Atvelonis's recent activity
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Comment on “Hope is a method: If I do something about this situation, I might change it enough so that I can do something else about this situation.” -- Cory Doctorow in ~humanities
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Comment on Curing concrete - improving the carbon costs of an essential material (gifted link) in ~enviro
Atvelonis Link ParentEverything you’re saying sounds reasonable to me, but I don’t run a construction business or factory! The alternatives must have some underlying cost and/or supply chain factor dampening their...Everything you’re saying sounds reasonable to me, but I don’t run a construction business or factory!
There are robust, well tested alternatives! […] we did just fine…until concrete (as the article notes) became cost effective enough to replace it.
The alternatives must have some underlying cost and/or supply chain factor dampening their uptake—unless there’s a tremendous industry knowledge gap in the mix, which seems a watery proposition; or unless regulatory constraints make substitutes illegal, which is presumably only true for the most mountainous of structures, not sidewalk tiles or floors.
I believe you that many physical engineering challenges of concrete alternatives have been solved. I can accept the long-term view that society ought to pay the cost of more expensive, low-carbon material in a majority of circumstances to escape the externalities associated with concrete, which are higher in aggregate. (I could also accept the altruistic view that we should do so even if it’s a net loss on paper, for the purpose of saving an endangered fish or something else purely moral.) But I was convinced before I even opened the article. Policy hits a wall once a solution incurs short-term costs for the non-treehugging public constituency.
I would be interested to hear your perspective, as a person who knows more about this industry than me, on the particular substitute materials that are most likely on a fast-track to cost parity with concrete.
I’m also curious about holistic deployment. In the power sector, people rightly credit solar cell cost drops to much of the renewable boom, but industry analysts would have a lot to say about the buildout of financing infrastructure, establishing globally viable supply chains, and scaling up manufacturing capacity.
The article presents various ongoing initiatives to reduce emissions in the sector, but seems unconfident that they’ll become cost-competitive. It cites the concrete industry, who say that only carbon capture is an economically viable decarbonization accelerant.
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Comment on Better things are possible in ~talk
Atvelonis Link ParentEmber’s 2026 report allows me to be confidently optimistic about climate, when before I was just hopeful. The global energy transition is unstoppable. The forces informing renewable expansion are...Ember’s 2026 report allows me to be confidently optimistic about climate, when before I was just hopeful. The global energy transition is unstoppable. The forces informing renewable expansion are beyond any single government’s flailing attempts to prop up the fossil fuels of bygone eras. This is freeing, gleeful knowledge. Atlas’ shoulders no longer bear the dreadful weight of this particular impending global doom.
There are many outstanding concerns in society, but rapid global warming was one of only a handful accurately described as “existential” for humanity. Remaining engineering challenges in emissions are meaningful but of a comfortably achievable magnitude. Our trajectory is not only manageable but positive.
We can heal the world. I do not fear the future—at least not for this reason. It is a great joy.
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Comment on Ten US states pass balcony/plug-in solar legislation this year (three more expected soon) in ~enviro
Atvelonis (edited )Link ParentI just double-checked and the correct state might not be Illinois, which is what I had gathered from an initial search. Apparently the unions opposed the bill and it failed to pass the Senate....I just double-checked and the correct state might not be Illinois, which is what I had gathered from an initial search. Apparently the unions opposed the bill and it failed to pass the Senate.
This interactive map from Canary Media shows which states are advancing plug-in solar (as of July 2):
- Eight states have signed the bills into law (Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, Vermont, Virginia, Utah)
- Three states await the governor's signature (Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York)
- One state awaits introduction in the second chamber (California)
The missing state in the Third Act list is probably Massachusetts or New Jersey.
Balcony solar bills seem likely to pass in all those places. The map lists a few other states where the bill has been introduced during this legislative session (Delaware, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island; plus Washington DC) and various others where it has been deferred.
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Comment on Ten US states pass balcony/plug-in solar legislation this year (three more expected soon) in ~enviro
Atvelonis (edited )LinkI heard about Third Act on a recent podcast episode with Ezra Klein and Bill McKibben. It’s an organization for people aged 60+ to tangibly contribute to the environmental movement. Perhaps this...I heard about Third Act on a recent podcast episode with Ezra Klein and Bill McKibben. It’s an organization for people aged 60+ to tangibly contribute to the environmental movement.
