skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on Water and sanitation in the developing world in ~society

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

    From the article:

    The World Bank estimates that every dollar spent on water supply and sanitation in Africa yields up to seven dollars in return. Some analyses put it at $21. If a hedge fund offered you those numbers, you would think about putting a reverse mortgage on your house. Today, somewhere between 2.2 and 4.4 billion people still lack reliably clean water and sanitation.

    If returns are so high, why do we not see more investment? Answering this question is critical right now. With USAID cut and Chinese loans to Africa falling off from their 2016 peak, two of the biggest external funding pipelines into African infrastructure are simultaneously collapsing.

    [...]

    Mohenjo-Daro was a city in the Indus Valley that flourished around 2500 BCE. The settlement had over 700 wells and a dedicated sewerage system. The city featured covered drains running beneath the streets of residential neighborhoods. No one in Mohenjo-Daro had electricity or any idea what a germ was. Many of them enjoyed sanitation infrastructure that modern residents of Lagos or Karachi can only dream of.

    Every single country on Earth today is wealthier than Mohenjo-daro was. Pipes, pumps, gravity, and sand filtration are tools that ancient civilizations mastered independently. I have written about many of these systems on this blog before, including Venice’s ingenious cisterns, Archimedes’ screws and Persian wheels, and China’s Grand Canal. These civilizations solved water distribution under far more severe constraints than any modern government faces.

    [...]

    The underlying issue is rooted in mechanism design. The incentive structures surrounding the pipes are broken in specific and identifiable ways. Private capital cannot capture the vast positive externalities of public health interventions without the presence of a highly capable state, a state capable of enforcing tariffs, executing eminent domain, maintaining complex assets over decades, and ensuring macroeconomic stability. In what ways do states fail to provide this environment?

    [...]

    Developing economies face extreme budget volatility. In a flush year a government builds infrastructure. In a lean year maintenance is the first thing cut. In the next flush year they rebuild the thing they let fall apart. The money is there and is systematically misallocated toward the visible and away from the essential.

    [...]

    Tanker operators illegally siphon water from unmetered municipal taps and sell it to households at enormous markups. Utility water costs roughly $1 per 1,000 liters. Tanker water sells for $20 or more. The arbitrage is extraordinary. The profits flow upstream into a network of police and politicians who protect the scarcity that makes the business model work.

    When tanker operators siphon water from unmetered taps they physically depressurize the distribution network. Low pressure means more leaks and more contamination from groundwater infiltration. The theft makes the utility fail harder and creates more demand for tankers. As we all know, once a rent seeking equilibrium is established, the parties benefiting from it will actively resist any reform.

    [...]

    In 1993, the Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority was a catastrophe. The city was emerging from decades of war and genocide. Only 20 percent of the city had connections at all, and water flowed for just 10 hours a day. 72 percent of the water was non revenue water. It was lost to leaks or stolen through illegal connections.

    Into this mess walked Ek Son Chan, a young Cambodian engineer appointed as Director General. Over the next two decades he executed an incredible institutional turnaround.

    Chan replaced corrupt managers with qualified engineers. He got rid of unmetered taps. Every single connection received a meter and was billed. The old system of manual billing was replaced with a computerized system, which cut down on low level employees giving out free water and receiving kickbacks. Bill collection rates went from 48 percent to 99.9 percent. These changes were intensely unpopular, and Chan faced fierce resistance from rent seekers, from freeloading customers to his own employees. He established an incentive system based on bonuses among the workers, introduced an internal discipline system with a penalty for violators, and set up a discipline commission for all levels of the organization to deal with corruption.

  3. Comment on Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don't rewrite an Iran missile story in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    It's a novelty. A forum where we shared links based solely on their importance in the world would probably be pretty dull.

    It's a novelty. A forum where we shared links based solely on their importance in the world would probably be pretty dull.

    1 vote

  4. Comment on Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don't rewrite an Iran missile story in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    If insiders attempt to affect outcomes by making bets on both sides so that their interests are in conflict, that will tend to make the outcome less predictable, because you have to take into...

    If insiders attempt to affect outcomes by making bets on both sides so that their interests are in conflict, that will tend to make the outcome less predictable, because you have to take into account the possibility of cheating.

    How do you price that in? Markets don't magically make chaotic systems less chaotic.

  5. Comment on Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don't rewrite an Iran missile story in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    To start with, maybe anything specifically about war should be off limits?

    To start with, maybe anything specifically about war should be off limits?

