Links for October

we're back

i skipped September, sorry. but really need to clear out all these links that’ve been piling up, so here they are, with (hopefully!) minimal commentary (about 50… god forgive me). probably there are some typos, i really just wrote this out & didn’t review the text. have a spooky & successful October, friends

1. great post about Anduril's various acquisitions

2. stratosphere balloons. love it. there are several companies pursuing this that i've read about over the years, but i'm not sure anyone’s actually done test flights. it's a great idea, though. good place for like, weddings & parties and stuff

3. Psionic, pursuing self-contained location tracking (so you don't need gps). not much detail on the website but seems like a neat idea

4. somewhat depressing piece about the biological challenges of human space living, and the various efforts to do terrestrial closed-ecosystem tests (e.g Biosphere 2). we simply have to try, though. if genetic & other kinds of modification are required, then that's what needs to happen (SciAm)

5. more bad news in lab-grown meatworld, this one concerning Upside. some amusing Theranos energy on display here. it's just way more technically difficult & expensive than the initial hype suggested. i am still hopeful that eventually it can work, though (Wired)

6. deep dive from Intercalation Station on seabed mining, worthwhile

7. complete uranium supply chain in New Mexico, let’s go (Bloomberg)

8. Brian Albrecht has a good post making the simple & obviously correct point that concerns about new glp-1 agonist weight loss drugs being bad for ""business"" are ridiculous, since weight loss & health improvements will result in offsetting new spending & are just obviously socially beneficial. Josh Barro makes similar arguments here

9. Sam Hammond's AGI timelines. & also see his posts on AI & society: part1, part2

10. good article on Amazon One, the palm-reading payment thing. i use it periodically, it's neat. not having to even open up your phone to pay for stuff is a slight increase in convenience (WSJ)

11. amusing piece about the perpetual "truck driver shortage" meme not being real

12. instant spoken-translation tools, they’re here

13. update on ambient solar for small electronics. underrated

14. pour one out for Skydio (their consumer drone product, at least). DJI is just too powerful (e.g). at least they made some good hype videos

15. and if you didn’t already hate the FAA enough, see this blog post on how the’ve been bad & slow in adopting modern remote facilities for air traffic control. there's something nice and aesthetic about physical towers at every airport, with actual people on-site looking outside glass windows. and there are presumably some marginal benefits to having more FAA ppl physically disbursed, involving local knowledge & communications/tech/terrorism robustness etc. but the benefits of more centralized sites seem bigger. perhaps the greatest advantage is staffing: USA desperately needs more flight controllers, and having fewer, bigger facilities would help (via scale efficiencies; more ppl able to trade & cover shifts, more ability to invest in a nice workplace, more ability to locate in a place with good amenities

16. good long piece on US Navy shipbuilding dysfunction (NYT)

17. to grudgingly provide some balance, at least Zipline got FAA approval to make autonomous drone deliveries without having line-of-sight observers. pathetic & shameful that this process was even necessary, but hopefully it’s the start of broader reforms here

18. small steps towards exowombs. i find it fascinating that this technology is progressing incrementally through improvements in neonatal healthcare. it’s not some ethics-loaded top-down recognizably-transhumanist effort

19. and similarly, brain-computer interfaces continue their slow march via disability treatment

20. good Gary Leff post on commercial passenger airline regulation (and why it's bad)

21. argument for more power line undergrounding. support

22. amusing thread from Rainmaker Technologies, apparently pursuing cloud-seeding weather modification tech. i support, though framing it as a cost-effective alternative to large-scale desalination & piped transportation seems.. dubious. my sense is that cloud seeding is best for more targeted, high-value applications, like boosting snowfall at downhill ski slopes, rather than general water supply. but who knows!

23. update on the diamond market (Economist)

24. Mighty Buildings raised some money, pursuing prefab homes. i'm optimistic about this stuff. of course land value is a huge part of the cost of homebuying. but minimizing other costs helps

25. good post about urban growth in Austin, how transportation infrastructure is getting built out. seems like they're pretty much fucking it up. also from the same blogger, electrified trains are good. i particularly think the air & noise pollution benefits are underrated, for urban railyards & corridors at least (which is where a lot of apt development is happening in many cities because land use regulation prevents them from being built in quieter less industrial residential areas — an appalling & offensive situation imo)

26. good piece on the drawbacks of heat pumps, as compared to propane for space heating. i think it's pretty likely that all-electric air source heat pumps will come to dominate, but it might take 50+ years to conquer the last market chunks. as the article describes, the tech works best with new buildings rather than retrofits, so there's just a building stock lifecycle turnover process that needs to happen. i also think it's plausible that ground-source heat pumps will begin taking some market share, especially those connected in grids that share heat & coolth (the ‘geogrid’ concept (Economist)