Perhaps this age demographic has some of the best inclinations, skills, and professional networks to run effective campaigns about the “boring” side of climate policy, like navigating electricity transmission and solar permitting reform across tens of thousands of municipalities.
The article I linked talks about balcony solar. Apparently this technology has become popular in Europe already, but remained illegal in the United States until this year. It seems like the usual state progressive bloc is most open to reforms—though if that’s where most of the apartment-dwelling population lives anyway, maybe that’s the best place to start for once.
As of July 1, Maine, Virginia, Colorado, Maryland, Virginia [sic], New Hampshire, Connecticut, Vermont and New York have joined Utah in passing plug-in legislation. Three more states, Massachusetts, California, and Rhode Island — are advancing legislation likely to pass this year.
These states make up around 33% of the US population and include 40% of the people who live in apartment buildings. Paired with rooftop solar permitting reforms (one of Third Act’s other initiatives), their efforts will make it cheaper and easier for a lot of regular households to use solar energy. In addition to being good for the renewable energy transition and household budgets outright, this has downstream bureaucratic benefits, like reducing the pressure for additional transmission line buildout.
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Ten US states pass balcony/plug-in solar legislation this year (three more expected soon)
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Comment on Representations of the Braid Groups, winner of 2017 Dance Your PhD in ~arts
Atvelonis LinkThis is an incredibly creative visualization. Pieces like this remind me of how much interaction there can be between seemingly disparate fields of study, and how useful it is to be an...This is an incredibly creative visualization. Pieces like this remind me of how much interaction there can be between seemingly disparate fields of study, and how useful it is to be an inter-disciplinary thinker.
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Comment on Modern, abstract art makes me angry in ~arts
Atvelonis (edited )Link ParentArt is not presented in a museum on its visual merit alone. Collectors are interested in provenance and context, which is difficult to fake. Such fraud at scale is impractical in an institutional...Art is not presented in a museum on its visual merit alone. Collectors are interested in provenance and context, which is difficult to fake. Such fraud at scale is impractical in an institutional context—conflict of interest rules prevent curators from donating works they have a financial interest in, acquisitions committees (who are also experts) have no obligation to accept anything in particular, valuations require third-party appraisals, etc. What you describe is technically possible but not common. The ethical codes are robust, and this is a competitive field with a high barrier to entry. There are much easier and more lucrative ways to scam people.
Said apprehension might be the wrong focus altogether. Instances of theft/forgery become narrative elements of the art, because meaning also comes from a story, not just an object. There exist claims that the Hatata could have Italian authorship, not Ethiopian as predominantly believed, which would have various cultural and academic implications. Even if true, this wouldn’t erase hundreds of years of subsequent scholarship, it would just produce an additional, different reading.
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Comment on Modern, abstract art makes me angry in ~arts
Atvelonis Link ParentThat seems like a narrow view. In Germany (for example), public spending on arts and culture is something like €15 billion. Public allocations to museums is around €5.6 billion. Across ~7,000...That seems like a narrow view. In Germany (for example), public spending on arts and culture is something like €15 billion. Public allocations to museums is around €5.6 billion. Across ~7,000 museums, that's an average of €800,000 each, which is a rounding error in a national budget of €476.3 billion. Besides:
In 2023, Germany’s nearly 7,000 museums contributed €9.4 billion to the country’s GDP.
That's a 68% ROI. From a strictly economic perspective, these services are an asset to society.
It's okay to dislike something out of principle. The deontological view, if it defines modern art as inaccessible or not truly public, might cite a duty to spend only on more egalitarian services. That's a different logic than a consequentialist ideal that budgets ought to be allocated according to greatest impact, as you imply.
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Comment on Modern, abstract art makes me angry in ~arts
Atvelonis (edited )Link ParentAll meaning is made up; all ideas are conceived of by people. But yes, that's a useful distinction in many public spaces. My city has a famous mural program whose subjects tend to be tangible. One...All meaning is made up; all ideas are conceived of by people.
But yes, that's a useful distinction in many public spaces. My city has a famous mural program whose subjects tend to be tangible. One of the purposes of the program is to make people feel represented in their city, which is why many murals feature diverse portraits and activities. This has various direct social benefits, like incentivizing neighborliness and perhaps reducing crime. This is a highly utilitarian use of art which is only loosely connected to the "meta-narrative tradition" that the avant-garde spearheads. The murals can convey obvious, simple meaning without much explanation. But teleological utilitarianism is only one branch of philosophy.