    7 votes

  6. Comment on I before she — on the shift in narrative perspective in romance novels in ~books

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I had not read those, thanks. I have read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and enjoyed parts of it, though it gets rather dark and is far too long. I wouldn’t say it started the...

    I had not read those, thanks.

    I have read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and enjoyed parts of it, though it gets rather dark and is far too long. I wouldn’t say it started the Rationalist movement since Yudowsky wrote the Sequences before that, but it did popularize it.

    3 votes

  7. Comment on Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don't rewrite an Iran missile story in ~society

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

    From the article:

    On Tuesday, March 10, a massive explosion shook the city of Beit Shemesh, just outside Jerusalem, in yet another Iranian ballistic missile attack during the ongoing war.

    Rescue services scrambled to the scene in search of possible casualties, though as it turned out, the projectile had struck a forested area just outside the city, around 500 meters from homes.

    On The Times of Israel’s liveblog that day, I reported that the missile had hit an open area and no injuries were caused, citing the rescue services, as well as footage that emerged showing the massive explosion caused by the missile’s warhead.

    [...]

    The event that these people had bet on was “Iran strikes Israel on…?” More than 14 million dollars had been wagered on March 10.

    The rules of the bet state: “This market will resolve to ‘Yes’ if Iran initiates a drone, missile, or air strike on Israel’s soil on the listed date in Israel Time (GMT+2). Otherwise, this market will resolve to ‘No’.”

    However, there is a clause: “Missiles or drones that are intercepted… will not be sufficient for a ‘Yes’ resolution, regardless of whether they land on Israeli territory or cause damage.”

    My minor report on a missile striking an open area was now in the middle of a betting war, with those who had bet “No” on an Iranian strike on Israel on March 10 demanding I change my article to ensure they would win big.

    [...]

    Shortly after midnight between Saturday and Sunday, I started to receive threatening messages in Hebrew on WhatsApp from someone called Haim.

    [...]

    The attempt by these gamblers to pressure me to change my reporting so that they would win their bet did not and will not succeed. But I do worry that other journalists may not be as ethical if they are promised some of the winnings.

    15 votes

  9. Comment on I before she — on the shift in narrative perspective in romance novels in ~books

  10. Comment on Helgi Hjorleifsson, a firefighter, is a leader in an Icelandic experiment to steer rivers of lava away from important sites. Some called it crazy, but it worked. in ~enviro

    skybrian
    Link
    This would be a great idea for a video game.

    This would be a great idea for a video game.

    2 votes

  11. Comment on Rescue dog Rosie’s cancer shrinks after world-first mRNA vaccine in ~health

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

    From the article:

    Heartbroken when his fur-baby was diagnosed with a deadly mast cell cancer in 2024, Mr ­Conyngham threw thousands of dollars at veterinary chemotherapy and surgery, which slowed but failed to shrink the tumours. Now, after treatment with a custom mRNA cancer vaccine over the Christmas break, the tennis ball-sized tumour on Rosie’s hock has shrunk in half, in a recovery that has astounded researchers at the cutting-edge of human cancer treatments.

    [...]

    Harnessing some of Australia’s most sought-after scientists to manufacture the vaccine in laboratories at the University of NSW, he then tracked down the only veterinary researcher with ethics approval to administer the experimental drug.

    It was ChatGPT that suggested immunotherapy, pointing Mr Conyngham to the UNSW Ramaciotti Centre for Genomics, where Associate Professor Smith still remembers the “weird” request. “We often get oddball queries, and this one was coming from a private individual looking to sequence his dog,’’ he recalls. “DNA sequencing is a way to profile the tumour and identify mutations that might be causing the disease.’’

    The renowned researcher was reticent. “Usually we don’t support direct-to-consumer type DNA sequencing because while generating data for genomics is relatively easy for us, interrogating that data is really hard and challenging,’’ he said. “But Paul said, ‘No worries, I’m a data analyst and I’ll figure this out with the help of ChatGPT’.”

    With 17 years of experience in machine learning and data analysis, Mr Conyngham is an AI pioneer – an electrical and computing engineer who co-founded Core Intelligence Technologies, and was a director for the Data Science and AI Association of Australia. Once UNSW handed him the genomic sequencing, for which he paid $3000, he got cracking to decipher the data.

    [...]