27. long essay on the philosophy & psychology of loneliness (National Affairs). see also this post on psychology being pretty useless as a scientific field, heh

28. interesting rumination on liberal arts, liberalism, John Keats... not sure the analysis is super clear (the concept of 'negative capability' is a bit mushy. David Chapman's 'Stage 5' metarationality is better), but definitely made me think

29. Microsoft announced big carbon removal deal with Heirloom. i still think direct air capture is the ideal, but most people seem convinced that this rock weathering technique is legit and measurable, so who am i to judge? note that Heirloom still has to actually build the facility, it doesn't exist yet (WSJ)

29. good Michael Liebreich summary post on the five biggest challenges of the clean energy transition

30. Philippe Lemoine on US immigrant assimilation vs Europe. i do think USA has a "special" culture that makes multiculturalism more viable & functional, vs perhaps many European & other countries. but it's totally true that the composition of immigrants varies by location, and that matters a lot too. and Lemoine is good to question the "special sauce" theory & ask for concrete evidence. both immigrant demographics & mushier "cultural" things matter & are surely related in complex ways

31. fun piece about the spread of LED lighting. some ppl oppose the LED takeover despite the obvious benefits, i think mostly out of a misguided contrarianism and conservative aversion to change. but modern LEDs have perfectly comfy warm light, they really are better in every way and a totally free lunch. i can't say i'm the world's biggest fan of command-and-control regulation banning LED alternatives in most contexts. but i'm also not incredibly worked up about it here (Bloomberg)

32. good piece on the slow uptake of data-intensive tech & approaches in agriculture. much of the problem is not collecting data, but analyzing it. i assume new AI tools will appear soon to really help with this, as the article discusses (WSJ)

33. very nice Joseph Politano post on solar, battery & EV global production & trade patterns

34. at this point i've read like 30 articles on the topic so really all we can do is wait for the rules to come out. but nevertheless Haas had a good post on the hydrogen subsidy dilemma. Bloomberg NEF did one too. i mostly agree that the rules should be more on the tighter side. but i can see the argument for having it be lax, even if it results in massive thermodynamic inefficiency & increased emissions initially. ultimately the goal is to create the hydrogen infrastructure. the idea is that once that's in place, it will heavily compliment wind & solar and ultimately produce a cleaner grid with the lowest cost. you can of course disagree with that vision. and it is quite contestable, especially if you think other clean firm stuff like nuclear, geothermal, clean gas etc is better than hydrogen. so idk, maybe both paths are viable

35. car tyre pollution, not great. even if heavier EVs do make it worse, imo it doesn’t really change any of my views. the air & sound pollution benefits of EVs vs ICEs make them worthwhile regardless (to say nothing of rapidly-improving performance & cost considerations). & the land-use & safety effects of cars & road infrastructure alone make a strong case for building nice comfy, walkable urban centers. i suppose this dimension of pollution moves me a bit towards encouraging things like bicycles, trains, & eVTOLs for longer trips

36. so many articles on offshore wind. this one was interesting (FT), arguing that part of the reason for cost & supply chain issues is the rapid iteration of turbine designs (getting bigger), so there's no time to 'catch up' with learning curves through economies of multiples. it's an interesting dilemma: rapid iteration & technological improvement is obviously good, but also so is standardization & learning curve cost reduction. ultimately i think there's no prima facie argument for either approach; the market will figure it out. eventually iteration & size growth will hit constraints (perhaps soon) & things will shift more towards optimizing a smaller set of designs

37. nice shakoist post on data viz, statistical inference etc

38. selentelechia did a blog post, worthwhile. & eigenrobot’s postrationalist syllabus

39. an actual, literal banana writing about automaticity. of course you must always read. and this response from Scott Alexander

40. fun Ross Douthat newsletter post about JRR Tolkien (NYT)

41. Palladium piece on the Bay Area's fractured municipal governance. i agree it would be good to merge them all into one Bay City govt. only then can the region fulfil its destiny of becoming a US pacific rim cyberpunk megacity equal to our east Asian neighbors

42. also from Palladium, a nice essay on cosmism

43. interesting article about an apparent shakeout in US antarctic research, due to funding & logistics stuff. seems bad i suppose. i support pure research & do like the idea of Antarctica existing as a kind of utopian continent claimed by no country & existing for the betterment of all humanity via scientific research. that said, the cynic in me has always wondered how important these extreme excursions really are. there's clearly a huge amenity value for academics (a certain self-sorted subset of academics, that is). might these antarctic “research projects” be somewhat of a scam to provide funding for fun camping trips? i've got a climatologist friend from college who's been on tons of these & they basically admit as such. i mean, obviously much science is very hands-on, and the mix of theory/office work & hands-on research is a big reason why science is cool. i mean, if i take this one step further it's not like it’s a huge problem if it is a scam, necessarily— it's not a methodology issue with the research. even if it is just a big in-kind lifestyle subsidy to career earth scientists, maybe that's fine? unlike many ppl i think it's probably good to have an "oversupply" of academic scientists (though not necessarily academics overall). so idk