Abstract composition can have simple, appreciable value to laypeople. I would delineate "good art" from "good simulacra." Color theory is a legit thing: combining warm or cool tones (or whatever) with some skill (or luck) produces a work that has a real psychological effect, whether or not the output imitates a physical object/scene. Someone else in the thread mentioned sound, instrumental arrangements of which have minimal obvious correspondence to the real world; music theory is kind of the aural equivalent to color theory.
Monochromes can have some visual intensity in context, but I agree that they're a hard type of abstraction to interpret. I usually don't find them interesting at face value. When we see these pieces in a museum, they're often from a particular moment in the meta-narrative, like Malevich's Black Square (1921). (Perhaps ironically, the simplicity of this form was supposed to represent an experiential democratization of art, in contrast with symbolic religious paintings, which always require detailed interpretation from "the experts.") I don't think many 21st century artists are producing this exact sort of work because the commentary of "geometric abstraction that highlights the supremacy of non-referential artistic feeling" has already been made. There's always more that can be said, but imitations of that output, without new context, are on the boring side. I like the craft of abstract expressionism most when it has complexity.
So much work in the academy, and the museum, is ultimately not meant for laypeople. Not every one is meant to absorb every thing. But such activity in nominally public institutions seems to clash with the principle of public funding and with the financial incentives of any large non-profit organization. It feels upsetting to some non-art appreciators that some (miniscule, but non-zero) subset of public tax dollars goes to institutions creating art whose collections contain a subset of material they won't ever engage with. That's a real emotion—a critiquable one, but legitimate. And big museums are always trying to attract people outside the art world to come and spend their money at the institution, sometimes while paying their directors immense salaries, which can feel unfair given some museumgoers' relative economic condition. It could be said that when the museum invites a large number of people who lack all the narrative context of the art into exhibits that essentially require that context, without priming them, curators are perpetuating the ideological disconnect. Museums could structure their exhibits linearly, with a historical pedagogy, to ensure that everyone can easily understand everything. However, that is pretty didactic. It also assumes audiences are paying attention and want to read a lot of difficult intellectual material, which isn't a universal desire for casual attendees. It might strip out some of the non-linear narratives happening, too, and could be a boring way for art enthusiasts to engage with the material (it's their space too). It's kind of a non-solvable problem.
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Comment on Modern, abstract art makes me angry in ~arts
Atvelonis (edited )LinkIt may be worth distinguishing between craft and art. The former could be thought of as the object itself and the process of manufacturing it into a final state through technique. The latter is...It may be worth distinguishing between craft and art. The former could be thought of as the object itself and the process of manufacturing it into a final state through technique. The latter is the engagement in a cultural narrative of call and response; its resultant meaning is mostly derived from that history, not physicality. I’d say craft is usually present in art, even bad art, but they’re different ways of engaging with the human experience.
With that said, just because a work of art has meaning doesn’t make it aesthetically beautiful. Some art is intentionally designed to make the audience uncomfortable. Other pieces aren’t meant to convey any particular meaning, but to invoke something emergent from the audience. Art isn’t always successful and indeed, much art is simply tasteless or bad.
By “modern” maybe you mean “modernist” or “postmodernist” (“modern art” might include some impressionists or post-impressionists, like Van Gogh, whose works can be abstract but whom I assume you aren’t referring to). Much art from these mid–late 20th century movements is visually uninteresting to me, but the intellectual exploration that informs them is interesting and has lots of relevant implications for society today.
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Comment on On the US Declaration of Independence in ~humanities.history
Atvelonis Link ParentWhen we’re reminded that ideals can outlive people, perhaps we can more clearly see an alternative to the cynicism of the present moment. I often walk by the house this document was written in,...When we’re reminded that ideals can outlive people, perhaps we can more clearly see an alternative to the cynicism of the present moment.
I often walk by the house this document was written in, and the hall in which it was signed. I also walk by the nearby memorials to enslaved people that the administration has attempted to suppress. The spirit of freedom and remembrance in those monuments is not lost: activists now read the truth aloud.