    At the Ramaciotti Centre for Genomics, Associate Professor Smith was gobsmacked that this puppy lover with no background in biology had cracked the code. “Paul was relentless,’’ he said. “He called and told me he had ­analysed the data and found ­mutations of interest and then used AlphaFold (an AI program) to find the proteins that were ­mutated, and then identified ­potential targets and matched them to drugs, and he was ­wondering could I help him find someone to synthesise this compound that he’d identified. I’m like, ‘Woah, that’s crazy!’ I was motivated by his enthusiasm.’’

    [...]

    “This is the first time a personalised cancer vaccine has been designed for a dog,’’ Professor Thordarson said. “This is still at the frontier of where cancer immunotherapeutics are – and ultimately, we’re going to use this for helping humans. What Rosie is teaching us is that personalised medicine can be very effective, and done in a time-sensitive manner, with mRNA technology.’’

    [...]

    Rosie’s vaccine was ready, but Mr Conyngham still needed ethics approval to use it.

    “I had to do everything by the book because you can’t just willy-nilly create a vaccine in Australia,’’ he said. “The red tape was actually harder than the vaccine creation, and I was trying to get an Australian ethics approval to run a drug trial on Rosie. It took me three months, putting two hours aside every single night just typing up this 100-page document. But there was a second intervention of fate.’’

    [...]

    Rosie’s response has inspired David Thomas, inaugural director of the UNSW Centre for Molecular Oncology, who is working on similar mRNA treatments for human patients.

    “The striking thing about this is the idea of citizen science, where a punter in the street, with a computer science background, can use their skills in the scientific process,’’ Professor Thomas said. “That’s a very impressive thing.’’

    Rosie’s recovery has been a howling success, with most of her tumours appear to melt away in a matter of weeks. “In December she had low energy because the tumours were creating a huge burden for her,’’ Mr Conyngham said. “Six weeks post-treatment, I was at the dog park when she spotted a rabbit and jumped the fence to chase it. I’m under no illusion that this is a cure, but I do believe this ­treatment has bought Rosie ­significantly more time and quality of life.’’

    13 votes

  13. Comment on Russia goes offline in ~society

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

    From the article:

    Telegram would be joining a home screen’s worth of apps that have become useless to Russians. Kremlin policymakers have already blocked or limited access to WhatsApp, along with parent company Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Microsoft’s LinkedIn, Google’s YouTube, Apple’s FaceTime, Snapchat and X, which like SpaceX is owned by Musk. Encrypted messaging apps Signal and Discord, as well as Japanese-owned Viber, have been inaccessible since 2024. Last month, President Vladimir Putin signed a law requiring telecom operators to block cellular and fixed internet access at the request of the Federal Security Service. Shortly after it took effect on March 3, Moscow residents reported widespread problems with mobile internet, calls and text messages across all major operators for several days, with outages affecting mobile service and Wi-Fi even inside the State Duma.

    Those decisions have left Russians increasingly cut off from both the outside world and one another, complicating battlefield coordination and disrupting online communities that organize volunteer aid, fundraising and discussion of the war effort. Deepening digital isolation could turn Russia into something akin to “a large, nuclear-armed North Korea and a junior partner to China,” according to Alexander Gabuev, the Berlin-based director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.

    In April, the Kremlin is expected to escalate its campaign against Telegram — already one of Russia’s most popular messaging platforms, but now in the absence of other social-media options, a central hub for news, business and entertainment. It may block the platform altogether. That is likely to fuel an escalating struggle between state censorship and the tools people use to evade it, with Russia’s place in the world hanging in the balance.

    [...]

    On Feb. 4, SpaceX tightened the authentication system that Starlink terminals use to connect to its satellite network, introducing stricter verification for registered devices. The change effectively blocked many terminals operated by Russian units relying on unauthorized connections, cutting Starlink traffic inside Ukraine by roughly 75 percent, according to internet traffic analysis by Doug Madory, an analyst at the U.S. network monitoring firm Kentik.

    The move threw Russian operations into disarray, allowing Ukraine to make battlefield gains. Russia has turned to a workaround widely used before satellite internet was an option: laying fiber-optic lines, from rear areas toward frontline battlefield positions.

    [...]

    Until then, Starlink terminals had allowed drone operators to stream live video through platforms such as Discord, which is officially blocked in Russia but still sometimes used by the Russian military via VPNs, to commanders at multiple levels. A battalion commander could watch an assault unfold in real time and issue corrections — “enemy ahead” or “turn left” — via radio or Telegram. What once required layers of approval could now happen in minutes. Satellite-connected messaging apps became the fastest way to transmit coordinates, imagery and targeting data.

    [...]

