skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on Why the West stopped making land in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    In total, around eight percent of the land in America’s major coastal cities was underwater in the 1890s and has since been reclaimed. This includes the land under several major airports, like Newark, Logan, and SFO, as well as neighborhoods like the Financial District in San Francisco, the Back Bay in Boston, and Camden in Philadelphia. Some cities, like Boston and Charleston, have doubled in size by reclaiming land.

    [...]

    Today, reclamation should be more common than ever. Land values in some cities are thirty times what they were in 1950, and high-tide flooding is four to eight times as frequent. Reclamation could extend and protect our coastal cities as it has for centuries. But rather than reclaim more land, we have virtually ceased to reclaim any at all. Since the completion of Battery Park City in 1976, there has not been a single major urban land reclamation project in the United States and only a handful of port expansions.

    [...]

    The timing points to a third explanation. Reclamation stopped abruptly in the 1970s when a wave of environmental regulations made it enormously expensive to reshape the landscape. And it halted at the same time in every other country that passed similar laws.

    If the legal barriers to reclamation were lifted, we could build hundreds of thousands of new homes near the centers of our most valuable cities. We could build new airports to refresh ailing transportation infrastructure, and we could protect low-lying coastal areas from sea level rise. The disappearance of land reclamation is a choice that we have the power to undo.

    [...]

    Hundreds of square miles of water near major American cities are shallow enough to reclaim easily. When Boston’s Back Bay was filled in the late-nineteenth century, it had an average depth of 20 feet. Two thirds of the San Francisco Bay is shallower than this. The South Bay, adjoining Silicon Valley, is less than six feet deep. Outside the main navigation channels, most of New York harbor is less than ten feet deep. Almost all of the water between Miami and Miami Beach, and along the shelf extending south to Key West, is also less than ten feet deep. All of these could be candidates for reclamation.

    Nor is depth a hard limit if land values are high enough. Monaco’s recent Mareterra project expanded the country’s land area by three percent by dredging down to 164 feet.

    Soil and rock conditions also matter, but much of the American coastline has better conditions than sites where reclamation has already succeeded. Singapore’s Jurong Island is a massive industrial zone created on land reclaimed between 1995 and 2009. The water was more than 50 feet deep and atop another 50 feet of soft marine clay, which settles more than other materials under pressure. To reclaim the land, these layers had to be threaded with long plastic tubes to allow drainage and loaded with a large, heavy quantity of extra soil.

    [...]

    Today, downtown land values are high enough to justify reclamation costs even in places where suburban land is plentiful. In 1955, the California Division of Water Resources estimated that reclaiming 23,000 acres of land on the west side of the San Francisco Bay would cost about $330,000 per acre in 2025 dollars. Today, the cost of an acre of single-family-zoned land in San Francisco County averages $24 million, more than 70 times the estimated reclamation cost. Even the cheapest county in the Bay Area exceeds $330,000 per acre.

    Despite the space opened up by cars, trains, and buses, America’s biggest cities face a massive land shortage. Even as the transportation explanation has weakened, reclamation hasn’t returned. Boston’s Back Bay reclamation was profitable when land sold for the equivalent of $40 per square foot. Land in major cities today sells for ten to a hundred times that, and dredging capacity has grown nearly tenfold since 1950. Yet urban reclamation has disappeared even in the most land-constrained cities in the country.

    [...]

    Reclamation has continued only in countries where environmental regulation is less onerous, like China, Singapore, and Japan. China has reclaimed over 5,000 square kilometers in the first two decades of this century, including a new city of 500,000 outside of Shanghai, and Singapore has expanded its territory by over a quarter since 1975.

    Japan does have high environmental standards and a NEPA-style law requiring environmental impact reports. But Japan’s system has two advantages: clear numeric thresholds for when reports are required and courts that make it harder to overturn agency decisions. Japanese infrastructure projects don’t need the defense against legal challenges that make Western projects take decades. The result is abundant housing and infrastructure, including multiple airports, port facilities, and residential areas built on reclaimed land.