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Comment on From 1638-1655 a forgotten Swedish settlement extended across the Delaware Valley – smallest, least-populated and shortest-lived European colony in the US was also the most clandestine in ~humanities.history
Atvelonis LinkThanks for sharing this. I'd never looked closely enough at the four statues at City Hall beneath William Penn to realize the symbolism. It speaks to the multicultural ethos of the Holy...Thanks for sharing this. I'd never looked closely enough at the four statues at City Hall beneath William Penn to realize the symbolism. It speaks to the multicultural ethos of the Holy Experiment. There are a few other landmarks hidden throughout the city that reference these ideals, like the Toleration Statue deep in the Wissahickon. I remember first discovering this on a walk and being taken with its presence.
It's miraculous that Old Swedes Church has survived since 1698. Many historic buildings in Old City and adjacent neighborhoods burnt in fires (like the Tun Tavern) or were dismantled: the present-day City Tavern mentioned in the article is actually a 20th century reconstruction. Old Swedes is meters away from an expressway whose construction tore down thousands of rowhomes and countless other historic structures.
I love seeing cultural festivals like Midsommarfest celebrating heritage. South Philadelphia is also more diverse now than it's probably ever been. FDR Park, where the Swedish festival happens (now I know!), is also home to the Southeast Asian Market and apparently the new African American Market. The Italian Market, which kinda doubles as the Mexican Market, is not so far north in Bella Vista. Pennsport (not sure anyone calls it Southwark now) still has its Irish pubs, and I guess South Street has its aesthetic. It all gives the city a nice international food scene, but I'm mostly just glad to see so many cultures and hearing so many languages in that area. It keeps the city interesting and full of new perspectives.
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Comment on Climate.us is a new website created by former NOAA employees who worked on Climate.gov until they were laid off last year as part of the heinous DOGE cutbacks in ~enviro
Atvelonis (edited )Link ParentYou can choose not to use the technology. Taking an ethical stance is admirable and I agree with your objections. But you're allowing your personal dislike for generative LLMs to cloud your...You can choose not to use the technology. Taking an ethical stance is admirable and I agree with your objections. But you're allowing your personal dislike for generative LLMs to cloud your reasoning.
I mean this politely, and respectfully, as a fellow human and a humanist, and I recognize the exhaustion this topic brings out; I've filtered most AI tags from Tildes for this reason. But we have to be reasonable. Your original comment speculates on an application of AI where there probably is none (or none with any contextual harm). Your most recent comment sounds fearful, and I'm sorry if I upset you. I'm going to respond for the benefit of the discussion, but please don't feel obligated to read or respond to this comment if it's giving you anxiety.
I think you're allowing an idea of AI to exceed the practice of the tooling. That is probably having an outsized effect on your operating worldview. It's probably stressing you out more than it needs to.
automating my fun or my self out of my job
Fun is one thing, and fair enough, but I don't suppose that's your primary objection.
This is what I mean by marketing. The concept of replacement was always a mechanism to entice venture capital and media attention rather than a technical capability. LLMs are not capable of automating your job as a developer unless all you write is boilerplate code in a vacuum, with no implementation considerations. The models can become more predictive up to a plateau (which we're reaching), but they're encapsulated in a context that inherently limits their utility. They do not exist in the real world.
The intentionality behind your work as a developer has both spiritual and economic value. In business contexts, SME governance of LLMs as a tool to realize that intentionality is their only meaningful value-add (at least along medium-term time horizons). Full automation would require that models acquire a level of logical reasoning and ability to contextualize social norms that is incompatible with token-based prediction. Sequential token logic is different than logic derived from first principles, which has open-ended outcomes.
In the context of employment, this means the hypothetical AI to which you object (that which can replace your role) is not an LLM, but something else that doesn't exist. This is an important distinction.
nor in using a tool that has proven itself so variously harmful for everything from my health & skill to the national economy
I wish you good health, but the latter claim seems scientifically improper. The technology has not "proven" itself harmful to "the national economy" in a broad sense. Whether or not clearer specifications of this harm are causatively related to LLMs (I'm sure some are), that is not a rigorous claim. We have to work with facts! That's the whole purpose of a service like climate.us.
This is ~enviro. We're all aware of the real impacts on electricity demand (from data center compute). I won't detail that because it's mainstream. We've also read the spurious reporting on water use, which has to be constantly corrected. That even very smart people are inclined to share misinformation about how data centers function signifies that the popular objection to the technology is not technical; it is ideological, coming from the marketing ploy of supposed full automation.
