@kevinf567 @aarmlovi If it's in central London, the rail infrastructure is there already. If it's further out, the property taxes will pay for the rail extension.
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Eric23332
6K posts
Whenever people say 12 story midrises are denser than "towers in a park", I agree
But then I ask them--what if you put the towers *on top of the midrises*, with the parks on the roofs of the midrises?
Then the Midrise Bros get mad & change topics
Seán O'Neill McPartlin@o_mcpartlin
Some people respond to the desire to "build up" by citing graphics like these. They appear to suggest the counterintuitive idea that building mid-rise buildings actually achieves the same density (dph) as very tall buildings But the counterintuitive point is obviously false. These calculations involve applying arbitrary distances between buildings, artificially restricting densities. It is true that midrise may be preferable in a variety of settings. It may also be true that high densities can be achieved through midrise development (think of Paris!) But don't be fooled: the obvious point that tall buildings achieve higher densities is true.
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i have a theory for what's going on with architecture.
the way that i have come to see it is that a desire for ornamentation is largely a desire for ethnic markers. we evolved to ornament our bodies, homes, and other objects to tell people who we are. the reason this ornamentation behavior evolved is because it helps us expand our cooperation network - if you see someone you don't recognize but has the right ethnic markers, you can probably trust them (especially if the markers are hard to fake).
but the way this manifests in the modern world is that we like seeing things that are familiar and carry the right culturally-loaded associations. this is difficult to get right in a multicultural society.
in the US, our founders came up with a creative solution to the problem without realizing that's what they were doing. they just copied a lot of classical architecture but made it bigger and cooler. this let them call on recognizable architectural tropes from a high-prestige tradition without overly favoring any specific modern group.
modern architects don't want to copy random old prestige styles from dead cultures. they want to come up with their own stuff. the problem is, there's nothing to come up with. all that's there is just mashing up different culturally-loaded symbols.
Matthew Yglesias@mattyglesias
Highbrow center-right people are surprisingly open to elaborate conspiracy theories about architecture.
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@dilanesper What's funny is one day they claim that Israel is a US puppet, and the next day claim the US is an Israel puppet.
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A lot of lefties love to claim that Israel is just a US puppet and that POTUSes can pick up the phone and stop Israel from doing anything in a moment's notice, but the reporting on the Iran War is basically falsifying those claims-- Israel's done several things we didn't want.
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@deanwball But state control of AI would happen anyway. States as a rule have a monopoly on power in their territory. If AI develops to the point of wielding power, either the state confiscates AI or AI becomes the state. With a pause, at least the AI that can be wielded is weaker.
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Pause AI rhetoric is predicated on the notion that the AI companies are recklessly racing toward dangerous tech and that a government controlled pause button is therefore necessary, but this seems really hard to reconcile with the fact that government is attempting to destroy an AI company because *the government* is racing toward plausibly dangerous AI uses (Sec. Hegseth has stated in official directives that he wants to deploy AI into critical systems regardless of whether it is aligned, for example) and *the company* is pushing back.
The roles are totally reversed from the logic that Pause AI and frankly other AI safety advocates confidently assumed for years. It is *industry* that is in favor of alignment and at least somewhat measured deployment risks, and government whose actions seem much closer to reckless.
I predicted this for years. I said, in particular, that pauses and bans and licensing regimes gave government a dangerously high degree of control over AI, and that the incentives of government are much more dangerous than those of private industry with competitive market incentives.
I believe the events of the last month are good evidence in favor of my view. At this point if you are an AI safety advocate whose policy proposals do not wrestle seriously with the brutal political economic reality of the state and AI, I don’t take you seriously.
It gives me no pleasure to have been right about this, by the way. The state has an incredibly strong structural incentive to centralize power using AI, and we are, all of us, not so empowered to stop it. I am quite concerned about this.
Miles Brundage@Miles_Brundage
I think if you pushed them for five minutes they'd agree that putting the federal government...right now... the same one that did the Anthropic stuff...in charge of approving AI products before deployment is an insane idea
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@perrymetzger Biden wasn't the president when Altman talked about human extinction in 2015.
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@eric23332 During the Biden administration, most of the Office of Science and Technology Policy was placed there by Open Philanthropy and friends.
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In another year, or two years, or five years, or ten years, when AI has not destroyed the economy, and there’s been no “jobs apocalypse”, and people are just living better and healthier, will the current doomsayers come back and admit on chat shows “you know, I was wrong there, I regret having panicked everyone”? Evidence from the past says that it’s unlikely. Paul Ehrlich never retracted his claims about imminent overpopulation.
