What stands out to me is that Charleston, SC, is not a center of economic activity, despite being one of the best ports in the colonies through today. Atlanta, GA, is, though, and it's got no port at all.... (4/end)

I did an overlay of the two images. Only two areas of high economic activity didn't have railroads: Phoenix (railroads reached Phoenix in 1895) and Miami, which didn't have a rail link until the Flagler railroad in 1912. (3)

The economic activity aligns with this 1889 map of US railroads. (2)

Data source: mpdc.dc.gov/publication/...

In 2014, the DC Metropolitan police made 20,387 arrests, or an average of 55 per day. At that rate, they would have made 726 arrests in 13 days, or a 32% more than 550

The problem with this is that toxicity is mostly about off-target effects (with some target overload and receptor affinity concerns) and to evaluate off-target effects, you need a whole organism. Simulation and organoids are useful when you want to consider a specific target.

Within human intelligence, processing ambiguous situations add approximately 600ms to processing time, and adds activity in the DLPFC and OFC. Maybe without those 600ms, our brains are actually processing an input-output transformation, like an LLM. Maybe those 600ms are where intelligence lies. (6)

As we marvel at the progression of the technologies we group together under the heading AI, we are increasingly unable to distinguish between a sufficiently sophisticated transformation of input to output data, and the kind of general-purpose processing that characterizes human intelligence. (5)

If LLMs are information theory constructs, then doubling the rank of the tensor weights would quadruple the context window. Doubling a log is equivalent to squaring the message length. Continued progress could easily extend beyond our ability to recognize entropy limits in interactions. (4)

ChatGPT has a "context window" which was described as 30,000 words in this 15/Jan/25 article. This makes sense in terms of an information theory entropy limit. It doesn't make a lot of sense when we think about traditional definitions of intelligence. (3) www.nytimes.com/2025/01/15/t...

With a robust enough transformation tensor, information theory suggests that an input could be transformed to an arbitrary output without the tensor describing what people would consider "intelligence." Information theory offers an explanation of how the Turing test can be wrong. (2)

In 2007/8, I worked with genetics labs while Bush had the “no fetal tissue” stem cell ban. In university labs, they had 2 of each piece of equipment: 1 for general studies and 1 for federal grants - no fetal tissue. They charged that 2nd set on direct budgets, because it wasn’t shared. (5/end)

This means the choice is: direct charge the equipment: $600k direct + 15% indirect. Indirect charge the equipment: $100k direct + 60% indirect. So that’s $690k vs $160k. And from a pure numbers perspective and 280 characters of insight, paying $690k sounds like the better deal. 15% overhead! (4)

Second, it actually under-pays for infrastructure. Imagine that scientists need a $500k psychofrackulator to do their $100k study. If it is used only for the study, they can charge it as a direct expense, for $600k. If they share it with even 1 other study, they can only cover it as an indirect. (3)

This is really very advantageous to the government, for two reasons. First, many federal grants require an in-kind contribution of capabilities and services. I worked on a $10M/year grant to UMiami in the aughts and the terms of the award required a lot of in-kind services. (2)

What is your position on Van Gogh? I was embarrassed when I first heard a Dutch person say the name, but then I decided to relax and not worry about it. Verbalization is for communication, so if “the right way” is unintelligible to your audience, it is wrong.

There seems to be a Dunning-Kruger aspect to SBF: smart enough that people convinced him that he was smarter. But to not understand the game theory that underlay his strategy means he wasn't all that good at math. The game theory he describes in interviews shows his thin grasp of strategy. (5/end)

SBF/FTX ran this way - understanding odds x return = EV, but not that a bet with a 0% chance to win infinity dollars can have a positive EV but be stupid to play. FTX made a bunch of massive upside vs implode bets. They won massive upside several times. But they imploded once. That's enough. (4)