Shaping technological deployment for the public good, in a consequentialist view, is largely a question of governance. LLMs are algorithms performed on rocks and transmitted along cables to other rocks. They perform an action which has real, measurable, utilitarian benefit and some real, probably measurable cost; we can govern the actions LLMs perform (and surrounding context) to affect the outcome. We probably agree on the directional rightness of outcomes like pleasure/preference, equality, and liberty. My suggestion, which you probably agree is possible, is that we can create a governance mechanism to use LLMs well. (If you don't believe this is possible, well, I am an optimistic person, and pessimism doesn't serve us.)
From an environmental perspective, the biggest concern of LLMs is high electricity demand. There exists a class of financial incentives to improve model and data center efficiency (token-based prediction is not energy-efficient) and disincentives to use inefficient models. This would encourage capital to move toward solving the energy problem. We know that greater efficiency is possible in some architecture because the human brain is a far more energy-efficient neural network. There is a natural economic incentive in this direction, so the solution may just involve time (venture capital series funding, which many of the AI companies are surviving on, isn't infinite). Societies worldwide have successfully incentivized deployment of solar panels and electric vehicles under the same paradigm of cost efficiency. LLMs are not fundamentally different. Economically, a rush for energy might incentivize some fossil buildouts, but these are hardly profitable; profitable use-cases are mostly related to temporal load distribution (which is possible to index to renewable energy cycles), and energy storage systems are developing fast enough anyway that this is nearly a solved engineering problem.
But these benefits are lost when we throw away nuance. There are also other costs to exaggeration. Shayle Kann and Maeve Allsup discuss in a recent Catalyst podcast episode, "How data centers are complicating transmission expansion" that public perception about a particular electricity transmission line's potential use for "AI data centers" is delaying the project. The concern is primarily about the the extent of public dollars in a project that constituents perceive has no utility to them, or might harm them. However, the transmission line has wide applicability and its permitting predates data center load demand from popularized LLMs. Framing the line as a benefit to AI, and stopping it as a benefit to humanity, is therefore a harmful simplification.
- In a consequentialist view, delaying grid electrification is probably more harmful to the global environment, human health, and the economy than any marginal short-term benefit to taxpayers.
- In a deontological view, broadly challenging the legal cost-sharing framework of a project that will benefit constituents in multiple ways (all grid-connected homes necessarily use electricity, whether or not they also use electricity to use LLMs) is a questionable rejection of civic duty, even though the exact cost-sharing structure could probably be made more equitable (perhaps more strongly indexed to current demand originators, like LLM data centers).
- In a virtue ethics view, NIMBYism is generally a parochial ideology unsuited to solving large, technical problems, even if the opposition feels/is virtuous for stopping or delaying a perceived evil and "protecting" everyday people.
If we are being reasonable, as Kann and Allsup try to be, we can recognize that the problems that led to this outcry are legitimate (just not the full picture), that we need to systemically improve the permitting cost-sharing model, and broadly (this is not their focus) that we need to improve LLM energy-efficiency or access to electricity sans long-distance transmission. There is no need to obscure the benefits of the project just to create enough fear and mayhem to get people riled up about a boogeyman.
The case discussed in the podcast is representative of the reductive, fear-based oppositional sentiment that's dominating most of the popular discourse. This "selective reasonableness" bias has also permeated discussions on Tildes, which is disappointing. If we choose not to maintain a reasonable intellectual perspective on the technology, then we are certainly not going to govern it well, which would be a loss for society.
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Comment on Climate.us is a new website created by former NOAA employees who worked on Climate.gov until they were laid off last year as part of the heinous DOGE cutbacks in ~enviro
Atvelonis (edited )Link ParentLet's be realistic: this is certainly untrue. Large language models are exceptionally powerful tools. Neural network intelligence has been a field of study for decades precisely because...simply because they know [AI] is broadly useless
Let's be realistic: this is certainly untrue. Large language models are exceptionally powerful tools. Neural network intelligence has been a field of study for decades precisely because high-throughput textual analysis has dozens of meaningful use-cases in hard scientific research, information science/business administration, and historical research/humanities. I can use LLMs effectively, helpfully, reliably, factually in daily work. They're designed for corpus analysis, so they're well-suited for any kind of searching, organizing, and related tasks.
