Alex Ames

Ten million schoolchildren running language model inference by hand on ten million TI-83s

We just need to have all the school districts park their electric buses at charging stations to do vehicle-to-vehicle charging on holidays

It’s going to be incredibly expensive to build battery-backed charger megastations for that peaky vacation/road trip-centric demand profile (only really need to store/deliver that much power across hundreds of charging stalls a few days per year)

A single Buc-ee’s on a busy travel weekend (say 100 pumps operating at 30% capacity factor) is delivering ~180 MW in usable (EV efficiency-equivalent) power, which is like 500 Supercharger stations. Home charging is fine most of the time, but road trip holidays are going to cause problems

The most expensive LLM generates about thirty thousand words for one dollar of compute cost. The average human typist can do something like 3-4k words per hour. If you’re just paying for student essay words-per-hour, the LLM breaks even at like $0.16 an hour. No Mturk worker is that cheap.

Workers with highly-specialized wisdom about a subdomain are probably fine for a while, but if all you’re doing is writing generic software to solve other people’s generic problems, how do you justify your salary a year or two from now?

Remote IT workers are going to be completely hosed. People have spent the last three years complaining about RTO mandates, but if your work is mostly modular tasks that can be conducted over text-based channels w/o in-person collaboration, I just don’t see much of a moat left

This already exists and works great: block.alxtratrstrl.xyz/index.html

Bilbo looking at his phone top on bottom is ChatGPT After all, why not? Why shouldn't I keep it? You're absolutely right — you found it, it's been with you a long while, and it's only natural to feel fond of something that's served you so well, especially when someone like Gandalf suddenly seems to want it for himself.

The rates and prices are bad, but the houses? Well, turns out that those are also fractally bad.

I cranked this specialty tool out in an hour or so using Sonnet 4.5 and JavaScript. I do not know JavaScript, but I know the output is correct because it matches the output of a compiled tool that took me a couple of days to create back in 2022.

stillyslalom.github.io/STCalc/

Dem primary turnout (proxy for base) is like 60% white. Black voters are obviously a huge and important part of the coalition, but there are roughly as many white dude Dem primary voters because there are so many of us in the US (even though the white dude demographic is less reliably Dem)

I’m just really skeptical about narrowly-targeted Rube Goldberg schemes for reducing emissions. The scope of the problem is much too broad. We need everything pulled in the right direction by economic gravity, not decades of whack-a-mole and carve-outs

Taxing blast furnace emissions sounds like a carbon tax and is a great idea if generalized! Legislating specific incentives is what we tried in the IRA, and that kinda worked. Electricity generation doesn’t inherently create negative externalities and should not be treated as such - focus on CO2

Yeah, people see higher electric rates as an obvious stick to whack power-hungry data centers with, but to decarbonize, we need lots and lots of cheap, clean electricity to make doing the right thing also the cheaper thing. High electrical rates are a drag on every heat pump and EV.

But that’s bad if you want to, let’s say, incentivize steel producers to move to electric arc furnaces instead of fossil-fueled blast furnaces, or electrification of process heat, etc.
You get bad decarbonization side effects when you start screwing with C&I electrical rates

That may have been true a century ago when the scientific frontier was ripe, but it does not match my experience working in R&D.

And if patterns hold, as they themselves get stirred into the melting pot and become wealthier they’ll also not have kids. To return to the original analogy, relying solely on immigration is like pinning all our hopes on carbon capture rather than building actual sustainability

To the extent the problems of the world have been addressed and conditions improved, it has almost exclusively been by young people rather than those who are invested in the system and set in their ways.

It would be neat to build an economy around a steady-state population. The problem is that many wealthy countries aren’t headed towards equilibrium, but rather massive contraction that’ll have a scant few young people spending their lives just providing for the old rather than improving things

Yeah, I’m not actually a crude utilitarian, but it’s easier to convey a point in 280 characters by relying on blunt objects

Elderly people in depopulated parts of rural Japan are now being routinely eaten by bears and I think that’s bad. I value elderly Japanese people more than bears.

I see all these people saying there are too many people, but each and every one of them seem to think their *own* life is valuable and worth living. Multiplying that value times nine billion is a good thing if we can do it sustainably, and an aging, shrinking population won’t fix unsustainability

You said my observation wasn’t useful but didn’t say why (other than that different things have differences), which left me a bit stumped

Thanks to your diligence, your concerns have been noted and filed with the appropriate authorities

As I said, obviously not the same thing, but apples and oranges are both fruits. Observing commonalities between societal problems doesn’t equate to saying they’re identical, or bear identically on individual choices.

Obviously not the same thing, but the rate of each is (a) hard to alter and (b) causing ever-greater problems that people ignore or minimize because addressing the root cause is inconvenient

Wild to see the right-wing response to climate change adopted almost word-for-word by the left for population collapse. “It’s not a problem, and even if it is, we shouldn’t try to address it - we can just adapt”

Believe it or not, showing up to work drunk is also a fireable offence!

Part of the difficulty with weed is exactly the point you raised - you can easily test for acute blood alcohol content. If what you care about is whether someone shows up to work impaired, it's hard to distinguish for weed.

Lots of clearance holders here who smoked weed in the *past*, but you gotta be able to exercise self-control