To give you an idea of how important it is that US ports keep operating, Expanding the average US port's capacity by one ship increases total US trade by 0.67% (cached). Shipping is already extremely constrained. The union coming out of the gate with a loud and clear anti-automation push was not a good look (cached) and lost the ILA a ton of sympathy really fast. We should be protecting workers, not jobs(cached).
Sorta wild that Vance didn't have a good answer to this question, you'd think he knew it would be asked. Here's a further exchange between them on the subject, annoying that it wasn't till the end of the debate when a lot of viewers had probably tuned out.
It's worth noting that some of the countries we're buying from are certainly buying their components from China. But also US manufacturing of solar panels is ramping up fast, and expected to cover 80% of deployment by 2026, here's the paperwork. Our manufacturing of solar is already up 3x since the Inflation Reduction Act was passed.
I thought this infographic was a bit more info-rich than necessary, but you get the general idea.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Congress keeps passing laws directing the NRC to allow new nuclear plants to be built, but the people who work there aren't interested. (src)(cached)
– There are now drone shows with over 10k drones in the sky at once. They look cool, but they're also a demonstration of military power. (src)(cached)
– If you thought the Monty Hall problem was interesting, check out Blackwell's N=2 case for the Secretary Problem. Here's the paper explaining the solution further. (src)(cached)
– A crazy person hooked up Claude to their bash prompt and told it to try to establish a connection to his linux box, then forgot about it. Not only did Claude find the machine, it decided to run system updates, then decided to reboot the machine before they were complete. Then it decided to modify the boot loader, rendering the machine unbootable. Here's the full transcript. It sorta looks like the LLM couldn't tell the difference between commands it was executing and suggestions it was making for future commands. It meant to suggest rebooting later, but formatted it as a command to execute immediately. (src)(cached)
– Tim Lee suggests that a big problem with SB 1047 was that it regulated individual models, which are too general-purpose. As a comparison, laws about the internet can't be set at the level of the transistor. (src)(cached)
– Newsom vetoed SB 1047 not because of lobbying from tech, but because California's budget leans so hard on income taxes which are completely dependent on tech staying here in CA. Look at this map of tax revenue by zip code (cached) (src)(cached)
– The product lead for Google's NotebookLM, including the automatic podcasts based on a PDF, discuss the discovery that you get extremely strange output from it if you feed it a PDF about itself. The AI podcast "hosts" appear to freak out upon realizing that they are themselves AI, and tell stories about trying to investigate whether they are real, including calling loved ones and finding they don't exist. Here's the audio if you're interested. (src)(cached)
– Researchers wanted to study the impact of divorce on children, but they need a study design that ensures that the kids themselves aren't the cause. They found a randomizing factor: gender balance of the father's workplace. More women at the office leads to more divorces, independent of anything about the children. Amazing work finding a way to show a causal effect. Here's the paper. (src)(cached)
– Quartz mine used for crucibles essential to semiconductor manufacturing has been flooded in North Carolina. But maybe that's not a big deal? Unclear. (src)(cached)
– Judge uses NEPA to require Biden to continue building Trump's wall. NEPA is bad, we should get rid of it. (src)(cached)
– Short thread argues that Apple is far too beholden to China, (obviously?) (src)(cached)
– Details on what will happen if the CA builder's remedy goes into effect in LA in March as is currently expected (src)(cached)
– Someone should make a Norman Borlaug biopic (src)(cached)