It sounds like your interaction with LLMs is mostly in attempting to replace your workflow as a programmer. This is the wrong way to use the technology and is bound to fail; the idea of substituting human decision-making is predicated on a marketing device. LLMs are leaps and bounds ahead of previous tooling: I can have an LLM produce flawless boilerplate code and avoid reading hours of endpoint documentation about a system I'm architecturally familiar with. The pedagogical implications of individual reliance on the technology are a different subject matter and do not negate its real utility.
"AI" refers to so many things now that it's not useful for practical discussion. I suppose the best way to classify the graphical side broadly is "vision and vision–language models." There are many benefits to computer vision algorithms (this concept isn't new), like medical imaging pattern recognition, manufacturing defect identification, and any number of labeling/sorting tasks. The world is a vast, complex place full of mundane tasks that can be reliably automated or semi-automated with VLMs and directly improve the human experience. Further, human participation in the automation process is not only necessary but in fact useful. It's multiplicative.
Generative media is a different category of AI. Philosophical impacts on the ontology or epistemology of art, concerns about judicial malfeasance or evidentiary error, and the general fear of misinformation are all reasonable concerns. However, it's not reasonable to disregard such an extraordinary set of technologies so fundamentally. It's possible to acknowledge the excellent capabilities of LLM software while also recognizing that we have a lot of work to do in data governance and education & theory of knowledge.
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Comment on Climate.us is a new website created by former NOAA employees who worked on Climate.gov until they were laid off last year as part of the heinous DOGE cutbacks in ~enviro
Atvelonis Link ParentThat section is taken from a page full of testimonials from scientific experts about the importance and trustworthiness of the project. The purpose is to legitimize the new website—in rhetoric,...That section is taken from a page full of testimonials from scientific experts about the importance and trustworthiness of the project. The purpose is to legitimize the new website—in rhetoric, this device is called ethos, an appeal to authority.
The article is a press release. “What people are saying” is a journalistic phrase. The target audience includes climate journalists and others who would be reassured by a professional consensus that the project is reliable. The testimonials would have been solicited ahead of time or gathered from the fundraiser linked at the bottom. They’re not being scraped from random web sources. I don’t see how this signifies LLM use at all.
Concern about architectural decisions predicated on possible LLM use during development is meaningful, but this is a serious project! If you’re worried, you might want to email them directly.
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Comment on Re-watched the Bourne Trilogy after several years, I understand now why it was so influential in ~movies
Atvelonis Link ParentAndor is exceptional, perhaps my favorite TV series this decade. It's situated in a different part of the canon than other Star Wars media because it focuses on experience + ideology rather than...Andor is exceptional, perhaps my favorite TV series this decade. It's situated in a different part of the canon than other Star Wars media because it focuses on experience + ideology rather than magical fantasy. The grand narrative of the franchise is interwoven throughout, but it doesn't rely on cameos of famous characters or references to other entries to generate a sense of gravitas. I found it to have a totally different tone than any of the films/shows except Rogue One. It has the unique distinction of fitting neatly into an existing creative universe while also standing on its own merit. And it's short! They say brevity is the soul of wit. ;)
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Comment on Just be normal about things - On sleepmaxxing, beef-only diets, political hysteria, and the lost art of being reasonable in ~health.mental
Atvelonis Link ParentMy experience mostly aligns with this, but there's evidently also been a rise in the baseline level of polarization across society. People who are online are necessarily also part of the real...In the real world, people seem just as indifferent and wishy-washy and normal as they have for most of my life.
My experience mostly aligns with this, but there's evidently also been a rise in the baseline level of polarization across society. People who are online are necessarily also part of the real world. Their wild expectations do affect downstream social interactions. We're all connected.
Even if people aren't personally reading political threads on X, they're probably watching newscasters who do. If those who don't directly use social media consider themselves fundamentally separate from that kind of discourse, it's possible that they're less aware of the subconscious influence the online "milieu of unreasonableness" has on their emotions or the structural impacts it has on communication generally.
There isn't a substantial movement to extract ourselves from social media or the internet, at most a gradual hope to remove smartphones from classrooms. Otherwise, for now, it might be the opposite. That risks looping even more mundane stuff into the online narrative. (I've seen neighbors go from having reasonable takes on some local thing to having unreasonable takes because it got caught up in a national/political news cycle.) I think we'll come to our senses eventually, but not before we see a lot more wacky internet takes.
