Summer Thoughts

Jun 04, 2024

Hello from Santa Cruz! I’m here visiting a friend and later this week will be in Berkeley for Manifest. Hit me up if you’re around!

Sci-fi plot: the protagonist is born into a population-capped world where the rules state that new births are only allowed when someone dies. Since death is virtually nonexistent, the protagonist obsesses over the identity of the person they’ve replaced. After a frenzied investigation, driven to the brink of insanity, they eventually die from a tragic misstep. It dawns on them in their dying moment: they replaced themself.

If tourism is your desire, wealthy sheikh, build not silly shapes in the desert. Build the Illinois:
Attract the world’s numberless legions of Frank Lloyd Wright fans!

A corollary of the fact that more capable models are generally harder to explain is that if you can explain exactly why you’re good at what you’re doing, you’re probably operating below your maximum capacity.

As a French Dutchman, my favorite types of cheese are Gouda and Beaufort (an Alpine cheese made near the valley in France where my parents live). As such, I’ve discovered my ultimate cheese: Luna, an alpine Gouda produced in Wisconsin.

Is there any food unworthy of being heightened? What might a Michelin chef’s take on a stuffed-crust pizza look like? Or a hot dog bites pizza for that matter? What about KFC’s infamous Double Down, or Taco Bell’s Naked Chicken Chalupa? And, lest we forget, how about Lay’s Chicken and Waffle flavored chips? I’m ashamed to admit I’d pay good money to find out.

Is anybody else tired of stray WhatsApp, Telegram, or Xeet at-mentions touting rising crypto prices? I say we compile language that is maximally likely to induce panics and sell-offs, and simply reply all to crypto-related notifications with such messages.
Fight 🔥 with 🔥?

Someday we will have a Super-intelligent Counterfactual Omega, a being that can so accurately simulate alternate realities that it can evaluate the outcomes of reversing our past decisions. This is a useful tool for betting markets, as it could someday let folks resolve predictions about unfulfilled states of the world. What if Al Gore had won? What if the COVID vaccine never got developed? What if Bitcoin had never taken off? This would pave the way for humans to canonically measure the value we attribute to various social and technological developments.

Researchers have developed solar panels that are 50 percent efficient. That means that solar radiation can be converted to LED light, which is energy efficient up to 90 percent, at roughly 45 percent efficiency.
Per Wikipedia, 53 percent of solar light is bioavailable (400-700 nanometer wavelength). When it comes to supporting photosynthesis, in addition to factors internal to a leaf, this would get adjusted to 40 percent due to “wavelength-mismatch degradation” (which Wikipedia states leads to a 24 percent loss).
Therefore, we’re now at a technological point where it might be more energy efficient to grow plants with LEDs that better match plants’ optimal wavelengths, and are entirely supported by solar panels (granted, bleeding-edge solar panels) than to grow plants directly from sunlight.
Someday we will replace our Sun with two Suns, each optimally split and distributed across Earth: one onto the multitude of leaves, radiating at the wavelength that plants convert most efficiently into food; and another onto the multitude of retinas, radiating at the three wavelengths our light cones are most sensitive to.

Thank you for reading this season of Thoughts. See you all next Sunday-ish!

Candid Selfie