More Links for April
more. links.
recall that i’m adding original links to everything because archive.ph/archive.is has been struggling lately. the visual clutter bothers me but what can you do
1. good Business Insider piece on the failure of Kittyhawk, Larry Page's eVTOL startup (original). see also this great profile of Whisper Aero, pursuing very quiet eVTOLs
2. related, this short video from Beta about their 386-mile all-electric test flight. i'm optimistic about eVTOL for short range trips (longer if we get wireless power beaming). but probably mid- & long-range commercial aviation, & hyper/supersonic, will shift to drop-in electrofuels. hydrogen combustion seems unlikely. maybe hydrogen fuel cells happen in some shorter distances, competing with battery electric
3. Ars piece on moon-based astronomy. ppl criticize Starlink for harming earth-based astronomical science. much of this is negative mood-affiliation by ppl who don’t like Elon Musk. but the steelmanned critique still fails, & space-based astronomy is a big reason why. ubiquitous satellite internet will have massive social value. but even if you grant that the benefits of pure astronomy are greater, yet fragile such that satellite constellations have a net social cost, it’s still worth doing the satellites bc astronomy has other options. space-based astronomy is more expensive & difficult, yes. but it’s ultimately better on strictly scientific terms. & it will create demand & lobbying interests for continued progress in space launch capacity, moon bases, & general space industry (fuelling, repair services etc). costs will come down, access will expand. we should want astronomy to level-up, not constrain other valuable technologies for the sake of a stagnation paradigm
4. update on erthos. these crazy bastards bring a tear to my eye
5. synthetic blood update, including the DARPA project that’s generated some buzz. we need this. & i like how the piece places it in the context of other medical & transhumanist technologies
6. what's happening with digital payments in India is fascinating, & cyberpunk. you have little speakers that help facilitate transactions with ppl who aren't very tech-savvy, also increasing trust wrt fraud. over time i assume this will be less needed, as generational change occurs & legal institutions improve. but regardless it's a great example of emergent market forces finding a way through social barriers in order to reap the benefits of new technology
7. Bloomberg profile of E3, pursuing direct lithium extraction in old oilfields. (original)
8. China's nuclear weapons buildup, general nuclear weapons politics (original)
9. Chinese EV firm made a 100% sodium-ion vehicle (original). sodium still seems better suited for stationary storage, or as a hybrid component of EVs that remain largely lithium-based. but you never know! there are so many submarkets & EV applications with particular constraints & usage profiles, nobody really knows how it will all shake out. & the tech is improving all the time. the current explosion of different approaches is ideal. this is what peak "markets as a discovery process" performance looks like
10. Breakthrough published a bunch of fantastic ecomodernist articles as part of a series. all worth reading, but i particularly enjoyed this piece about the concept of "naturalness" wrt food & environmentalism. years ago i read this great book about naturalness in the context of public land management, & interest in this niche topic always stuck with me
11. Moderna with some possible progress towards mRNA cancer vaccine 👀 (original)
12. good Bloomberg profile of Precision AI, an ag drone firm doing precision crop-spraying. optimistic about this kind of thing for productivity increases in farming. long-term we’ll probably move to indoor farming & synthetic food production. but that will take a long time, & in any case requires the development of technologies like this (original)
13. promising legislation introduced in SF, to eliminate & streamline some of the government's insane housing & land-use regulations & processes (original). good thread about it here
14. state lawmakers in North Dakota banned approval voting, which was implemented successfully in Fargo. stupid & pathetic. these myopic freaks just want to cling to power. approval voting is clearly superior to plurality-rule for single-winner elections
15. notable Bill McKibben piece on the need to Build, wrt clean energy. he's an old-school environmentalist who’s been focused on blocking stuff, so this is nice to see
16. & in the same Mother Jones feature, this piece from Jesse Jenkins on the scale of physical transformation required to build a net zero clean energy system in the US (according to his model of least-cost pathways)
17. Uniqlo doing rfid self-checkout. technological progress tends to eliminate miserable jobs over time, & i’d say that retail cashier qualifies. phasing it out will be a win for society (original)
18. laser tree trimming, very cool & it does seem to be real, although these days who can say
19. interfluidity on why the two-party system is bad. i agree. multiparty systems & proportional representation have their own failure modes & downsides, but overall they’re better. not that there's much chance of USA moving to a multiparty system. but you could do incremental changes, especially at the state level
20. long Foreign Affairs piece from Richard Haass & Some Other Guy about USA's Ukraine strategy. they want a surge of military support, followed by a push for diplomacy. seems reasonable, although i place more weight on escalation risk. but i'm still pretty undecided about the best path. it's a complex, miserable situation. war is horrible. choosing the least-worst negative-sum strategy is just tough (original)
21. also from Foreign Affairs, a worthwhile piece arguing against the recent meme of multipolarity in international relations, emphasizing USA's continued dominance. not sure i agree (original)
22. a piece on why US trucks & SUVs have grown so much bigger. some right-leaning ppl use the fuel efficiency explanation to blame leftwing environmentalists, casting them as naive morons who don't understand the policies they support. setting aside the actual policy development historical details, i am always amenable to the idea of govt regulation unintended consequences, & political economy dysfunction. & lefty environmentalists & anti-car urbanists being silly & wrong. but in this case the critique misses the mark. environmentalists & urbanists concerned with vehicle size generally do support regulatory reform to fix the perverse incentives & make cars safer for pedestrians & other road users. do rightwingers crowing about the rise of dangerous trucks being caused by environmental regulation actually support fixing the problem? my sense is mostly no, & they don’t actually think the appalling state of US road safety is a problem
23. amusing takedown of Facebook & Mark Zuckerberg. i disagree with tons of it, & the author is an anti-market, anti-business hack. but some of the points seem right. Zuck correctly realized that FB’s success came largely from being first in capturing an internet business category that was inevitable (& which had strong winner-take-all/network externality dynamics). he then became kinda obsessed with recreating that— or rather avoiding failure caused by missing the next similar thing. the bet on VR was reasonable tbh. i mean it was/is extremely risky & perhaps mismanaged. but probably VR/AR is still the most likely thing to cause a paradigm shift in consumer behaviour & spending comparable to Social Media. Zuck should be commended for going big & not simply sitting back & muddling through some kind of inevitable decline or stagnation in FB’s core business. something like the metaverse surely will come to dominate, eventually. but currently the hardware isn’t good enough for (non-industrial) mass adoption of heads-up displays. the software isn’t either, though perhaps that will change soon with the rise of high-quality generative imagery. there’s a scene in The Big Short movie where Michael Burry says wrt to his bet, “I may have been early but I’m not wrong” & his partner responds, “it’s the same thing, Mike!” this is Zuckerberg’s situation with VR
24. devarbol on the Soviet army.
