I never thought too much about solar until my recent trip to Florida. We’re planning to get solar on our roof, but largely to create some energy independence and wean off the natural gas our municipal electrical company uses. I’ve been bullish on solar, especially as its cost
I’ll caveat this post with the acknowledgement that compensation and promotion aren’t everything, and comp especially is just one dimension in what I consider to be a fulfilling job. Other dimensions worth mentioning the same breath are autonomy/agency (especially technical autonomy in engineering roles), responsibility, visibility to
When trying to view space from space, the earth blocks a cone-like volume and casts a sightline “shadow” behind it. I’m interested in exploring the amount of occluded space for an observer/satellite as a function of altitude. Given Earth’s radius R and the viewing altitude h , the
When I worked at Boston Consulting Group, there was a large team that handled the presidential transition after the election. Around 2016 when Trump was elected for the first time, there was a lament from some partners that they couldn’t staff the transition team because many BCGers weren’t
I watched a video recently of Carl Sagan discussing defense spending in contrast to spending on climate change prevention. His salient point is that if we used a small nonzero chance of annihilation to justify massive cold war spending in preparation for that possibility, we should be willing to do
In “Stubborn Attachments,” Tyler Cowen presents a fascinating thought experiment to stress test our responsibilities to future generations. He says to imagine a space traveler leaving Earth now and taking a somewhat long journey (for us) at close to the speed of light (99.995%). People on earth would experience
Experts like Tyler Cowen and Dario Amodei place optimistic (and realistic) GDP growth over the next few decades due to AI at 10-20% (and 3-5%), but this can only be realized if AI is widely adopted by the right markets. Large companies are pursuing AI adoption with insufficient aspirations. Companies
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There is a population of people – especially in their 30s and 40s – who are perfectly able to use LLMs (or "AI" more generally) to improve their lives and work but remain unwilling to do so. A larger group seems content to use it to generate an image for