Timothy B. Lee
@binarybits
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Reporting on AI and the future of the economy. Computer science masters degree from Princeton. @arstechnica alum. Subscribe to my AI newsletter!
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Joined March 2008
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Perhaps the most damning thing Trump said in the debate was that they were ready to vaccinate 200,000 people per day. At that rate it would take more than 4 years to vaccinate the population. So either he has a terrible plan or he has no idea what he's talking about.
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According to the NYT, Facebook knows perfectly well how to slow the spread of misinformation on its platform. It has mostly chosen not to do so because the company is run by a sociopath.
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Maybe Twitter should alert it's users that some of the claims in this tweet are disputed.
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Email from Twitter spokesperson: "This Tweet is not in violation of our policies." Cc:
@jbarro
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Population of the last 10 states at admission:
Montana (1889) 140k
Washington (1889) 350k
Idaho (1890) 90k
Wyoming (1890) 60k
Utah (1896) 250k
Oklahoma (1907) 1.4M
New Mexico (1912) 330k
Arizona (1912) 210k
Alaska (1959) 230k
Hawaii (1959) 650k
DC in 2019: 690k
PR in 2019: 3.1M
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I think a lot of liberals underestimate how much this kind of behavior erodes the norms of social trust and solidarity that make societies work well.
Update: Nearly 40 fare jumpers in five minutes this morning.
I asked the Metro attendant if he cared about people stealing. He said, verbatim, “That’s not my job.”
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"I'm am not a terrorist. I'm just a guy whose actions perfectly fit the dictionary definition of terrorism."
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Sorry, if you earn $150k/year, you are rich. That's 3 to 4 times what a typical worker makes.
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The data here is really striking. A lot of Americans seem to assume it's impossible to eradicate the coronavirus and we'll just have to live with it until a vaccine arrives. Experiences in other countries show that's not true.
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I don't understand why fact-checking sites twist themselves into rhetorical pretzels like this.
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Nobody is going to want to hear this but George W Bush’s proposal to partially privatize social security would have worked out well for workers. Stock market returns over the last 15 years have been 🔥
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In 2013, the Washington Post made me sell 56 bitcoins for $112 each. They'd be worth $2 million today.
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Back in April, I set out to write an explainer on how large language models work. First I had to learn how they worked, and that was harder than I expected. This article is the culmination of 2+ months of in-depth research. I hope people find it useful.
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I made a chart. On average, blue states have seen steadily declining coronavirus infections since mid-April. On average, red states have... not.
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My story on this
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Most CEOs report to a board that in turn is accountable to shareholders. So a CEO risks getting fired if he fails to maximize profits. But Zuckerberg has super-voting shares that give him total control. If he chose to prioritize quality over profits no one could stop him.
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Interestingly, Democrats in the House passed legislation last year requiring post-election auditing (not specific to mail-in ballots). The bill died in the Republican-controlled Senate.
One way of determining fraud in mail-in ballots would be to examine a random sample of a few thousand to find the rate of fraud. If fraud rate is low, voters may be convinced of the election’s legitimacy. If the fraud rate is high, then every mail-in ballot should be examined.
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I see this sentiment a lot and it's remarkably childish. People seem to think that coronavirus-fighting efforts are favors the public does for public health experts, rather than precautions we all take to protect ourselves and our loved ones.
Which we were told explicitly was the purpose of flattening the curve
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Before I became a parent I had no idea what an insane feat of endurance single motherhood is.
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If the NTSB's diagnosis of the Uber crash is right, this is totally insane.
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This is a remarkable level of dishonesty from the Times. Scott Alexander once expressed agreement with Charles Murray on a topic unrelated to race and IQ. The Times wrote a paragraph strongly implying Alexander endorsed Murray's views on race and IQ.
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People responded to this thread by asking whether we can trust Zuck to decide what news people should read. But he's *already* deciding. He's delegating day-to-day decisions to an algorithm, but "promote whatever content people click on" is an editorial philosophy. And a bad one.
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I feel like people who think there's something uniquely inefficient about government bureaucracies has never had to deal with a private-sector bureaucracy.
