Links for June

good link summer is here

1. excellent video about feeding humanity in various catastrophe scenarios. nothing new if you're familiar with ALLFED, but a good roundup. i continue to think this topic is super important & underrated, even within effective altruism

2. long profile of LTA, Sergey Brin’s company doing large rigid airships. why not (Bloomberg)

3. nice Eric Berger piece on in-space refueling, & the paradigm-shift it represents

4. Spacetop, pursuing an augmented reality laptop with no physical screen (i do like the retro typewriter aesthetic). seems awesome, pretty clearly the future

5. update on Project Pele, the actually-small microreactor that really does seem to be moving forward quickly, since it’s a DoD thing that bypasses NRC (Bloomberg)

6. Black Wolf, Atlanta ride-hailing app with armed drivers. highly amusing, a big-brain business genius move we should all support on principle. i do wonder how much of the initial success is merely a function of its novelty & meme value though

7. three good TechCrunch articles about three different satellite startups, all completely fascinating & exciting

• Astranis, pursuing space internet with geosynchronous satellites that are more narrowly targeted at ground locations (e.g remote Alaska). internet-everywhere via low-earth orbit constellations (Starlink) is ultimately where we want to go. but it will take time, & there’s opportunity for different intermediate approaches. and who knows, it might be sustainable if getting those last bits of LEO coverage are super expensive. i expect we’ll also see progress in other methods for internet coverage that will create useful competition & redundancy, like perpetual drones, bigger meshnets & cheap robotic tunneling for underground utility pipes & wires

• Pixxel, pursuing 'hyperspectral' satellite imagery. the fog of war must be destroyed

• Hubble, pursuing a long-distance space-based bluetooth IoT network. this is perhaps the wildest one

8. quite interesting piece about eDNA harvesting, advanced surveillance tools that collect tiny bits of DNA that are shed everywhere in the environment. there's obviously a creepy GATTACA-style dystopia scenario here. but like with facial recognition, i'm fundamentally optimistic that we can use these new technologies to create large benefits while limiting downside costs & risks. benefits include crime reduction, anti-terrorism, pandemic defense, health & social science research... who knows what else. of course the idea of “good regulation that prevents abuses” is no solution if the abuser is the government itself. but this is why liberalism & democracy win & remain robust to innovation & change — you have a broad, decentralized culture & institutional setup that constrain out of control govt. at least that's the optimistic story. if the costs of perfect surveillance fall too much who knows what could happen (Economist)

9. wild piece on corporate-backed quasi-private Russian militias operating in Ukraine. amusingly cyberpunk (FT)

10. Tim Lee post on self-driving cars, specifically Waymo, Cruise & Tesla. the technology is still coming (& in some sense here already), despite various hype-cycle booms & busts. a direct consumer taxi service is the most high profile goal but i think there's probably more immediate opportunity in simpler industrial & commercial settings like mines, airports, corporate campuses etc

11. widely shared, but some progress towards solving major physical disability through brain implants + robotic exoskeletons. perhaps the most fascinating part is that the patient saw improvements in function without the technology being activated, after using it for some time. this suggests the possibility that pure "prosthetic" tech can help "teach" the body to heal (NYT). also related, Neuralink got approval for human testing, which is great news. i am not an Elon Musk sycophant. his behaviour wrt twitter & media generally has been embarrassing & idiotic, and i wish he would stop. but the mood affiliation brainworms that many ppl have towards him are absurd, given his obviously-huge contributions to socially-valuable technologies (mobile payments, EVs, self-driving cars, solar & storage, rockets). and Neuralink is not different. brain computer interface seems very likely to be a massively important foundational technology for our species, with huge benefits. although there are risks (wireheading, infosec & privacy, digital despotism etc)

12. China is drilling a very deep hole. noice. it's nominally for research purposes (pure science & mining stuff). but of course figuring out how to drill deeply & affordably is necessary for the potentially-utopian energy vision of 'geothermal everywhere' (Bloomberg)

13. based Japan seems to be choosing the correct path for AI training copyright policy

14. nice short piece describing some new technologies that might plausibly be on the horizon for preventing future respiratory pandemics (NYT). & see also this post on indoor air quality reforms

15. Maxwell Tabarrok post on the extropians (recall this was the early CA futurist techno-libertarian community that influenced tons of stuff like transhumanism, internet rationalism, EA, ecomodernist environmentalism, as well as silicon valley & tech culture generally)

