2024-11-07

Martian power, vibe testing, fake truffles, Bitcoin booms, bettors made bux, Kamala blew it, voluminous volcanic liberal spew, DOJ to drop Trump cases, Fat Leonard gets 15yr, glassing Corning


etc

  • Powering the Mars Base

    In the US, per capita energy consumption is about 10 kW, with about 1.5 kW being used as electricity and 6.5 kW ending up as waste heat. If we want to close the entire Mars industrial stack with just a million people, on the surface of Mars, it is safe to assume at least a 10x increase in per capita productivity and energy consumption, so let’s baseline 100 kW per person.

Horseshit

  • Civilian support for military coups isn't a bug – it's a feature

  • Vibe Checks Are All You Need - by Daniel Olshansky

    Quantitative benchmarks, evaluations, and verification are critical to the 1% tail-end, but a vibe check is the good enough solution. This is what most LLM developers and day-to-day but are afraid to admit due to the lack of rigour. At Twitter in 2014, our initial spam filtering algorithms relied on word matches manually curated based on the "that's not nice test." At Magic Leap in 2017, while building out one of the world’s earliest mixed reality experiences with spatial mapping and object recognition, the "that looks good test" often sufficed. At Waymo in 2020, I joined the planner eval team focused on evaluating risky autonomous vehicle interactions - we used the "that looks safe test" to build out a golden ground truth dataset.

  • The truffle industry is a big scam. Not just truffle oil, everything


Musk

  • Elon Musk’s Election Day X Posts: Trump Support and Conspiracy Theories - The New York Times

    On Election Day, Elon Musk used his X account to encourage his 203 million followers to vote for Donald J. Trump. He also used it to stoke fears about election interference. Mr. Musk, one of Mr. Trump’s most vocal and wealthy supporters, has thrown the weight of his social media company and his wallet behind the former president. He’s given almost $120 million to the Trump campaign and posted incessantly about Mr. Trump in recent weeks.

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

  • Sin taxes are suffering from a shortage of sinners

  • Colorado voters reject ranked choice voting, ban on hunting big cats.

  • South Dakota votes to keep 'him' in the state constitution

  • Florida: Marijuana amendment didn't pass. But it got more than 50%

  • Polymarket Whales Cash In: Big Bets on Trump’s Victory Yield Millions in Profits - Ecoinimist

    As of Nov. 4, one day before election day, over half of Donald Trump’s “Yes” shares on Polymarket were in the hands of five enigmatic whales. In comparison, shares for Vice President Kamala Harris are more evenly spread, with the top five shareholders owning only 18% of her “Yes” votes. The largest shareholder of Harris holds just 4.4%, while Trump’s leading shareholder commands 29.1%, Domer pointed out. The largest Trump-related betting account on Polymarket, referred to as “Theo4,” reportedly made over $20.4 million in profit from his pro-Trump wagers, based on information released by Lookonchain on Nov. 6.

  • …and now we see what is possible | the singularity is nearer

    In retrospect, I’m very impressed with how Elon did the Twitter transition, and I’m grateful to have had a front row seat to that history. It made me reconsider how power works. He has an army of competent lieutenants, and he tasked them with doing a variety of things. I regret not seriously trying to fix search, I didn’t really understand at the time what he was asking or why. I thought I was there to reverse engineer the mess of a codebase, while in reality just having people try to build features and seeing what breaks is a better strategy. I’m not very good at being a follower, I need to deeply understand why, and I’m sorry I didn’t until later.

    It’s even possible that the Intelligence Agency Deep State shows up on your first day in the Oval Office, tells you who really runs things, and tells you what happens to you if you defy them. “Hello, we are the Deep State. Here are the bounds in which you can act. Step outside them, and we will kill you.” Which is another place the government differs from Twitter. As a state, they have a legitimate monopoly on violence, so is the deep state’s threat even wrong? “You just didn’t understand the President hasn’t actually been in charge for 60 years. Better for everyone that way. We have control of weapons that can end the world. We can’t trust something like that to the will of the people”

  • Allan Lichtman fails to predict correct outcome of election

    Allan Lichtman, the historian who predicted 9 of the 10 last elections, failed to accurately predict who voters would chose to become the 47th president of the United States. In a stunning political comeback, ex-President Donald Trump defeated Vice President and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris to reclaim the White House Tuesday night. "Right now after a very long night I am taking some time off to assess why I was wrong and what the future holds for America," Lichtman told USA TODAY Wednesday morning.

  • Opinion | What We Just Went Through Wasn’t an Election. It Was a Hostage Situation. - The New York Times

    Heading into Tuesday’s vote, a large majority of voters said that the country was on the wrong track and that they were disappointed with the candidates on offer. A plurality of voters said that regardless of who was elected, the next president would make things worse. Nearly 80 percent said the presidential campaigns did not make them proud of America. The blame for this grievous state of affairs lies with the Democratic and Republican Parties, both of which played a game of chicken with the electorate, relying on apocalyptic threats about the end of democracy to convince people that they had no choice but to vote as instructed. Both candidates offered up policies that were unpopular even among their supporters, serving a banquet for their donor classes while doling out junk food to their bases. For one candidate, that contemptuous strategy succeeded. But it fails the American people.

  • Revenge of the Silent Male Voter

Harris / Democrats

Trump / Right / Jan6