Honestly this every time I read ACX posts on Al risk/trajectories.

All spiders are little mechs to me! Their legs are powered by hydraulics!

Tigers are generally crepuscular which means they’re most active around dawn or dusk, when the sun is very low in the sky. Their orange fur does not stand out so well when everything looks orange under the golden light of dawn.

As many as you can fit on the ship!

We just need to send Elon to Mars and then we’ll be happy here on Earth.

You say that now but wait till you’re sleeping in a tree (to escape the dinosaurs) and start to fall and there’s nothing to wake you! Then you’ll be sorry you wished away that “glitch!”

High maternal mortality meant that having more than about 7 children per woman was rare. Total fertility rate was about 4.5 to 7 in the pre modern era. Population growth was low due to infant and early childhood mortality though.

If you start having children at age 12, you can have a child every year and reach 7 children by age 20. Without contraceptives, people weren’t having such large multi-year gaps between children like we do now.

That’s not a well-founded assumption. The average age of first birth was only 21 as recently as 1970. Go back a few hundred years and it’s way younger than that. Many women throughout history became mothers as soon as they were able (right after the onset of puberty). Many cultures had rites of passage into adulthood for boys and girls of that age. There was no such thing as adolescence.

Silent? No no no. The gaping hole makes loud chewing noises while the nostrils merily chat away in a sing-songy, whistly voice!

Absolutely nailed the look. I’ve seen so many PhD students with that exact look!

It’s extremely common for different fields of inquiry (scientific, mathematical, philosophical, etc) to reuse common words. If we had to come up with brand new words for everything in every field then we’d all be speaking gibberish, like they do in medicine!

Same story in Canada. A big decline in total farmland (decline of 13.1 million acres or 7.9%) but an increase of 3.6 million acres in crop land. This represents an increase in intensity and density of farmland and a decrease in farmland used for non productive applications.

One of the big differences recorded in this report is a 62% decrease in the number of people living on farms from 1971-2021. A decrease in the amount of farmland used for living spaces (farmhouse, garden, garage) may be a big factor in the above crop:farmland ratio changes, as would a consolidation of farms (total number of farms decreased from 246K to 189K from 2001-2021).

What this all says to me is that economies of scale play a huge role in North American farming, and that our subsidy structures do not favour small farms.

That’s for modesty!

No it’s to wipe the sauce off his chin after finishing a burger!

Thanks for this. Now I’m on a major Wikipedia deep dive on Polaris and cepheid variables!

I thought this was some kind of new, futuristic house design.

You rub them so hard it starts producing smoke!

We’re talking about two different things here.

Actually trying to end world hunger vs pushing a button and having it happen. The former is really hard and probably way beyond the means of any individual, no matter how wealthy. The fact that Elon promised to do it is only evidence of his extreme ego, not his ability nor his ethics (which his donation to himself calls into question).

If he could push a button and end world poverty at a nominal cost of $xxx billion, I think he would do it. But to actually put in the work over a lifelong project which has a high potential to fail? I don’t for a second believe he’s capable of that. But who is?

I don’t think you thought this one through!

To be the guy known for ending poverty for all time, having statues in every park on the planet? Or just another boat to park in your mega-garage of boats?

Easy choice.

Yes and by contrast Microsoft has been enshittifying the hell out of Windows in order to extract more and more money out of the corporations they have contracts with. They force everyone to use Teams, Azure, OneDrive, and Office 365 so that they achieve total lock-in and ratchet up the cost of the support contracts.

Microsoft is basically following the same playbook IBM pioneered in the enterprise: use a slick sales team to get your hooks into into the CEO, CIO, and other senior VPs in charge of IT in order to force all their crap onto the company by top-down fiat rather than bottom-up informed decision making.