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Comment on Just be normal about things - On sleepmaxxing, beef-only diets, political hysteria, and the lost art of being reasonable in ~health.mental
Atvelonis (edited )Link ParentGeorge Eliot in Middlemarch (1871) writes about the obsessive, extreme nature of Miss Dorothea Brooke (Chapter 3): This is not a person of even temperament, though she has very refined manners!...- Exemplary
George Eliot in Middlemarch (1871) writes about the obsessive, extreme nature of Miss Dorothea Brooke (Chapter 3):
From such contentment [appreciating the simple life] poor Dorothea was shut out. The intensity of her religious disposition, the coercion it exercised over her life, was but one aspect of a nature altogether ardent, theoretic, and intellectually consequent: and with such a nature, struggling in the bands of a narrow teaching, hemmed in by a social life which seemed nothing but a labyrinth of petty courses, a walled-in maze of small paths that led no whither, the outcome was sure to strike others as at once exaggeration and inconsistency. The thing which seemed to her best, she wanted to justify by the completest knowledge; and not to live in a pretended admission of rules which were never acted on. Into this soul-hunger as yet all her youthful passion was poured; the union which attracted her was one that would deliver her from her girlish subjection to her own ignorance, and give her the freedom of voluntary submission to a guide who would take her along the grandest path.
This is not a person of even temperament, though she has very refined manners! Miss Brooke is naïvely driven toward consummate intellectual pursuit, so much so that in her haste to live a life which Eliot would parallel with that of Saint Theresa of Avila—whose "passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life [...] Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self" (Prelude)—Dorothea enters a predictably disastrous, ill-suited marriage nevertheless permissible under the narrow confines of provincial society that existed prior to enfranchisement. Our Miss Brooke follows her natural tendencies (thirst for knowledge and accomplishment), totally uninhibited by her complacent guardian, toward a destination both socially questionable and abjectly failing her romantic visions (in multiple senses of the term), even if she maintains the formal respectability of the arrangement. Her mistake is immediately evident. Eliot's critique is of polite society's allowance of a young, intelligent girl to be so emotionally suffocated and subsequently unguided.
What I find interesting about Victorian literature is its timelessness in any society of form. We think of ourselves today as liberated from the formalities of ancient eras: the traditions, sorting, restrictions, oppressions, etc. There's much truth to that, and yet also we find ourselves locked in a culture increasingly reflective of old tendencies to put everything into discrete boxes. (The postmodernists, beyond whom philosophy so far struggles to conceptualize a definite center, understood that nothing is really new.) Many people have replaced their fanatic zeal for religious righteousness with a counterpart in nationalism or "science" or economic theory or some more modern focus. Human nature itself is not different than it was. That also means that inclinations toward extremity and categorization are also not necessarily different, and neither is society's passive failure to provide useful mentorship. In the 1840s, those structures that did exist (the social design of stratified provincial communities, the patriarchal marriage system between landed gentry, the constrictive role of womanhood) failed to provide support, and the structures that might have helped (role modeling, social and intellectual emancipation) either had no incentive to appear or did not exist.
I think modern -maxxing culture (and political polarization, etc.) is operating in an essentially similar paradigm. Some of us have naturally intense feelings about the world. Our environment either nurtures those tendencies constructively or it doesn't. In either case, 21st century young people have a structural opportunity to broadcast their own desire for greatness to millions. Just like there was minimal structural social incentive for Mr. Brooke to oppose his ardent niece's marriage to the dreadful Mr. Causabon (what little there was evaporated under Miss Brooke's confidence in her plan, and her sister's comparative reasonableness), these modern broadcasters and their audience reflexively amplify their mutual obsessive, simplistic, and idealistic visions of self and society because there is simply no meaningful structural incentive not to. There is real social grumbling about everything mentioned in this article, just as Mrs. Cadwallader went to great lengths to persuade Mr. Brooke to put a stop to Dorothea's ridiculous arrangement, but it's not the same as a collective pressure from society. Obviously, extreme beliefs have always existed (think of the sincere beliefs that led to the Crusades, the Thirty Years War, and the Reign of Terror). Yet even then, the relentless ardentness of youth was at least somewhat constrained by elder guidance, for better or worse (perhaps usually worse, but constrained nonetheless). Dorothea was expected to adhere to a very specific set of behavioral norms; she also did not have a TikTok with 4 million followers. What might be different in 2026 than in 1846 is that, today, while several useful waves of feminism have remedied many of the social ailments of Miss Brooke's time (her exact circumstance would be impossible to replicate in Western society today), there has probably been an overcorrection in other areas.
