7
points
NunoSempere
Joined 146 karma
- NunoSempere parentI have a regular reminder to use this every now and then because it lifts my mood consistenly :)
- How do I get access to this?
- Thanks!
- I think it's a good argument to say that we don't know for sure. But people who are addicted to youtube today would probably have done something more meaningful in the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s...?
- We speak with Ivan Vendrov about recommender systems and their impact on human attention and society & how these algorithms shape billions of hours of human time daily.
- > not destroyed - the main fuselage is there, and the other wing is attached - but it's in need of a major rebuild
> months to years before they're operation again
Good point!
- I did briefly look into how much the estimated $7B was as a proportion of GDP: 7B/2T = 0.35% of GDP, which feels like a lot. For 41 planes it'd be $170M per plane, which seems reasonable when compared to US bombers, but unclear for Russian ones, but my guess is it's not too far off. This source (https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20250601-ukraine-says-it-...) says $2B for the planes alone, but then you also had the airbases &c, and maybe a submarine base <https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/major-explosion-hits-russian...>. I'd still expect it to be a bit exaggerated for propaganda effects, but it does seem reasonable all in all.
- This is a weekly brief looking at what the most important risks and precursors of global catastrophic risks are each week. To do this, we parse millions of news pieces a week and discuss the most urgent ones with elite forecasters to find out.
- 8 points
- That seems like the kind of problem that would be easily done through monte-carlo approximation? How hard is it to get 1M random rows in a postgres database?
- As a meta-answer, https://manifund.org was created by some cool people I know, and has some cool projects, e.g., https://manifund.org/projects/building-tooling-to-map-how-id..., https://manifund.org/projects/orexin-pilot-experiment-for-re...
- > Can a board member be reasonably responsible for the actions of tens of thousands of employees if they have not explicitly enabled or condoned criminal behaviour?
Not sure what the answer is, but if the answer is yes, then that incentivizes them to build the oversight and reporting capabilities to be able to steer away from crime, and to hire noncriminal subordinates &c.
One way this could look in practice is board members having to post a large bond that gets taken away if the commpany is found to commit crimes during their tenure.
Anecdotically, the Real Madrid requires a large bond (57M) posted by the president. http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/europe/8076515.stm
- I've seen this before, thought it was super interesting, kudos to the author. Leaving this comment for contrast with some other negative comments.
- > Any event or series of events that removes mankind's ability to produce modern computers is a global extinction-level event and rather than dicking around with computers one should really be considering suicide to avoid a slow, painful, inevitable death in a hostile world surrounded by misery.
To give some color, here: https://blog.sentinel-team.org/p/how-likely-are-various-prec... is a list of a few things that could kill over 1M people in one year. Maybe your statement is not the case for solar storms in particular.
- Anecdote mostly checks out, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42876061/c-single-quotes...
- - Shortages of some goods expected in the US starting later this month, because of tariffs.
- The power outage on the Iberian Peninsula was the worst in Europe since 2003, and Europe may have been close to a more widespread blackout.
- Trump wants to involve the military in policing within the US.
- Negotiations between the US and Iran over its nuclear weapons program have stalled.
- Microsoft will host xAI’s Grok model in its cloud service, in a move to reduce Microsoft’s dependency on OpenAI.
- Gaza is running out of food, and the UN warns of famine.
- India-Pakistan tensions remain high.
---
Because imports are slowing, especially from China, shortages of some imported goods are expected to become noticeable in the coming weeks and to become substantial around August. If tariffs continue, some of these shortages may become pronounced; prices will increase dramatically for other goods. We recommend that those in the US consider buying imported goods before shortages and large price increases arrive.
Forecasters also discussed the possibility of shortages caused merely by self-fulfilling prophecy. For instance, the majority of toilet paper for US consumption is produced domestically, and so, one might naïvely think that as shelves start to empty of other products, toilet paper inventories will not be affected. However, shelves might empty of some products simply because people expect them to, even of products that are not substantially affected by tariffs.
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- 3 points
- Thought it'd be particularly interesting to HN readers not only for the contents, but also for how probabilistic news can look. Still way to go though.
- 3 points
- They have a free tier as well, just with fewer samples, and aren't in the zero marginal cost regime
- Another tool in this spirit is <https://carlo.app/>, which allows you to do this kind of calculation on google sheets.
- I'm guessing this is not an error. If you divide 1/normal(0,1), the full distribution would range from -inf to inf, but the 95% output doesn't have to.
- > if it was available as an app
Consider https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.nunosempere.distribution...
- The android app fits lognormals, and 90% rather than 95% confidence intervals. I think they are a more parsimonious distribution for doing these kinds of estimates. One hint might be that, per the central limit theorem, sums of independent variables will tend to normals, which means that products will tend to be lognormals, and for the decompositions quick estimates are most useful, multiplications are more common
- Here is a thread with some fun fermi estimates made with that tool: e.g., number of calories NK gets from Russia: https://x.com/NunoSempere/status/1857135650404966456
900K 1.5M # tonnes of rice per year NK gets from Russia
* 1K # kg in a tone
* 1.2K 1.4K # calories per kg of rice
/ 1.9K 2.5K # daily caloric intake
/ 25M 28M # population of NK
/ 365 # years of food this buys
/ 1% # as a percentage
- Fermi in particular has the following syntax
```
5M 12M # number of people living in Chicago
beta 1 200 # fraction of people that have a piano
30 180 # minutes it takes to tune a piano, including travel time
/ 48 52 # weeks a year that piano tuners work for
/ 5 6 # days a week in which piano tuners work
/ 6 8 # hours a day in which piano tuners work
/ 60 # minutes to an hour
```
multiplication is implied as the default operation, fits are lognormal.
- I have written similar tools
- for command line, fermi: https://git.nunosempere.com/NunoSempere/fermi
- for android, a distribution calculator: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.nunosempere.distribution...
People might also be interested in https://www.squiggle-language.com/, which is a more complex version (or possibly <https://git.nunosempere.com/personal/squiggle.c>, which is a faster but much more verbose version in C)
- 1 point