What is low hanging fruit that we know how to actually do with germline engineering for humans regarding longevity and not as some highly speculative thing that requires overcoming a lot of issues? And how much lifespan would it add?
So every business should measure any client fungible resource that way? Should a bank put a revenue number to any capital held in excess of regulatory requirements, for example?
Excess capacity sitting idle is the cardinal sin in modern economy.
I was merely pushing back at the insinuation that internal costs should be used to measure internal resource use.
No. The costs should always be external market price because that's where you are making the correct trade-offs.
Bank reserves, Compute etc are trade-off decisions.
Buffett vs Mayoshi
Anthropic vs Google
are being played out in real-time for us. Pretty soon you'll know which trade-off was better.
Zero excess capacity makes things quite unstable and estimating what revenue could potentially be had isn't necessarily easy or so reliable (and what about future revenues from using capacity internally vs revenued now?).
We are talking in the context of the future. I could have elaborated I guess. I personally don't foresee a future where human doctors will in general outperform AI and robotics.
AI systems will probably be able to, if not direct labs themselves, cut down a lot of the search space to only the most promising candidates. That’s basically what Isomorphic Labs is doing for candidate drug research. It doesn’t seem crazy that the same could be true for material sciences.
Simulation to the point that the accuracy is large enough to extrapolate to real materials. You can do a lot of stuff when you have access to a million GPUs that would otherwise be much harder.
A lot of materials science is already done through simulation, same with a large chunk of chemistry and biology. That fraction will only increase over time.
I am aware of advances, but I think a large chunk is a stretch in various ways. We'll just see what happens - simulating even a glass of water fully is tough.
That depends on the granularity of your simulation. For most - not all - purposes a glass of water can be simulated coarsely or by simulating a far smaller amount with greater fidelity and then to extrapolate.
For useful materials science the numbers are still large but far lower than the numbers involved in 'a glass of water'.
I really depends on what is needed. If you know that something quite "coarse" is enough to create/uncover room temperature superconductors with high critical current - fair enough. Again, we'll see what happens.
With the kind of compute they have at their disposal 'quite coarse' may actually be 'impressively detailed' and that is why I think they have an edge on this kind of stuff. It's like being able to borrow a trillion and then to go play research lab, it would be highly surprising if they weren't able to monetize such a head start.
Yep, it did. And (brown)coal kills much more people and the dependence on Russian gas made the geopolitics much worse than any nuclear reactor ever would.
The chances of a Soviet leadership-induced meltdown like at a German nuclear reactor that is properly designed and maintained is laughable.
It is, however, extremely hard to film the slow killing of people by browncoal. It's easy to film a nuclear reactor incident.
I think we can agree that people are not in general making purely statistical decisions when it comes to what risks are acceptable and which ones are not.
German TV had local experts who could tell the audience in real time that the authorities in Fukishsima were lying about the unfolding disaster.
A slightly racist belief in the Japanese as superior at following the rules meant a big shock when the Germans realised that even the Japanese could not be trusted with nuclear power.
You do realize that those "experts" were widely criticized by scientists and engineers for their lack of knowledge of the plant, many, many scientific inaccuracies and for basic fear mongering right? Most of the things they said weren't accurate. What was accurate is that the Tsunami took out the power lines around the plant and its cooling pond had a hydrogen explosion. Their backup power was down (which was the design flaw in the plant) because it was flooded. This required the pumping of seawater into the reactor to keep it cool. It never melted down in any way and the death toll was either 0 or 1 depending on how you count. Just in case you actually wanted to deal in facts on this one.
A nuclear strike on a larger fission reactor could create an awful result unlike any other power plant. There were some studies during the cold war (something about the effects in West Germanyin the early 1980s, IIRC).
As opposed to a nuclear strike directly on a populated civilian area with no nuclear power plant nearby which also creates an awful result?
The main difference in nuking a fission plant over any other area would be creating longer-term fallout.
If the attacker is at all rational, unlikely to be desired because it makes the area hard to inaccessible for troops on either side.
If the attacker is horrificaly irrational and just wants to cause pure, long term, irreparable harm, unfortunately salted nukes would be a feasible option, independent of having a fission plant anywhere near the drop zone...
Nuclear disarmament, international cooperation and reliable defence alliances can (hopefully) be used to protect against this, along with resilient fission designs within reason. Not having a fission plant by itself unfortunately and targically wouldn't prevent an utterly irrational attacker willing to cause as much long term damage as possible.
Very aware of that harsh fact, living in a country that has a section in our constitution making nuclear power illegal (yes, very stupid) and is not part of any defensive alliance (while expecting the countries around us to defend us anyways), if someone wanted to "salt the earth" around Salzburg, Vienna or Graz, they could do it, even if we have no plants.
Scale of fallout would be huge. People were kind of shocked by the analysis (trying to remember what came out then... Fetter, early 1980s, Scientific American?).
It's a bit more complex, I think. When gas imports started from the USSR, nuclear power plants were still being built in Germany, for example. There were gas imports for a long time.
if the germans want to shoot themselves in the foot they are allowed to do this, yes. what is the point of your comment? it's not even remotely relevant.
I was trying to point out that societies make and are free to make decisions that others don't like or that aren't great for them by some metric - and that there is nothing wrong with that. Why is that not relevant when it comes to energy?
so your point is that it's fine that germany ceeded energy independence and gave power to russia, because they're a country and countries have the 'right' to make bad decisions?
we have the right to criticise countries too right?
If Germans don't want energy independence - you can criticize that but that's how nation states work or is there some UN Charter violation in there, for example?
im still so confused what your point is. it's like talking about the consequences of someone's alcoholism, and someone chiming in "well they have a right to die of the booze if they want" like...ok???
So any nation state needs to be energy independent? Is that your point? Or have cheap energy and energy independence? If people want low growth, expensive energy etc., why is that like alcoholism? What is intrinsically bad there? Not like life expectancy in Germany is low, for example.
> So any nation state needs to be energy independent?
It is obviously a good thing if a democratic nation state is independent from a totalitarian dictatorship.
> Not like life expectancy in Germany is low, for example.
It's not about life expectancy. They now have to make a choice between supporting an aggressive totalitarian state vs. suffering damage to their economy due to higher energy prices. That is obviously a bad position to be in.
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