Month: December 2019

Cancelling Plans

Part of the secret is not to overbook yourself in the first place. I’m a long-time practitioner of this technique — I say a straightforward no to lots of things, and if I say yes to something, I almost never cancel. And lately I’ve been saying yes more often, because as Khazan writes, getting out and doing stuff, even if it’s potentially uncomfortable and maybe not even your cup of tea, is part of caring for yourself. Human souls are not meant to be left on shelves; they need to run and play with others in the real world.

Amazon market share

Running the numbers, Amazon has 35% of US ecommerce. But, it competes with physical retailers as well – it competes with Macy’s, Walmart and Barnes & Noble. On that basis, Amazon’s real market share of its real target market is closer to 6% (it’s 2/3 the size of Walmart)

Mitigating X-Risk

The initial advocate for off-planet colonies now concedes that the additional difficulties associated with constructing a space colony would encourage the successful construction of terrestrial lifeboats before attempts are made to construct one on another body. The only reason to still countenance their construction at all is an issue which revealed itself to the advocate for terrestrial biospheres towards the end of the collaboration. A terrestrial lifeboat could end up being easily discontinued and abandoned if funding/political will failed, whereas a space colony would be very difficult to abandon due to the astronomical (pun intended) expense of transporting every colonist back. A return trip for even a relatively modest number of colonists would require billions of $ allocated over several years, by, most importantly, multiple sessions of a congress or parliament. This creates a paradigm where a terrestrial lifeboat, while being less expensive and in many ways more practical, could never be a long term guarantor of human survival do to its ease of decommissioning (as was seen in the Biosphere 2 incident). To be clear, the advocate for terrestrial lifeboats considers this single point sufficient to decide the debate in its entirety and concedes the debate without reservation.

Squashing ISIS

ISIS is now harder to track online—but that's good news

technologies like the Dark Web are often thought of as fitting to the group’s security demands, they are largely useless to its outreach goals. ISIS needs to be where more users already are; otherwise, it’s just talking to itself alone in an empty room. For the first time since ISIS embraced social media in the early 2010s, there seem to be strong signs of the government-tech sector collaboration myself and others have been calling for. ISIS is not gone and will not be for a long time, but a critical pillar of its life force has been cracked. It’s something to not only embrace, but also demand continue.

44 ka Figurative Art

We describe an elaborate rock art panel from the limestone cave of Leang Bulu’ Sipong that portrays several figures that appear to represent therianthropes hunting wild pigs and dwarf bovids; this painting has been dated to at least 44 ka on the basis of uranium-series analysis of overlying speleothems. This hunting scene is currently the oldest pictorial record of storytelling and the earliest figurative artwork in the world.

2021-11-13: The New Yorker has a nice background article, and it turns out newer research pushed the age 1 ka back:

The painting of the warty pig was at least 45 ka old. This makes it the oldest known example of figurative cave art in the world. The implications of these dates are profound. The famous animal paintings in the Chauvet cave, of France, are dated at 35 ka BP; the Sulawesi warty pig outdoes them by 10 ka. Many archeologists and anthropologists talk about a “great leap forward” in human culture, suggesting that it occurred 30-60 ka BP. During this “leap,” Homo sapiens initiated behaviors characteristic of modern humans. Such discoveries indicate that the leap may have occurred toward the more ancient end of that range. The warty pig also upends any lingering belief that figurative cave art was a European thing. “The early cave art in Europe is so spectacular that it was hard for archeologists to tear their eyes away from it”. This sometimes resulted in a “not fully conscious Eurocentrism.”

2023-01-06: Insights into the why of cave paintings

the number of marks on the cave paintings was a record, by lunar month, of the animals’ mating seasons. Ice Age hunter-gatherers were the first to use a systemic calendar and marks to record information about major ecological events within that calendar

Awkward Scone

At the airy and plant-filled, 16-seat cafe, See makes 3 kinds of breakfast burritos. 1 with chorizo, New Mexican red chile, white cheddar, scrambled eggs, and hash browns; another with all the same ingredients except for New Mexican green chile and bacon; and a third, vegan option with refried Navajo pinto beans, chipotle salsa, New Mexican green chile, and hash browns.

More With Less

There’s still a lot of potential to build more efficient and larger scale computing systems, particularly ones tailored for machine learning. And I think the basic research that has been done in the last 5 or 6 years still has a lot of room to be applied in all the ways that it should be. We’ll collaborate with our Google product colleagues to get a lot of these things out into real-world uses.

But we also are looking at what are the next major problems on the horizon, given what we can do today and what we can’t do. We want to build systems that can generalize to a new task. Being able to do things with much less data and with much less computation is going to be interesting and important.