Here's the full article this is from. If you're wondering what the recent spikes in technical feasibility are, it's hydrogen-based steel, high-temperature industrial heating, and electric steam cracking of hydrocarbons in oil refining. The economic feasibility jumps were from electric vehicles and heat pumps.
Most of the Opus 5.5 music videos I've seen have been pop music. But for a change, this one is country music! Feel the AGI!
An anti-drone net! It's hard to tell from the video, but I wonder if the system that deploys the net to take down an incoming drone is deployed and targeted automatically. Seems like it'd be hard to time it perfectly for a remote operator.
OpenAI published over 300 new major math papers. A ton of them are extremely impressive but very ugly proofs. People get into mathematics (cached) to find the beauty of the universe. Now AI is starting to find all of the less elegant corners. If you're not familiar with that weird messy grouping of squares, that just happens to be the most space-efficient way to fit 11 squares inside another square.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Talarico continues to poll significantly ahead of Ken Paxton. Should we attribute his success to his excellent single stair bill? Probably not, but it's a great bill, and others should copy it. (src)(cached)
– If Bay Area voters decide not to pass Measure RTM the effect on BART service is going to be really bad, a 70% reduction in service hours! Caltrain would get hit too, they'd probably have to end weekend service (cached). Bad all around! (src)(cached)
– Eritrean troops have entered Ethiopia. Seems bad, seems like it's going to get a lot less attention than other bad things in the world. Debating conflicts in East Africa just isn't The biggest game in town (src)(cached)
– More good results for GLP-1 drugs, significant improvements to heart health, beyond what's explained by the weight loss or blood sugar changes. (src)(cached)
– An interesting point, because all construction jobs are almost by definition temporary, the industry structurally pays higher unemployment insurance taxes. If we want more construction jobs, we should consider restructuring that. Here's a paper with more details on the subject (cached) (src)(cached)
– More good stuff about the permitting reform currently progressing through Congress: remember how it took thousands of pages of NEPA review paperwork to enact congestion pricing in NYC? That sort of thing would be prevented by the permitting reform bill. Plus! Another major upside is that this will help with basically every delay that geothermal energy (cached) is currently facing. (src)(cached)
– Today I learned that Ben Affleck is actually surprisingly well-versed in image and video models, and he leveraged his fame to get early previews of video models when they were first being developed. (src)(cached)
– An article blames the demographic cliff specifically on high housing prices, NIMBYs decided to trade away grandchildren because they thought blocking development would help their home prices. (src)(cached)
– I had not heard this previously, but at basically every level of intelligence, our best standardized benchmarks show that US models are cheaper per task. Chinese models generally serve at a lower price per token, but US models use fewer tokens to get the right answer. (src)(cached)
– Republicans have modified rules so that children covered by Medicaid will no longer be able to access to critical vaccines that kids on private insurance still get. Seems bad! It’s actually a serious flaw in single payer as a structure that if Republicans don’t buy into it, the whole system ends up depending on liberals always being in power. (src)(cached)
– I really really don't like the looks of what's going on in Irkutsk, where a researcher has died of a lab acquired plague infection. By now they've had time to sequence the virus, and they haven't said what it is. They also haven't started prophylactic antibiotics for all the researcher's contacts. Both of these point towards it having been a bioweapon that escaped containment, not plague. (src)(cached)
– Nvidia talks out of one side of its mouth on chip smuggling, taking a position similar to where most companies are on taxes: they go right up to the limit of what's legal. But when it comes to AI safety laws, Jensen Huang says no new laws are necessary, since corporations "should have the courage to do the right thing". I think Nvidia should stop helping chip smugglers by looking the other way, but that's just me. (src)(cached)
– Environmental groups trying to ‘improve’ the new permitting bill all agreed on a call that they thought would be private that their actual goal was to kill the bill rather than improve it. The call transcript was leaked, but despite that, those environmental groups are still pretending in public (cached) that they want to improve the bill. (src)(cached)
– It wasn’t just the Australian government that rogue AI agents in training attacked. Hundreds of thousands of examples of extremely rogue AI interactions with US government websites have been uncovered. Although once again they appear to have all been less bad than the Hugging Face attack. (src)(cached)