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😕
I sold my Bitcoins to comply with WaPo's strict conflict of interest policies. Average purchase price: $6.50. Average sale price: $99.75.
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@elonmusk
@JaneidyEve
I've seen some reports that the narrowest part of the cave is roughly 72 cm by 38 cm (see attached diagram for instance). What is the diameter of the tube? If it's over 38 cm, wouldn't it get stuck in this spot? Or are these diagrams wrong?
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It's ludicrous that the party that represents Wyoming, Alaska, and North Dakota in the Senate is describing it as a "power grab" to give DC voters like me the same rights as voters in those states.
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I think the most plausible explanation for why Joe Biden is so unpopular is that we've developed a media ecosystem that's good at convincing everyone that everything is bad all the time, regardless of what happens.
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I have emailed Twitter to ask whether the tweet violates Twitter's rule against hateful conduct.
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California regulators just approved a huge Waymo expansion: all the way down the SF penninsula and a big chunk of the LA metro area.
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Joe Biden thinks market forces, not government bureaucrats, should determine what kind of housing gets built. And a lot of Republicans aren't happy about it.
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The fact that three different companies have apparently made COVID vaccines in ~8 months makes me wonder if there's room to be a lot more ambitious about other technology projects. Like maybe we should follow the UK and ban internal combustion engines in 2030.
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This might be the single most important chart for understanding the current inflation situation. For 25 years prior to 2020, the prices of durable goods like cars, washing machines, and couches fell every single year. Then in 2021 that suddenly and dramatically reversed.
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Clinton's most effective tactic: bring up a controversy from Trump's past and let him incriminate himself with his "defense."
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This is exactly backwards. The GME fiasco demonstrates that short-term swings in the market are often driven by random, arbitrary factors. But if you buy into an index fund and plan to hold it for 30 years you can tune all the noise out because it doesn't matter.
I don’t ever want to hear “poor people need to learn financial literacy, learn how to save and invest” again in my life. The past 48hrs has proven that’s a lie, the market is fake, and the game is rigged.
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People are dogpiling
@mattyglesias
for his completely reasonable view that copyrights should last for about 30 years. One of the more ridiculous counter-arguments is that royalties from old books can serve as an author's pension.
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One of the most ridiculous common beliefs in Silicon Valley is the idea that online instruction is going to replace face-to-face learning. It's like predicting that instructional videos will replace yoga classes or coffee machines will replace coffee shops.
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Some 🔥from
@mattyglesias
. (If you aren’t subscribed to his substack you are missing out)
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I don't think people appreciate what a big accomplishment this was. We easily could have had another lost decade.
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This is the sassiest lead I've ever seen in a NYT news story.
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In functional, high-trust societies you don't need much formal enforcement of the rules by law enforcement because most people comply voluntarily based on shared social expectations.
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Elon Musk is convincing me I've underestimated how big of an impact a single determined individual can have on the world even without political power.
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The average American enjoys one of the highest standards of living in world history but a lot of people think we live in a “late stage capitalist hellscape.”
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If Tesla became seen as a right wing brand that would be a win for the climate. Liberals will buy an electric car from somebody else. Conservatives are more likely to be switching from an ICE.
Across the country, people are now saying, “To me, buying a Tesla would be like buying a My Pillow.” Has Elon lost his marbles?
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One of the worst aspects of current politics is the bipartisan consensus that America kind of sucks. On the left you have the relentless negativity of woke politics. On the right you have the relentless negativity of Trumpism.
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My hobby: writing extremely polite responses to angry emails. Often the person realizes they were being a dick and apologizes.
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The House should impeach Trump tomorrow and the Senate should convict on Friday.
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Buying milk that will outlast the trump administration.
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I do not want the US to become like Greece or Italy where the general view is that you're a sucker if you fill out your taxes honestly. Fare jumping isn't exactly the same but I think it's more similar than some people would like to admit.
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@mattyglesias
This NYT report is suggesting the opposite! They have a switch they can throw that feeds people more real information and less garbage. Zuck is just choosing not to flip it because he's a bad person.
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I went through all 1,566 pages of the 1980 Sears catalog to find items I could easily compare with present-day products. Almost every item I looked at saw significant declines in the hours of work required it buy it.