    3 votes

  3. Comment on A conversation on rent control in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article:

    From the article:

    In Mason’s view, the evidence that rent regulations discourage construction has been widely overstated: When designed well — and paired with zoning reforms — rent controls can protect tenants from displacement without reducing the long-term supply of housing.

    3 votes

  5. Comment on Finland offers a glimpse of the hurdles Chinese electric vehicle makers face in winning over Europe – consumers ask whether the cars spy on them, or if they have kill switches in ~transport

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    We discussed "impaired driving detection" here. Since the NHTSA hasn't published any regulations (they don't think it's feasible), maybe the car manufacturers don't have to do anything? That is,...

    We discussed "impaired driving detection" here. Since the NHTSA hasn't published any regulations (they don't think it's feasible), maybe the car manufacturers don't have to do anything? That is, it's the NHTSA that's not in compliance with the law. (Lots of that happening with this administration.)

    9 votes

  6. Comment on Sports entertainment makes me angry in ~talk

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    That's clearly insulting. I don't think my post was much like that at all.

    That's clearly insulting. I don't think my post was much like that at all.

    4 votes

  7. Comment on Sports entertainment makes me angry in ~talk

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Well, I think I sufficiently acknowledged that some parodies are better than others.

    Well, I think I sufficiently acknowledged that some parodies are better than others.

    2 votes

  8. Comment on Sports entertainment makes me angry in ~talk

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Parodies are commonly shared on social media because it's easy and people think it's clever. Sometimes it actually is clever! (With the Onion, often it's just the headline that's clever.) Sure, it...

    Parodies are commonly shared on social media because it's easy and people think it's clever. Sometimes it actually is clever! (With the Onion, often it's just the headline that's clever.)

    Sure, it should be allowed and occasionally it's fun, but often it's mean-spirited and not the sort of thing I like to see in my feed.

    What's the underlying point in this case? It's basically a rough analogy. How is criticizing modern art similar to criticizing sports? Well, it's similar in some ways and different in others.

    With a bit more thought, it might be possible to figure out something meaningful to say without the sneer that parody often adds?

    Off the top of my head, there's clearly a lot of money that goes into sports, and like modern art it can seem rather excessive and wasteful, to people who aren't into it. And that's not even taking into account sports betting.

    (I'm not going to go around calling it "sportsball" though, because I see no reason to be mean about it.)

    4 votes

  9. Comment on Your AI is not a tool in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Yes, guilty. So it’s about addiction? Is AI use addictive like social media or games?

    Yes, guilty. So it’s about addiction? Is AI use addictive like social media or games?

    1 vote

  10. Comment on Your AI is not a tool in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    That’s rather ominous, but vague. What would be an example of the sort of thing they’re warning about?

    That’s rather ominous, but vague. What would be an example of the sort of thing they’re warning about?

    4 votes

  11. Comment on Small AI models gain traction around the world in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Small AI is a far cry from wealthy nations’ colossal large language models (LLMs), hyperscale data centers, multibillion-dollar investments, and debates about AI consciousness. But for millions of people around the world, the only AI that matters, and often the only kind available, is small. (According to a World Bank Report issued in November, only 0.7 percent of internet users in the world’s poorest countries have used ChatGPT, compared to a quarter of all internet users in the most developed nations.)

    [...]

    For example, a drone-based system developed by Bala Murugan and colleagues at the Vellore Institute of Technology, in India, takes photos of cashew plants and quickly identifies those with splotches that indicate disease. All the processing takes place on the drone itself, so there’s no need for a computer on-site, nor for a connection to a central server.

    Using small language models trained for a specific problem, and sometimes running on cheap, low-power devices, other small-AI implementations have been developed to identify ant infestations in a Uruguayan vineyard, detect the presence of malaria-carrying mosquitoes in a number of nations, and run electrocardiograms from an Arduino device in parts of Brazil that lack access to more complex equipment.

    [...]

    In 2025, slightly more than a third of all smartphones shipped worldwide were capable of running generative AI, and that figure will reach 45 percent by the end of this year, according to the technology research firm Counterpoint. By the end of next year, slightly more than half of all smartphones will be able to run a small AI model.

