reasons is like driving instead of flying for safety reasons.

The “fun” thing here is that they basically overlap regardless of the actual number you come up with, unless you decide the LNT only applies to radioactive pollution. Or more succinctly, the average coal plant is about as harmful as the worst nuclear disaster in history.

A fun thing to estimate is the relative magnitudes of: - the actual deaths from the Chernobyl disaster under even pessimistic LNT assumptions - the expected deaths from the equivalent capacity coal plant operating normally

If I had to describe the heart and soul of Bluesky it would the following: a guy who didn’t actually read Emily Wilson’s review of Nolan’s Odyssey movie defending it against a guy who didn’t actually watch Nolan’s Odyssey movie