44. Current Affairs is perhaps the stupidest leftwing online publication, and their takedown of Strong Towns is no different. it's just very low-quality, not really understanding their subject in a deep way, and offering a weak & muddled critique. it certainly is true that Strong Towns is heavily libertarian-influenced, and their founder is a lifelong Republican. but that's good, actually. it's one of the few right-leaning urbanist groups out there, and subtly distinct from the purer libertarianism of the market urbanists. it emphasizes multiscale localism, & is heavily influenced by complex systems ideas like antifragility & robustness. i don't agree with everything Strong Towns puts out, but i'm highly supportive & have been for a very long time (i also have a personal connection to Chuck Marohn, it should be said). Strong Towns’ focus on small town economic resilience is extremely novel & valuable (YIMBYs tend to focus exclusively on big cities), and their emphasis on how architecture, design & road safety interact with local economics & public finance is genuinely brilliant. Strong Towns has single-handedly introduced dozens of concepts & frameworks into urbanist discourse & theory, & has done a lot to influence practical policymaking. it provides a critique of the car-centric, suburban planning model that is mercifully light on cultural snobbery, focusing on clever dollar-and-cents public finance metrics like tax revenue per mile of road, and long-term infrastructure maintenance obligations

45. same old stuff, but Austin Vernon did good posts about electricity markets & storage, & brick-based thermal storage (mostly for industrial heat applications, e.g Rondo). the idea that off-grid solar PV heating up bricks to produce industrial steam/heat will become very cheap & competitive is interesting. one can hope. see also this article about Antora (Bloomberg)

46. interesting post about how Septembers being increasingly hot are unfortunate wrt solar output (Heatmap)

47. new Works in Progress edition. the past few haven't really tickled my fancy, but this one is a banger with most of the articles being fantastic. my favourite piece was on theories for why the baby boom occurred. they focus on parenting cost theory, with three big things happening that outweighed the "deeper" trend of higher income causing reduced fertility (itself a complex multi-factor mechanism): improvements in household technology (electric appliances etc), improvements in medicine (lower child mortality.. this one would seem to have countervailing effects wrt the insurance value of kids, they don't really get deeply into that), & finally a housebuilding boom leading to earlier marriages & thus more kids.

48. a lovely piece (Economist) about the Royal Enfeld Bullet, a long-enduring British motorcycle that apparently is still big in India (quite related, Works in Progress & Stewart Brand have been steadily releasing articles for a planned book, and ch2 is all about maintenance & the importance of simplicity in cars & guns. see the roundup here). i have somewhat conflicted views on all this stuff. i support the small-scale, decentralized vision of high autonomy & modularity. this goes for energy systems, food systems, and machine maintenance. but i also deeply support the large-scale technological systems that have brought so much power to humanity & which are ultimately necessary for longrun survival via space colonization. so like if electric & self-driving vehicles become too complex for decentralized repair & maintenance, & all transportation except for bicycles or whatever is controlled by megacorps... is that bad or good? i just don’t know

books

The Future Is Degrowth: A Guide to a World beyond Capitalism by Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter & Aaron Vansintjan. my book consumption has really fallen off lately (i started a great new job at work that has been quite engrossing, please clap). but i did read this. it was an enjoyable hate-read (i disagree with degrowth philosophy & economics in the strongest possible terms). the book surveys & synthesizes the many flavours of degrowth. some of it was very slippery, presenting degrowth as an absurdly moderate, common-sense programme. they try to separate themselves from hardcore primitivist localism. there’s not much effort to steelman degrowth critics. it suffers from a 'no true scotsman' issue, where all criticisms of degrowth are dismissed as not representing what an 'ultimate' degrowth paradigm would be, and claiming that any problems arising from movement towards Degrowth Utopia are actually caused by Growth Capitalism & insufficient implementation of the true degrowth principles. needless to say this is a common flaw in all ideological systems, & is tightly linked to the horrible failure mode of “it’s all for the greater good, things will just have to get a bit worse before they get better! you’ll see!” i won’t get into the details of the book

Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrless. this was pretty okay. like it was fine, idk. perhaps one of those cases where its novelty doesn’t impress simply because the genre it helped create is so well-established now (high fantasy paired with modern-age technology/politics). China Miéville’s books seems influenced by it, but i enjoyed those better. a victim of its own success, maybe. Ross Douthat linked to this review of the book a while back which brought it to my attention