    Telegram founder Pavel Durov, a Russian-born entrepreneur now based in the United Arab Emirates, says the throttiling is being used as a pretext to push Russians toward a government-controlled messaging app designed for surveillance and political censorship.

    [...]

    That app is MAX, which was launched in March 2025 and has been compared to China’s WeChat in its ambition to anchor a domestic digital ecosystem. Authorities are increasingly steering Russians toward MAX through employers, neighborhood chats and the government services portal Gosuslugi — where citizens retrieve documents, pay fines and book appointments — as well as through banks and retailers. The app’s developer, VK, reports rapid user growth, though those figures are difficult to independently verify.

    [...]

    Unlike China’s centralized “Great Firewall,” which filters traffic at the country’s digital borders, Russia’s system operates internally. Internet providers are required to route traffic through state-installed deep packet inspection equipment capable of controlling and analyzing data flows in real time.

    [...]

    Pro-war Telegram channels frame the government’s blocking techniques as sabotage of the war effort. Ivan Philippov, who tracks Russia’s influential military bloggers, said the reaction inside that ecosystem to news about Telegram has been visceral “rage.”

    [...]

    Unlike Starlink, whose cutoff could be blamed on a foreign company, restrictions on Telegram are viewed as self-inflicted. Bloggers accuse regulators of undermining the war effort. Telegram is used not only for battlefield coordination but also for volunteer fundraising networks that provide basic logistics the state does not reliably cover — from transport vehicles and fuel to body armor, trench materials and even evacuation equipment. Telegram serves as the primary hub for donations and reporting back to supporters.

    “If you break Telegram inside Russia, you break fundraising,” Philippov said. “And without fundraising, a lot of units simply don’t function.”

    [...]

    The communications shutdown, and uncertainty around where it will go next, is affecting life for citizens of all kinds, from the elderly struggling to contact family members abroad to tech-savvy users who juggle SIM cards and secondary phones to stay connected. Demand has risen for dated communication devices — including walkie-talkies, pagers and landline phones — along with paper maps as mobile networks become less reliable, according to retailers interviewed by RBC.

    12 votes

  15. Comment on ArXiv is separating from Cornell University, and is hiring a CEO, who will be paid roughly $300,000/year in ~science

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Yeah, from the outside, it seems fine the way it is, but perhaps they have more ambition?

    Yeah, from the outside, it seems fine the way it is, but perhaps they have more ambition?

  16. Comment on ArXiv is separating from Cornell University, and is hiring a CEO, who will be paid roughly $300,000/year in ~science

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I don’t see any reason why they should be in New York City and from the point of view of an organization that needs to keep expenses down, it seems like a particularly bad choice. The cost of...

    I don’t see any reason why they should be in New York City and from the point of view of an organization that needs to keep expenses down, it seems like a particularly bad choice. The cost of living is much cheaper in Ithaca, for example, and there are places with better weather than either. It’s an Internet organization, so couldn’t they be based anywhere?

    13 votes

  17. Comment on Dabao evaluation board for Baochip-1x - what it is, why I'm doing it now, and how it came about in ~comp

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

    From the article:

    In my mind, the Baochip-1x’s key differentiating feature is the inclusion of a Memory Management Unit (MMU). No other microcontroller in this performance/integration class has this feature, to the best of my knowledge. For those not versed in OS-nerd speak, the MMU is what sets the software that runs on your phone or desktop apart from the software that runs in your toaster oven. It facilitates secure, loadable apps by sticking every application in its own virtual memory space.

    [...]

    This begs the question: if the MMU is such an obvious addition, why isn’t it more prevalent? If it’s such an obvious choice, wouldn’t more players include it in their chips?

    [...]

    The root cause turns out explicitly to be because MMUs are so valuable: without one, you can’t run Linux, BSD, or Mach. Thus, when ARM split their IP portfolio into the A, R, and M-series cores, the low-cost M-series cores were forbidden from having an MMU to prevent price erosion of their high-end A-series cores. Instead, a proprietary hack known as the “MPU” was introduced that gives some memory security, but without an easy path to benefits such as swap memory.

    [...]

    Thanks to the rise of open architecture specifications such as RISC-V, and fully-open implementations of the RISC-V spec such as the Vexriscv, I’m not bound by anyone’s rules for what can or can’t go onto an SoC. And so, I am liberated to make the choice to include an MMU in the Baochip-1x.

