in retrospect, 6 years later:
wow, I was way too bearish about the “mundane” economic/practical impact of AI.
“AI boosters”, whatever their incentives, were straightforwardly directionally correct in 2019 that AI was drastically “underrated” and had tons of room to grow. Maybe “AGI” was the wrong way of describing it. Certainly, some people seem to be in an awful hurry to round down human capacities for thought to things machines can already do, and they make bad arguments along the way. But at the crudest level, yeah, “AI is more important than you think, let me use whatever hyperbolic words will get that into your thick noggin” was correct in 2019.
also the public figures I named can no longer be characterized as only “saying true things.” Polarization is a hell of a drug.
links 1/10/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-10-2025
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Romania
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamangia_culture
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucuteni%E2%80%93Trypillia_culture
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armand_C%C4%83linescu
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Antonescu
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ana_Pauker
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gheorghe_Gheorghiu-Dej
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolae_Ceau%C8%99escu
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_770
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_rural_systematization_program
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitate
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gheorghe_Pintilie
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pite%C8%99ti_Prison
https://balkaninsight.com/2021/02/03/long-shadow-how-romanias-securitate-turned-the-revolution-into-riches/
claims that the Securitate continued to exist de facto, even after the revolution that ended the Ceausescu dictatorship.
“This influence distorts democracy, says Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, a Romanian civic activist and a leading scholar on corruption. “There’s long been ample evidence of a ‘deep state’ in Romania with roots in the former security services,” she maintains.”
“The Securitate was declared defunct and, with no admission of previous crimes – including those committed in the revolution – or internal vetting, was chopped into nine separate services that corresponded to the Securitate’s organizational substructure. The new services were staffed and directed by virtually the same people as the old Securitate.”
“During the 1990s, the Securitate’s successors, the domestic SRI, the Foreign Intelligence Service, SIE, and others, exploited their wide-ranging resources and security monopoly to become oligarchs and form cartels in the post-Communist economy. So vast was their intelligence that they could blackmail compromised politicians, media professionals and judges. In post-communist Romania, just about everyone had something to hide.”
what went wrong at Zymergen?
https://manufacturingchemist.com/news/article_page/Where_Zymergen_went_wrong_a_biomanufacturing_perspective_for_synthetic_biology/204177
https://www.forbes.com/sites/angelauyeung/2021/08/03/as-biology-manufacturing-company-zymergen-implodes-correspondence-with-sec-showed-early-doubts/
https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/admin/2024/33-11303.pdf
https://polymerist.substack.com/p/zymergens-implosion
https://web.archive.org/web/20240423050337/https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/2021/10/13/the-inside-story-of-how-softbank-backed-zymergen-imploded-four-months-after-its-3-billion-ipo/?sh=3df6dc87c2e0
https://www.bclplaw.com/en-US/events-insights-news/sec-penalizes-company-for-unsupported-hype.html
they failed to manufacture their first product to customers’ specifications, lost the orders, overstated the market for it (which the SEC sued them for), and admitted they had no revenue & would not be profitable for the foreseeable future shortly after their IPO.
ultimately the issue may be that they specialized in only one piece of the manufacturing process, strain optimization. they outsourced downstream processing and manufacturing scale-up to third party contractors, and those are often places where hiccups arise for new biomanufactured products.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rastafari
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haile_Selassie
https://drownedinsound.com/in_depth/4140798-10-years-of-dubstep-by-subliminal-transmissions-digest
https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/living-world/2023/controlled-burns-california-wildfire
“not enough controlled burns” and “climate change” are the causes of forest fires.
what’s going on in LA right now is a chaparral fire. controlled burns aren’t appropriate for chaparral. these are “wind-driven” fires spread by the Santa Ana winds, which are unusually strong this year, but the wind severity isn’t driven by climate change.
the human-preventable cause of these fires isn’t climate change or Smokey the Bear, but too many human-caused fires, in particular due to power lines, since PG&E has not adequately maintained the lines in California as population has risen and the power grid has grown.
https://www.npr.org/2006/12/15/6630791/name-calling-in-michael-crichtons-next amusing story about Michael Crichton putting an unflattering portrait of a journalist who criticized him in his (fiction) book.
https://topos.institute/work/ Topos Institute builds collaborative modeling tools based on category theory, useful for formalizing mathematics, system dynamics, epidemiology, etc.
try their tool CatColab here: https://catcolab.org/analysis/f79f1894-601f-49cf-9da1-00a2ebcc0792
textbook about these concepts: http://davidjaz.com/Papers/DynamicalBook.pdf
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2023/11/18/formalizing-the-proof-of-pfr-in-lean4-using-blueprint-a-short-tour/
https://github.com/PatrickMassot/leanblueprint the Blueprint library allows you to visualize the dependency graph of a proof in Lean