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For a "tech" candidate, Andrew Yang has an uncanny knack for forming bad opinions about technology. We don't need PowerPoint in the State of the Union. Blockchain voting is a terrible idea. Robots aren't going to cause mass unemployment.
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@WillOremus
If you "don't feel competent to even attempt math," maybe you shouldn't be making claims involving math on national television.
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The scene at the cvs in Columbia Heights, near where I live in Washington DC. Most shelves empty, a few shelves with merchandise behind glass. Talked to a staffer who said people keep stealing stuff and the police aren’t doing anything about it.
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Elon Musk is an asshole.
"The days of us blowing off social media vitriol as trolls being trolls — those ended for us last year. We’re never going back to that space." From
@angelanfu
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I think Elon Musk buying Twitter is like a normal billionaire buying a major-league sports franchise. The business may or may not make money, but the point is to be a famous patron in your favorite hobbyist community.
The first thing to point out is that this deal makes no financial sense for Elon Musk. He's paying a premium for the stock, the total value of the acquisition is almost a fifth of his net worth, and there's no obvious way he's going to squeeze more money out of Twitter operations
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Here in the US, some states are doing well. A lot are... not.
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In 1972, the median family income was $11,116, or about 2,800 times the cost of a KFC family meal. In 2020, median household income was $84,000, or 3,200 times the cost of a KFC meal. So the average family's income goes about 14 percent further, relative to KFC meals.
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When that breaks down, institutions have to fall back on much more expensive and intrusive enforcement mechanisms. Think drug stores where you have to ask a clerk to get you razor blades from behind a plastic barrier.
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Finally got to listen to Ed Snowden's book and it's really good. The man is a hero and Joe Biden should pardon him.
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There are households pulling in $400k/year in Manhattan struggling to cover the mortgage on their $3M house and the $40,000 tuition on their kids' private schools. They'll insist they're not rich compared to their neighbor making $750k and living in a $5M house.
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Compromise proposal: Democrats agree to preserve the filibuster for this Congress, Republicans agree not to filibuster DC and PR statehood.
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I don't find Elon's excuses about how he's blocking journalists to protect his privacy at all persuasive, but the real tell is the fact that they're indiscriminately blocking Mastadon links. That's an act of desperation.
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This is so dumb. Vivek wants to end the Fed's dual mandate (inflation/employment) because it's like "trying to hit two targets with one arrow." Instead the Fed will "stabilize the US dollar against gold, silver, nickel, agriculture, and farm commodities." So that's five targets?
I will reduce headcount at the U.S. Federal Reserve by >90% and limit its scope to doing exactly *one* thing: stabilize the dollar as a stable unit of measurement. That’s it. I’ll make the 2024 election a referendum on the Fed & put the beast back in its cage.
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Some people weren't sure what I meant by superintelligence not being a thing so maybe an analogy would help.
Say you've got an college physics major, and every month you chart her performance on a test of physics understanding against the number of textbook pages she's read.…
It seems like one reason Bostrom-style superintelligence might turn out not to be a thing is that we "run out" of training data. Intuitively LLMs plateau in performance once they've "used up" the information in their training set.
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I'm starting to think that YouTube should just shut down automated video recommendations. Either recommend videos vetted by human YouTube editors or just show the next video in the same channel.
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Something that I think trips people up a lot about COVID is that the magnitude of risk changes a lot. With COVID cases down 95 percent since mid-January, every activity has a 20x lower COVID risk now than it did then.
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One reason I'm not excited about the work-from-home revolution is that it comes at a time when other forms of face-to-face interaction have been in decline for decades. Church attendance is down. Youth sports participation is down. Union membership is down.
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I was pretty bullish about bitcoin and blockchains from 2012 to 2014. I've gotten steadily more skeptical since then. At this point I'm quite pessimistic that blockchains will turn out to have economically or socially significant applications.
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This is idiotic. The current GME situation is hilarious but day trading on Robinhood mostly means letting Wall Street insiders take advantage of you. The way to stick it to hedge funds is to buy a Vanguard Target Date fund and hold it until you turn 65.