The combination of technological growth, a cultural interest in individual narrativized teleological greatness, and a structural cultural indifference for nurturing thoughtful, empathetic, and "normal" people results in an overwhelming barrage of unreasonableness.
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Comment on IBM claims world’s first sub-1 nanometer chip technology in ~comp
Atvelonis (edited )LinkMore descriptively, this is the world's first "vertically staggered transistor microprocessor architecture." FinFETs already have vertically stacked channels on any given transistor, but N-type...More descriptively, this is the world's first "vertically staggered transistor microprocessor architecture." FinFETs already have vertically stacked channels on any given transistor, but N-type and P-type transistors still couldn't be too close because of their polarity. There wasn't room to shrink the gap between them any further. It seems like IBM's new CFET arrangement increases density without physically reducing component size by simply arranging the transistors in a novel way.
The "sub-nanometer" designation is confusing to me because it seems not to refer to anything physical on the chip, but rather serves as a proxy for some other space efficiency improvement. I originally learned that an xx-nanometer chip measurement referred to the half-pitch between two transistor gates. However, for at least the last 20 years, I don't think 16nm, 14nm, 7nm, etc. technology has measured that. As the article says:
But keep in mind that such node numbers have nothing to do with the actual physical dimensions of IBM’s chip features. Older generations of chips developed in the 1970s and 1980s had physical features with dimensions matching the number in the name of their chip technology’s node or process—such as chips made at the 180-nanometer node—but that has not been the case for decades and certainly not for the latest chip generations made with a 3-nanometer or 2-nanometer process.
Instead, IBM is basically claiming that its new “nanostack” architecture can deliver the computing performance improvements that would be expected if a theoretical chip could be built with physical features smaller than 1 nanometer.
So why even headline the nanometer milestone? I would rather hear about the physical changes to the architecture. IBM's design is a fascinating implementation of long-awaited design ideas, but this theoretical comparison is an unhelpful abstraction.
I appreciate the value of a standardized compute indicator, like a "tons of CO2-equivalent gas" metric in environmental emissions, but just as that example downplays the ratio/potency of CH4, the "sub-nanometer" term subsumes the amazing three-dimensional advancements being made here into a flat model. Vertical transistor stacking surely has its own unique efficiency characteristics and manufacturing quirks. I suppose we can smush it all into a "nanometer-equivalent" measurement, but it changes the way we think about the devices on a granular scale and the velocity of efficiency gains we can anticipate in future production contexts.
Maybe the nanometer terminology conveys the general necessary meaning (a generational change in processor speed), but it means people are less likely to engage with the real innovation happening here, and they might not anticipate future processing capabilities with as much accuracy.
Perhaps I'm asking for too much. Of course I understand that narratives (not features) make products, and people are already familiar with this nanometer progression arc. Storytelling is part of the bridge between the technical and the practical. I just find it silly to use the explicitly pre-loaded technical language of measurement instead of highlighting a separate marketing concept to fit the new architecture. "Sub-1 nanometer" is contextless and misleading. "Nanostack" is halfway to usefulness. I'm sure we can find a great replacement if we try!
It might be reassuring to examine one's capacity in the context of one’s social/professional network, rather than as an individual. The article refers to normative evolution; small changes induce great ones merely because we are wired to be social.
An example I’ve heard is the localized clustering of residential solar panels. Installing them on one’s house signals to every neighbor, every passerby that this norm is valued here. This is cultural, not necessarily intellectualized. People carry that feeling with them, consciously or not, and evaluate it alongside other axes (like those mentioned in the article) to make decisions about their own life. Graph theory suggests that venturing even a couple degrees into a social network activates an enormous number of nodes; digital social network analysis finds collections of billions of users separated by a maximum of around 4–6 nodes on average.
Clearing accumulated trash from the on-ramp will not eliminate all pollution. But doing it visibly, and inviting others to do it, contributes to a movement—perhaps a dozen neighbors thus mobilized will be empowered to work with the city council to improve upstream municipal waste management policies on a broader scale. (Conversely, inaction passively establishes the opposite norm.)
There is a tendency in modern culture to try to morally extricate ourselves from the world, but we live in an interconnected web and have more influence than we realize.