    The second reason Rovai cites is the shrinking footprint of language models. Both Google DeepMind’s Gemma 4 (released in April) and Alibaba’s Qwen 3.5 are “fantastic” for small AI, Rovai says. Both models are “open weight,” meaning users can adjust the connections between parameters to suit their needs. This makes it easy, for example, “to take a lot of data from, say, the milk industry and retrain the model specifically on that,” Rovai says.

    Rovai illustrated these reasons on a Zoom call, using one of his most recent experiments. Holding up a device, he says, “This is the new Arduino UNO Q—a US $50 device with a Qualcomm chipset. I’m running a language model here, which collects data from sensors and analyzes that data to detect tiny pools of water where mosquitoes might be breeding. It takes 3 watts to run it.”

    [...]

    Convinced that millions of people are already benefiting from these kinds of applications, the World Bank now actively promotes small AI with grants, mentorship programs, financing, technical advice, and models of government policies that are friendly for small-AI development. For example, in Rwanda, the World Bank is backing a government program to help low-income households get devices that can run AI.

    All that said, no one claims that large language models are going away entirely. To create a generative AI that can run on a phone or other small device requires the architectural insights, data processing, and results of a larger model, Rovai says. “We need the big models to create these smaller models.”

    4 votes

  13. Comment on Cambria, California banned fireworks. Then came the dogs. in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Why did they do that?

    Why did they do that?

    1 vote

  14. Comment on A global workspace in language models in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...]

    From the article:

    In a new paper, we present evidence that a similar distinction has emerged in modern language models like Claude. We find that Claude has developed a small collection of internal neural patterns that, compared to all its other internal processing, play a special role.

    We call the collection of these patterns the J-space—named after the technique we used to find them, involving a mathematical concept called the Jacobian. Each J-space pattern is linked to a particular word. But when one of these patterns lights up, it doesn’t mean the model is saying that word—just that the word is on its mind. If you've heard of language models having a "scratchpad" or “chain of thought”—text they write to themselves while reasoning—the J-space is something different. It operates silently, in the model’s internal neural activations, allowing the model to think about a concept without writing it down. Notably, the J-space wasn’t designed or programmed by us, but instead emerged on its own during Claude’s training process.

    We find that the J-space has a number of unique properties, compared to the rest of Claude's processing:

    • Claude can report on these representations. If you ask Claude what it's thinking about, it will tell you what’s in the J-space. Non-J-space representations are less reportable.

    • It can also modulate them on request. If you ask Claude to think about something, or solve a problem silently in its head, it will light up the appropriate patterns in its J-space. By contrast, it has trouble modulating patterns not in the J-space.

    • Claude uses its J-space for internal reasoning. If you ask Claude to solve a problem that requires multiple steps, the intermediate steps will light up in its J-space, even when it doesn’t say them out loud. These J-space patterns causally mediate its performance in such tasks, despite being smaller in magnitude than other representations.

    • Representations in the J-space can be used flexibly for many tasks—for example, once “France” has lit up in Claude’s J-space, the model can recall its capital, or its national currency, or the continent it belongs to.

    • However, despite its important role, the J-space is not involved in most of what a language model does—speaking fluently, recalling simple facts, using correct grammar, etc. In experiments where we prevented Claude from using its J-space, it still interacted normally, but lost its higher-order cognitive functions.

    [...]

    This post is a short summary of a much more extensive research paper, where you can find more detail on our experiments. We’ve also released a code repository with an open-source implementation of the core methods, and have partnered with Neuronpedia to provide an interactive demo of our methods on open-weights models. To provide additional perspectives on the broader implications of this work, we also invited commentary from several experts in neuroscience, philosophy, and LLM interpretability, which can be viewed here.

    2 votes

  16. Comment on Agentic test processes, LLM benchmarks, and other notes on agentic coding in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I switched to GPT-5.5 recently, because I can connect the $20/month ChatGPT subscription that I already had to the coding agent I'm using, with the result that there's no extra charge for me. It...