16. some progress in space-based wireless power beaming. still early

17. good Power Magazine update on wind power technology

18. Equatic, pursuing seawater green hydrogen production + carbon dioxide removal. love it, though early-stage. add this to the growing ‘ocean filter’ space, in which i’d include mineral extraction (uranium, lithium etc), desalination

19. Martin Gurri on the psychopathology of digital life. i generally like Gurri (The Revolt of the Public was great, real ones read it before it got republished by Stripe Press), but this is sort of a weird essay. i wonder if he’s driving himself to silly extremes in order to keep his Big Idea relevant

20. good, if depressing, piece on Germany's economic stagnation. quite energy related, though the issues are deeper than that, touching on technology generally, institutional design, demographics etc (Bloomberg)

21. Magpie, pursuing an absolutely insane 'aero tow' system for improving flight efficiency. good luck

22. (semi) closed-loop on-land fish farms. very cool. many similarities with indoor farming for plants; resource efficiencies, ability to finely measure & control various parameters. any progress on closed ecosystems is good. we will need this for space settlements (Economist)

23. some war photos from Bakhmut (NYT)

24. US Marines’ new autonomous missile boat

25. quite interesting article on the increase in military spending worldwide. i support more spending by the US & its allies, but in some disinterested sense it's clearly not great to have the world spending a greater share of resources on military & defense. the ultimate goal of humanity should be to sustainably settle in space & ensure our long-run survival. this requires lots of advanced technology, which in turn requires a high degree of global stability & economic specialization. this coordination problem is difficult, & military/defense is a crucial piece of it. but of course it's better to achieve stability at lower cost than at higher cost. so we are going in the wrong direction vs some unicorns-and-rainbows global peace counterfactual that you can imagine. how feasible that counterfactual is though, impossible to say (Economist)

26. decent general overview of US fertility rate decline (WSJ)

27. interesting Breakthrough piece on cold fusion. idk

28. that crazy Sun Cable project to export Australian solar to Singapore is still alive... sort of (Bloomberg)

29. decent David Roberts podcast interview with founder & CEO of Emrgy, pursuing small hydro in canals. seems like basically a slam-dunk business case, i expect it will succeed at some scale. the stuff about dynamic water-energy revenue management is fascinating

30. critical review of Bryan Caplan's Don't Be a Feminist. most of the points seem reasonable, although i've not read the book so i have no opinion

31. i enjoyed this piece about the success of Spanish cultural power (Spanish language that is, not Spain). Puerto Rico is an amazing cultural bridge between USA & Latin America. i only wish it was richer. statehood would help with that. regaining its status as a major pharmaceutical & medical equipment producer seems like wise industrial policy too, help build supply chain robustness wrt China (Economist)

32. good & correct CSIS piece calling for more domestic US mining

33. excellent Charles Fain Lehman post on why fentanyl is such a tricky drug to control

34. amusing review of Astrotopia, a new space-critical book. going to have to hate-read this one methinks

35. fascinating long piece on Saudi Arabia & its recent social & economic liberalization

36. Anna-Sofia Lesiv of VC firm Contrary is publishing a great series of essays about various emerging technologies. my favourite was perhaps the one on lidar

37. Patrick Deneen on JS Mill. seems very wrong, and bizarrely paranoid & delusional. Mill & On Liberty are great imo. progress & change are good, and our only hope for escaping into space & surviving into the long run. this comes with risks & costs. cultural value is destroyed, yes. but ultimately there’s no better choice. i really enjoyed Why Liberalism Failed despite mostly disagreeing with its arguments. but Deneen kinda sucks honestly. his theocratic authoritarian degrowth environmentalist agenda is bad & totally unworkable (if you don’t think i’m describing his positions accurately i suggest rereading the book, you will be surprised)

38. good links post from Will Rinehart. we support our fellow linkpoasters

books

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar. i thought this would be more narrowly focused on parking policy, but actually it spent a lot of time on the actual business of parking. it was okay. bloated with lots of stories & personal anecdotes. i’ve read Donald Shoup’s canonical The High Cost of Free Parking so i guess i didn’t really learn much here

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. one of these Classic scifi books that i never read but has been perpetually on my list. it was pretty solid. it’s about a future Oxford historian who uses time travel to go back to the middle ages, but then gets trapped & everything goes to hell due to pandemics in both the past & present. it did feel a bit old fashioned & unoriginal, but i think that’s mostly because it's been so influential that its tropes are now part of the general cultural milieu in scifi