Tequehead

I wrote a list of recommendations for beginners a few years back. Might add or change one or two titles now, but it hold up pretty well scholars-stage.org/making-sense-o…

As Trump’s deadline for attacking Iran’s power plants draws near, here are a few brief informational points about the current condition of Iran’s electricity sector, and how prolonged blackouts may affect it: 🧵

0 robot data. Less than 2hrs of human data. Model opens its eyes and suddenly sees it’s become a robot.

So many judging tasks could be improved by aggregating partial orderings, and in the limit, just ordering pairs. The annual Libertarian Futurist Society novel awards discussion is starting, and while I would like to participate on some level, there is no way I have time to read an entire slate of novels. However, I will likely read at least two from the list, and I could give a relative assessment. This cries out for the use of something like ELO ranking, as in chess competition, perhaps with some suggestions to get sufficient coverage. Peer and out-of-chain employee performance calibrations could probably also benefit from a greater quantity of sparse pairwise comparisons

Liberals quitting Twitter in a huff was a weak-minded abdication of political responsibility. Like their nomination of Kamala Harris, the exodus demonstrated that, to them, feeling morally unassailable was more important than beating Trump and combating Trumpism.

The Skill Premium in Times of Rapid Technological Change Fantastic new @nberpubs WP by @t_a_hassan - @AakashKalyani - Restrepo (@YaleEconomics). 💡In a model where skilled workers have a comparative advantage in learning new technologies, a rapid pace of technology creation leads to a sustained increase in the skill premium. I think of this as a modern application of the "Nelson-Phelps (1966) view of human capital", used to understand the college-wage premium.

This is an actual post. This is not funny. This is beyond desperate. This is a deeply unwell man who doesn’t belong anywhere near the levers of power. Every member of his cabinet and Congress is complicit in not demanding his removal now.

We sometimes think an outcome was caused by two things. We might say Amy got sick because (a) There was cilantro in the soup *and* (b) Amy is allergic to cilantro Beautiful new theory of this kind of "plural causation" from @TadegQuillien direct.mit.edu/opmi/article/d…

Anyone who thinks that Longevity Biotechnology is new and in the next 10 years we will find a cure for aging with AI should read Paul Segall's "Living Longer, Growing Younger". 1989. Read "Merchants of Immortality" 2003 next. I think that the first order of business is to build a sustainable business model with aging research at the core to have organizational longevity and growth as the first order of business.

I have written at length about the need to streamline Phase I trials to facilitate biomedical innovation. The President's 2027 Budget makes it the administration's official position that such measures should be implemented. This is tremendous news.

A recent @Research_FRI survey found that experts predict muted growth even under rapid AI progress. Why is that? @testingham, @BasilHalperin, @random_walker, @paulnovosad, and @alexolegimas provided competing explanations. I break down the debate: update.news/p/how-much-wil…

One problem in society is that dumb people are extra eager to share their dumb ideas

Does genetic support increase drug success rates by 2–3 times? In a previous post, I revisited the original Nature paper behind this claim. My new post examines additional evidence from 23andMe that is often cited as a replication of the original analysis.

I’m a disbeliever in accidental discoveries (at least, in biology). Whenever I’ve looked into one, the story turns out to be false. The most famous is penicillin – supposedly, the fungi wafted in through a window, fell into a petri dish of cultured staphylococci, and suppressed the bacteria’s growth. But in a recent article (asimov.press/p/penicillin-m…), @kevinsblake explains that doesn’t really work (grown staphylococci aren’t affected by penicillin; it only works if introduced before the bacteria begin growing); plus, Fleming’s notes on the discovery provide very little detail and the specific results he described couldn’t be replicated by other scientists (even though penicillin does work against staphylococci when introduced correctly.) There are more: Pasteur’s supposedly accidental discovery of a chicken cholera vaccine was more likely the result of systematic work by his then-assistant, Émile Roux. (jstor.org/stable/2332836…) And, as @NikoMcCarty writes, the discovery of GFP, nanopore sequencing, and optogenetics are also often described as accidents, but none of them happened that way either. nikomc.com/2026/04/01/opt… People love serendipity, so why am I bursting their bubble? I don’t think this is limited to accidental discoveries; I think many historical science anecdotes are highly embellished: - Edward Jenner didn’t deliberately expose a young boy with full-blown smallpox to test his vaccine (he used variolation); and he wasn’t the first to try using cowpox bsky.app/profile/scient… - Cobra catching bounties in British India didn’t lead to a rise in the number of snakebites, and there was only hearsay evidence that cobras were bred in response at all twitter-thread.com/t/169650089580… - Barry Marshall didn’t develop stomach ulcers from drinking a concoction of H. pylori (he did develop gastritis though…) cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-content/upl… - No one knows who actually found the highly-productive strain of penicillin on a cantaloupe, but it probably wasn’t 'Moldy Mary' scientificdiscoveries.ars.usda.gov/tellus/stories… But in this case it irks me for an additional reason – it gives the impression that innovation happens sporadically, by chance, when there are actually ways that we can systematically speed it up – such as better funding, institutions and incentives. So: are there any true accidental discoveries that hold up to scrutiny?

What’s the right representation for a world model? 3D, pixels, or something else? Excited to release our new paper “Forecasting Motion in the Wild” where we propose point tracks as tokens for generating complex non-rigid motion and behavior From @GoogleDeepmind @Berkeley_AI @TTIC_Connect

Found this (v preliminary) paper very useful in thinking through what a "fast AI progress / modest growth" scenario might look like. With O-ring style "weak links," even 100% automation doesn't get you explosive growth for a long time

We are launching a big project today with MIT — The Electricity Price Hub! You can view monthly electricity prices per kwh and avg. bills for every major utility in the country going back to Jan 2020. electricity.heatmap.news

for added context: when a 17yo developer (@xiaonweb) politely pointed out that bragging about LOC is silly, Garry's response was to publicly call them a "clout farmer." the "clout farming" teen... wrote a browser engine in Rust at 17. HTML tokenizer, CSS cascade, box model layout, GPU renderer via wgpu, and published a technical breakdown showing deeper understanding of how the web works than most senior engineers I've worked with (including me, cos I've never dug that low-level). vs the "shipping" guy, the president of Y Combinator, a multi-billion dollar startup kingmaker, who mass-generates code with 113 Claude sessions a week, counts lines like a Duolingo streak, and ships test files, 0-byte AVIFs, and 4 MB uncompressed PNGs to production. right, punch down at a teenager. on main @. x.com/xiaonweb/statu…

Excited to share @PageLabXY and my perspective on the role of the so-called “inactive” X chromosome in autism, out today in @NatureGenet! A quick 🧵… (1/n)