    I switched to GPT-5.5 recently, because I can connect the $20/month ChatGPT subscription that I already had to the coding agent I'm using, with the result that there's no extra charge for me. It seems okay and is a lot more no-nonsense. One thing that takes a bit of getting used to is that it's somewhat more careful to follow whatever instructions you give it.

  17. Comment on Cambria, California banned fireworks. Then came the dogs. in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Apparently the dog owners check on this and a small, isolated community is a good spot in practice?

    Apparently the dog owners check on this and a small, isolated community is a good spot in practice?

    Karen Cartwright, director of hospitality at the nearby Cambria Shores Inn, said that pet owners even call asking if fireworks can be heard in Cambria from Cayucos, about 15 miles away (they cannot).

    1 vote

  18. Comment on Fines doubled as teens outsmart Australia's world-first social media ban in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I think a reasonable approach would be to identify devices rather than people. That is, there should be an easy way for a website to check whether the device used to access the website is...

    I think a reasonable approach would be to identify devices rather than people. That is, there should be an easy way for a website to check whether the device used to access the website is child-locked. Then it’s up to parents to make sure that the devices they let their children use have child locking turned on. Also, vendors shouldn’t sell devices to kids that aren’t child-locked.

    This is unlikely to work against determined teenagers, but it would help to change the culture so that most children don’t usually have access to websites that don’t allow child-locked devices.

    3 votes

  19. Comment on Modern, abstract art makes me angry in ~arts

    skybrian
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    The prices are often silly but I think you have to put it aside. Yes, the art market is a racket, but it’s someone else’s money and it probably comes from a rich donor. They can afford it. The...

    Thinking that a museum spent hundreds of thousands or even millions on a bunch of material that has no depth or meaning

    The prices are often silly but I think you have to put it aside. Yes, the art market is a racket, but it’s someone else’s money and it probably comes from a rich donor. They can afford it. The artist’s cost of materials was probably not that high.

    If you compare with the amount of money that goes into making bad or mediocre movies, there is plenty of “waste” there too, but usually we don’t think about the cost.

    1 vote

  20. Comment on Strange creatures cast ashore: salps in ~enviro

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Some of the gelatinous creatures that wash onto Oregon’s beaches are salps. Though salps resemble jellyfish without tentacles, they belong to a group of animals known as tunicates, commonly called sea squirts. In their larval phase, tunicates possess a primitive backbone structure, making salps more closely related to people than to jellyfish. Stranger yet, we are closer kin to a salp with its rudimentary spinal column than we are to an octopus, an invertebrate mollusk that seems almost humanlike with its playful personality and its remarkable memory, curiosity, and problem-solving skills. Sometimes I stare at a blob of salp goo on the sand and let the bizarre fact that we are cousins in the same phylum bubble in my brain.

    [...]

    As these gelatinous rocket scientists pilot their way through the sea sucking in water and expelling it, they filter the water for the tiny phytoplankton they eat. Salps are also considered plankton. Even though they are much larger than the microscopic organisms they consume, salps are carried by currents stronger than their jet-powered motion. The word plankton comes from the Greek planktos, meaning wandering. As salps wander the sea grazing on algae, they provide a gelatinous feast for fish, seabirds, sea turtles, and siphonophores like the Portuguese man o’ war.

    The salps we see on the beach represent one part of a strange lifecycle that involves both solitary salps and salp aggregations. A solitary salp reproduces asexually by budding a chain of clones that create light. The individual salps in a luminous chain remain attached as they swim; these strands of glowing strangeness can stretch more than fifty feet. The chains of some species form complex shapes such as giant wheels, and even a double helix. Salps that are linked together communicate through electrical signals to synchronize their movements, and a chain of harmonized beings pulses brightly as it snakes or spins its way through the sea.

    [...]

    When food is abundant, salps clone themselves extraordinarily fast. Their populations explode to take full advantage of the bounty; staggering numbers of salps gobble up vast blooms of algae. A single swarm of salp clones can cover hundreds, or even thousands, of square miles. And because of the constant gene shuffling that comes with the sexual reproduction of salps, when the environment changes, some individuals have the genetics necessary to deal with the shifting conditions.

    4 votes