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@perrymetzger He's said such things as late as 2023, maybe later.
And no the White House has never been infested with EAs, lol. During the Obama and Biden administrations it was "infested" with woke people, but not EAs.
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@eric23332 When was the last time Sam said such a thing? Not lately. There was an era where the White House was infested with EAs and you had to pay lip service to such things
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@borzou @taufiqzrahim @mashabani Lol. The article said "most". You refuse to deny that. Apparently it is "most" after all.
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@taufiqzrahim @mashabani Can you understand why I wouldn’t even wanna go there? Can’t use that as a representative sample. Best we can do is describe a range of stances. The overwhelming common denominator was confusion and fear.
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I was just there with another reporter for two days. I speak Persian so spoke to people directly, not through an interpreter. This is not what I found at all. I found a wide variety of opinions, including those who are supportive of the war, and those who oppose it and those who are ambivalent. There were also people who were pro-regime. There was no overwhelming sentiment in favor of the conflict.
Karim Sadjadpour@ksadjadpour
1. NPR’s @EmilyZFeng has been interviewing Iranians who’ve recently fled to Turkey. She reports that “most people told us they supported the strikes.” npr.org/2026/03/24/nx-…
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@soumitrashukla9 @alexolegimas Elastic demand does not necessarily mean more jobs. It depends *how* elastic the demand is, and also how much of the job has been automated.
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This chart is very related to the Substack @alexolegimas and I wrote yesterday. One explanation for this pattern is that this is basically the O-ring "focus effect" playing out in real time for software engineering.
Engineering is a high-dimensional job comprising coding, testing, and debugging, but the job has enough complementary dimensions that the worker becomes more productive rather than displaced.
And if demand for software is elastic (which it appears to be, given that cheaper/faster development means more products get built), then the model predicts exactly what the chart shows: more hiring, not less.
A counterexample here would be low-dimensional tech roles showing the opposite trend over the same time period.
Lenny Rachitsky@lennysan
Engineering job openings are at the highest levels we’ve seen in over 3 years There are over 67,000 (!!!) eng openings at tech companies globally right now, with 26,000 just in the U.S. We don’t know if there would have been more open roles if not for AI or if AI is actually leading to more open roles, but since the start of this year, the increase in open eng roles is accelerating even more.
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@Noahpinion If job displacement does start with "knowledge jobs", then "knowledge workers" will start competing for working class jobs, and they will mostly outcompete the existing working class because they are smarter and more conscientious.
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Everyone talking about AI job displacement was always so focused on the working class. They thought only the highest-IQ people would still be valuable. But it turned out mathematicians got replaced long before truckers did.
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Can confirm that this is how I made my decision on whether I should engage in premarital sex.
Matthew Yglesias@mattyglesias
"Likewise, 69% of all criminal cases in New Haven between 1710 and 1750 were for premarital sex." nber.org/system/files/w…
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@Noahpinion This is just PR. Hundreds of millions is a rounding error compared to the hundreds of billions they are spending on "making you poor and maybe killing your whole family"
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This is a nice change from "The purpose of our technology is to make you poor, and btw it might kill your whole family"
Kate Rouch 🛡️@kate_rouch
The OpenAI Foundation is spending hundreds of millions towards using AI to help cure high mortality disease, like aggressive and late stage cancers. openaifoundation.org/news/update-on…
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@AndrewCritchPhD AI agents now are running rm -rf against instructions and deleting the user's files. How is that a good place? What happens when the same agents are placed in charge of physical infrastructure?
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Protests to ban AI are not the way. AI is in a good place right now, and humans and AI need to team up for a positive future.
People afraid of AI being evil 5+ years ago are hard at work making it good today.
People discovering AI and loving it today are reaping the benefits.
Riley Coyote@RileyRalmuto
slowly but surely, this is going to be the experience and expressed sentiment of virtually every human being with a shred of ambition. and they’ll all start waking up and we’re all going to be watching with popcorn. we’re still so early, chat. somehow.
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I came across one of the most cursed objects imaginable sitting on the street in San Francisco. The contradictions are monstrous.
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@paperclippriors @mentalgeorge I thought Sutton's point was that it's a waste of time to optimize for current conditions because your gains will be dwarfed once more compute arrives?
