The German population’s support for arms exports to partners and friends in general has gone up significantly in the context of the war in Ukraine.

Source: https://zms.bundeswehr.de/resource/blob/5497510/ca157e2dc842f3f72f698e0397bbe005/download-bevbefr-2022-data.pdf#page24
poll June/July

Links for 2022-10-22

1. "In a US government lab in Bethesda, Maryland, virologists plan to equip the strain of the monkeypox virus that spread globally this year, causing mostly rash and flulike symptoms, with genes from..second monkeypox strain that causes more serious illness." https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-weighs-crackdown-experiments-could-make-viruses-more-dangerous

2. A new AI model can accurately predict human response to novel drug compounds https://phys.org/news/2022-10-ai-accurately-human-response-drug.html

3. “Over the last few years in particular there's been a proliferation of rigorous theoretical and empirical research on reasons to be concerned about existential risk from AI. In this thread I list some of the papers published in top ML venues which explore key ideas…” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1579948545733718016.html

4. Niceness is unnatural [don’t expect aliens or AIs to be nice because niceness depends on quirks in the human architecture and ancestral environment and probably isn’t stable under self-improvement] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/krHDNc7cDvfEL8z9a/niceness-is-unnatural

5. “We need permitting reform for geothermal power” https://www.slowboring.com/p/we-need-permitting-reform-for-geothermal

6. Unblocking Abundance: Breaking through regulatory barriers is an essential pillar of an “abundance agenda.” https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/unblocking-abundance

7. “No friction, no limits: magnetic bearings not only increase service life, they also enable oil-free operation in a vacuum at maximum speeds. Our technology allows you to reach 500,000 rpm and more.” https://www.celeroton.com/en/technology/magnetic-bearing/

8. “A group of programmers has designed an application for Android, called "ePPO" (an acronym meaning ‘it's the anti-aircraft defense’), allowing the population, since mid-October, to inform the army in real time of the passage of Shahed 136 in the sky. Simply point your phone in the direction of the noise and click a button to transmit the coordinates of the danger. ePPO, which already has more than 100,000 downloads, can also report planes, helicopters, missiles and explosions.” https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2022/10/21/l-ukraine-lance-une-application-android-pour-traquer-et-detruire-les-drones-kamikazes_6146771_3210.html

9. British police have raided what they’re calling a “makeshift 3D firearm factory”. It was discovered in NW London. Amongst the firearms are parts for two half made FGC-9s. https://news.met.police.uk/news/met-seize-large-number-of-3d-printed-firearm-components-455381

The fringe left and fringe right. Two sides of the same coin. No matter what side is facing up, the result is always retarded.

Here is a quick reminder of how anyone could have ever taken the COVID-19 lab leak theory seriously:

1. Of all places, the outbreak happened in the vicinity of a BSL-4 laboratory that has among the world's largest collections of this type of virus and did the most research about them.

2. Laboratory biosecurity incidents are common and there are confirmed historic examples of actual lab leaks causing infectious disease outbreaks.

3. Scientists have been and still are working to make various viruses more lethal and transmissible.

4. The domain experts debunking the COVID-19 lab leak theory were directly connected to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

5. Official organizations repeatedly and extensively damaged their reputation as reliable sources. For example, it took the WHO two years to even acknowledge that COVID is airborne.

6. The more costly it is to dispute X the less confident we can rationally be about X. And it is very costly for domain experts to take the lab leak theory seriously. This means that the majority of people who take it seriously will be nonconformists who likely hold other beliefs outside the Overton window. Trying to inform yourself about the possibility of an actual conspiracy makes it therefore necessary to accept some noise and engage with actual conspiracy theorists.

Hu Jintao: ex-president escorted out of China party congress: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-63355950

A very deliberate public humiliation.

"The 2021 baby bump is most pronounced for first births, women under age 25, and women with a college education, who were more likely to benefit from working from home."

Paper: https://www.nber.org/papers/w30569

80,000 people gathered in Germany's capital on Saturday to show solidarity with protesters in Iran: https://www.euronews.com/2022/10/22/tens-of-thousands-gather-in-berlin-to-protest-against-tehran-regime

Links for 2022-10-23

1. From Play to Policy: Conditional Behavior Generation from Uncurated Robot Data https://play-to-policy.github.io/

2. Transcending Scaling Laws with 0.1% Extra Compute: Performs on par with PaLM 540B with 2x less compute by continuing training PaLM with UL2R. https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.11399

3. Introduction to abstract entropy: “Here, I try to take on the task of synthesizing the abstract concept of entropy, to show what's so deep and fundamental about it.” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/REA49tL5jsh69X3aM/introduction-to-abstract-entropy

4. Resurrecting billon-year-old enzymes reveals how photosynthesis adapted to the rise of oxygen https://www.mpg.de/19348003/1010-terr-back-to-the-future-of-photosynthesis-153410-x

5. “The non-violent entrepreneurs create wealth. But they can flourish only under abnormal circumstances with the violent ones wiped out. Then they tend to perceive their abnormal circumstances as normal and their artificial security as given…” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1579124072390463488.html

6. “Restarting progress means getting energy that is so abundant that it’s almost free.” https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/energy-and-abundance/

7. More evidence that social media debates feel toxic because social media *breaks* echo chambers: "It is not isolation from opposing views that drives polarization but precisely the fact that digital media bring us to interact outside our local bubble." https://www.researchgate.net/publication/364310131_How_digital_media_drive_affective_polarization_through_partisan_sorting

8. Who made these circles in the Sahara? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twAP3buj9Og

9. “Videos contain a wealth of information about the visual world, but self-supervised methods have yet to use them for learning good image representations. Introducing VITO, a new method which discovers semantic concepts by binding content across time” https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.06433

10. Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability https://www.mdpi.com/2624-8611/1/1/34/htm

"Russian reinforcements in the form of the D-1 cannon of the 1943 model are already rushing to the front"