25. Cornelius Stahlblau with a good post about National Geographic
26. Economist had a great special report on the auto industry. here's the first piece, but worth reading them all (original)
27. Richard Hanania on fat shaming & free will. i somewhat agree with this take. rising obesity surely has a complex set of deep structural causes. but much of them flow through the mechanism of individual choice at some point, which can be influenced by incentives, including social & cultural incentives. so in that sense "fat shaming" or social pressure towards healthier behavior could be health-improving. it's obviously not good to be needlessly cruel. but in some harsh utilitarian sense, enforcing a culture of healthfulness more strongly might be net-positive, even if it results in a share of ppl enduring more psychological pain. Hanania frames his argument in a trollish, aggressive way. but i’d argue for a culture that is more fully committed to promoting healthfulness, where negative reinforcement (stigmatization of unhealthy behaviour) is subordinate to positive reinforcement & normalization of healthy behaviour. changing the cultural incentives around health & obesity might not be the most immediately tractable approach, compared to other levers like public policy (ag & food production, food business & marketing, healthcare, environmental regulation, urban planning) or new advanced drugs. but it’s all connected, & having a stronger culture of health would facilitate supportive policy changes that reduce the need for harsh negative cultural reinforcement
28. Julian Spector profile of EnerVenue, a stationary storage firm pursuing nickel-hydrogen chemistry. seems promising
29. Byrne Hobart & Tobias Huber piece on ‘safetyism’. there are certain insights to be gleaned from blending together safety & risk topics from many different scales & domains. but imo the distinction between x-risk & catastrophic risk & other kinds of risk is generally more fruitful. i think you can coherently have a very pro-innovation, risk-tolerant view towards lower-level technological risks, while also being very concerned & cautious about catastrophic & x-risks. i almost feel like Hobart & Huber needlessly corner themselves into a ridiculous stance, where being pro-innovation on mundane things like nuclear power & pop culture also requires taking a radically nihilistic position on artificial superintelligence safety
30. Newsweek has a strange article trashing the US submarine program for having low effective-uptime wrt costs. it’s a bad, confused piece. there surely are many dysfunctions in sub management & shipbuilding that we should fix. but the core argument seems to imply that ppl are unaware that US nuclear sub capability is insanely expensive. this is just obviously wrong. the proper question is whether the program overall has benefits that exceed its costs, relative to alternative resource allocations — not whether the particular metric of “time spend deployed for a given boat” is maximized. it almost feels like Newsweek wants a massive open ocean great power naval war, at least then our subs would be busier doing stuff!
books
Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Paul Scharre. the author is a former US Army Ranger whose previous book Army of None, about drone warfare, was good. unfortunately this one didn’t have much to say. you can always tell when an author of a successful nonfiction book gets another money-grab deal from publishers, & ends up churning out uninspired material largely compiled by research assistants. Scharre clearly got his contract, conducted a bunch of interviews with AI tech & military ppl, then only later tried to synthesize some conclusions. this almost never works. the best nonfiction books are from subject-matter experts who have been developing their ideas & hot takes for years. a book then serves as their masterpiece, an outlet that brings everything together & organizes their myriad fully-baked thoughts. Army of None was more like that, Four Battlegrounds not at all
i mean, some of it was interesting i guess. hearing more about China's high-tech surveillance authoritarianism was fascinating & horrifying. but the book lacks a broad argument or message. it’s j**rnalism, not theory. even though the book was released just recently, it already feels out of date due to the explosion of generative AI stuff. you can also tell that Scharre is not willing to strongly criticize the US military— he’s a CNAS lanyard who wants to preserve his access to elite decisionmakers. it’s a totally different vibe from say The Kill Chain, which is an extremely clear, focused, sharp-edged critique of big-picture military tech strategy that relentlessly drives home what the problems are & what the author's alternative vision is. John McCain died & allowed Brose to unleash. one whole chapter of Four Battlegrounds was just a summary of CNAS colleague Elsa Kania’s 2017 paper Battlefield Singularity, about China’s AI & advanced military technology (to be fair it is a fantastic paper). so overall i do not recommend. read The Kill Chain & Kania’s paper instead.