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@mentalgeorge The most bitter lesson-pilled approach is recognizing that you will have more access to compute in the future due to Moore's law (which was Sutton's original point) and so the optimal thing to do now is to find the thing that will be able to take advantage of that compute
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If scaling compute is all that matters, why do labs spend less than a quarter of their R&D compute on final training runs?
Naively, this finding seems to fly in the face of the Bitter Lesson / Scaling Law kool-aid we're all drinking.
What is stopping the labs from throwing all their compute on bigger training runs?
I can think of a few reasons
Epoch AI@EpochAIResearch
How do AI companies allocate their R&D compute? @datagenproc and @cherylwoooo estimate that across OpenAI, MiniMax, and Z.ai, less than 30% of R&D compute spending goes to final training runs.
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@alcibiades500 @RabbiPoupko @mhdksafa Probably it should be "The IDF soldiers [encountered him] holding his baby in front of his body as a human shield"
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@RabbiPoupko @mhdksafa @RabbiPoupko, do you have a typo here. You wrote the IDF held his baby in front of his body as a human shield which makes no sense.
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This is one of the most vile stories you will see on the internet today so let's share the facts:
The father is an official member of Hamas confirmed to have participated in the horrors of October 7th.
The IDF soldiers holding his baby in front of his body as a human shield and refused to stop while approaching soldiers.
The soldiers fired at him rubber bullets not knowing if he had explosives, some of which hurt the child.
Once Mr Hamas, worst father of the year, was taken into custody he was in fact interrogated while his child that he brought as a human shield was there.
Those are the facts.
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@Empty_America Isn't the US west mostly public land, including flat areas?
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Interesting theory on why high mountains tend to attract liberals.
The topography leads to collective management, which leads to public access, which leads to ability to roam, appealing to high openness people.
Whereas temperamental conservatives often loath public land, they desire the familiarity and enclosure of gated/fenced parcels of private land, have no desire to roam.
axolotl ansel adams@nwraae
mountain forests and alpine watersheds require some form of collective or community management. Otherwise unchecked forestry or mining just degrades them so fast (ex: the railroads clear-cutting mountains along the transcontinental, mines dumping tailings into creeks)
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@powerbottomdad1 No. Put the sulfur in the stratosphere, where it cools the planet without causing pollution.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratosph…
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ONCE AGAIN: environmentalist pressures caused the international maritime organization to mandate low sulfur in their marine oils. but it was reflecting the sun and keeping things cool. its been WAY HOTTER each year since they stopped. PUT THE SULFUR BACK IN THE MARINE OIL
Crémieux@cremieuxrecueil
2026 will probably be the hottest year on record. Phoenix has already set or met 13 record highs and it's only March!
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I don't buy it. From what I've seen and heard, Kent was a capable soldier with a distinguished combat record. He seems to have been broken by personal tragedy and by the larger generational failure of the GWOT in a way that led him to embrace bitterness as an identity. I described that arc in an essay published a few months ago.
tabletmag.com/sections/news/…
The attempt to retrospectively dismiss him as a fraud is cope. In truth, Kent is a shrewd person following incentives whose resentments and ambitions led him down a well-financed path into the moronic inferno of Candace-level conspiracism.
Sebastian Gorka DrG@SebGorka
Just got off the phone with an operator who served in the same T1 unit @joekent16jan19 served in. Got an earful of how he has always been a sycophant who leveraged his fake-MAGA obeisance to leap from being a tactical operator and failed Congressional candidate to a being a senior IC official. He made a great point I hadn’t even thought of. By undermining the man who was actually elected by 77 million Americans to be the Commander-in-Chief and who has sole strategic insight and responsibility for the security of America, Kent has selfishly undermined the future of any veteran who actually should be trusted with such a position and understands what it means to honorably serve the Republic out of uniform. Joe Kent prioritized himself over the will of the American People. Indefensible.
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@RachelMoiselle Worse than that, two days ago he said it was "heartwarming" that an Iranian ballistic missile hit a school in Dimona, injuring 47 Israeli civilians.
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‘Human rights activist’ in bio. Of course.
My first reaction when I saw this post was one of rage, but I’m not going to indulge that emotion further because he’s not even worth it.
You’re beneath contempt, Craig. Wholly beneath contempt.
Craig Murray@CraigMurrayOrg
Could they make the false flag any more obvious? There is only one entity I have ever heard of which routinely and deliberately destroys ambulances - the state of Israel.
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