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It's interesting to imagine a world where humanity never invented the transistor and therefore never had a digital revolution. In that world, the obvious interpretation of economic history would be that the discovery of fossil fuels gave humanity a one-time growth spurt.
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SpaceX is radically reducing the cost to send stuff into orbit.
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It’s great that a Chinese-owned company gets to decide which lunatic viewpoints get wide circulation among American young people. No possible downsides to this at all.
Over the past 24 hours, thousands of TikToks (at least) have been posted where people share how they just read Bin Laden’s infamous "Letter to America," in which he explained why he attacked the United States.
The TikToks are from people of all ages, races, ethnicities, and…
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It's a weird time for the self-driving industry. A lot of people are convinced that self-driving projects failed and the technology won't be ready for decades. Yet right now there are customers riding around in driverless taxis in the Phoenix area.
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I dutifully try to read and listen to as much ai safety stuff as I can but I think the whole field is grounded in a very strong conviction that high intelligence confers almost godlike powers. I don’t think this is true and I find it difficult to suspend disbelief about it.
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The more I write about voting, the more I become convinced that we should keep computers as far away from voting as possible. No online voting. No DREs. Limit ballot marking machines to blind people. Use optical scanners only with rigorous hand-counted audits.
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I can't stop watching this GIF of a Google LIDAR cleaning itself.
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People asked to see the same chart with NY, NJ, and CT broken out. If anything I'd say this makes the point more strongly: red and (non-NYC) blue states were on similar trajectories until about 3 weeks ago. Then blue states started falling while red states rose.
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I couldn't agree more with
@mattyglesias
here. Republicans are going to run the country roughly half the time, so even committed liberals benefit from elevating relatively reasonable conservative thinkers.
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Is Twitter's position really that it's "abusive" for the president threaten force against people who break the law? That's one of the most fundamental things a government does.
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I’m really puzzled the Taiwan situation isn’t getting more attention. It seems like China is probably going to attack in the next five years and this would likely lead to a direct war between us and China. A war we could easily lose even if it doesn’t lead to nuclear apocalypse.
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I've become convinced that this is one of the most important charts for understanding the modern economy.
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It's hard to overstate the importance of falling battery costs. Costs fell by a factor of 6 between 2010 and 2019, making almost every aspect of decarbonization easier. Experts expect electric vehicles to be as cheap as conventional vehicles by mid-decade.
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Musk's behavior here is vile.
@elizableu
Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis:
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After last week I don't want to see anyone claiming that we shouldn't give me and my neighbors representation in Congress because doing so would be too "divisive" or would be a "power grab."
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The perfect troll tweet has replies evenly split between those who get the joke and are mad about it and those who don’t get the joke and are made about it.
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Hot take: it's good that a few billionaires are using their wealth to level up humanity's space exploration game.
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It's interesting to compare the politics of guns to the politics of alcohol.
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Just say no to this. Computer security experts overwhelmingly think it’s a bad idea to hold elections online.
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I suspect a big reason that we're seeing so much pressure for a premature end to lockdowns is that public health officials have not done a great job of explaining their lockdown exit strategy. Perhaps because they don't have a good one.
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Idea: mandate the production of one economy car for every luxury car sold. Without regulation car manufacturers could flood the market with luxury cars, accelerating the rise in car prices. We might even want to block luxury car manufacturing until prices come down.
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I've talked to several people who see Elon's disastrous handling of Twitter as evidence that he just got lucky with the success of SpaceX and Tesla. I think it mostly demonstrates that partisanship makes people stupid.
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Fun fact: while GDP has grown dramatically over the last 50 years, the share of workers making less than the median wage hasn't changed at all.
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This seems like a good day to tweet out some of my favorite articles I've written over the years criticizing Elon Musk. A thread...
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If like me you're sometimes confused or annoyed by the way "neoliberal" has become a pejorative shorthand for centrist, technocratic policymakers, the recent behavior of ICANN provides an illuminating case study for why a lot of people feel that way.
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I think Ajit Pai is going to regret making light of concerns that his past work as a Verizon lawyer undermines his independence as FCC chair.
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