    This naturally empowers enthusiasts to try and run Linux on the Baochip-1x, but we (largely Sean ‘xobs’ Cross and me) already wrote a pure-Rust OS called “Xous” which incorporates an MMU but in a framework that is explicitly targeted towards small memory footprint devices like the Baochip-1x. The details of Xous are beyond the scope of this post, but if you’re interested, check out the talk we gave at 39C3.

    [...]

    Thus, while certain portions of the Baochip-1x SoC are closed-source, none of them are involved in the transformation of data. In other words, all the closed source components are effectively “wires”: the data that goes in on one side should match the data coming out the other side. While this is dissatisfying from the “absolute trust” perspective, one can’t definitively rule out the possibility of back doors in black-box wires, we can inspect its perimeter and confirm that, for a broad range of possibilities, it behaves correctly. It’s not perfect transparency, but it’s far better than the fully-NDA SoCs we currently use to handle our secrets, and more importantly, it allows us to start writing code for open architectures, paving a roadmap to an eventually fully-open silicon-to-software future.

    [...]

    Crossbar wanted to buck the trend and heed the call for open source transparency in security chips and approached me to help advise on strategy. I agreed to help them, but under one condition: that I would be allowed to add a CPU core of my own choice and sell a version of the chip under my own brand. Part of the reason was that Crossbar, for risk reduction reasons, wanted to go with a proprietary ARM CPU. Having designed chips in a prior life, I can appreciate the desire for risk reduction and going with a tape-out proven core.

    However, as an open source strategy advisor, I argued that users who viewed open source as a positive feature would likely also expect, at a minimum, that the CPU would be open source. Thus I offered to add the battle-tested CPU core from the Precursor SoC – the Vexriscv – to the tapout, and I promised I would implement the core in such a way that even if it didn’t work, we could just switch it off and there would be minimal impact on the chip’s power and area budget.

    [...]

    At the time of writing, wafers containing the Baochip-1x design have been fabricated, and hundreds of the chips have been handed out through an early sampling program. These engineering samples were all hand-screened by me.

    However, that’s about to change. There’s currently a pod of wafers hustling through a fab in Hsinchu, and two of them are earmarked to become fully production-qualified Baochip-1x silicon. These will go through a fully automated screening flow. Assuming this process completes smoothly, I’ll have a few thousand Baochip-1x’s available to sell. More chips are planned for later in the year, but a combination of capital constraints, risk mitigation, and the sheer time it takes to go from blank silicon to fully assembled devices puts further inventory out until late in 2026.

    4 votes

  19. Comment on Helium prices soar as Qatar LNG halt exposes fragile supply chain in ~finance

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

    From the article:

    State energy giant QatarEnergy, the world's second-largest LNG exporter, announced a production halt at its 77 ‌million tons per annum (mtpa) facility last week and declared force majeure on LNG shipments, amid the conflict.

    Because helium is extracted as a byproduct of natural gas processing, any disruption to LNG output directly cuts helium supply.

    [...]

    "If those conditions (supply disruption) persist, the market is ⁠effectively missing about 5.2 million cubic meters of helium per month," said Aleksandr Romanenko, CEO of market research firm IndexBox.

    The disruption is reverberating through a market with little ​spare production capacity and limited storage, leaving buyers with few short-term alternatives.

    Japan's top helium supplier Iwatani (8088.T), opens new tab said it had so far maintained stable supply to customers including semiconductor ​manufacturers, partly because it also sources helium from the United States and maintains stockpiles in both Japan and the U.S.

    [...]

    Helium markets operate very differently from most commodities.

    Most supply is sold through long-term contracts rather than a transparent spot market, meaning price signals often emerge slowly even as supply tightens.

    That opacity makes price discovery difficult, but signs of tightening supply have ​already begun to emerge.

    "Early indications show about 50% spot price increases already," said Anish Kapadia, CEO of market research firm AKAP Energy.

    "In a sustained disruption, prices could ​rise sharply and potentially retest past shortage peaks of more than $2,000 per thousand cubic feet."

    [...]

    Helium's physical properties add another constraint. The gas is typically shipped in liquid form and gradually evaporates during transport.

    "It's a commodity, but it also has a shelf life," said Chris Bakker, CEO of helium developer Avanti (AVN.V), opens new tab.

    "So when you liquefy it, and that's how they tend to ship it worldwide, you've got notionally 45 days to get it to the end-user."

    [...]

    Kornbluth said industries such ​as medical MRI systems and rocket ships would ⁠probably get 100% of their needs, while semiconductor manufacturers might receive 95%.

    Lower-priority uses, including welding, diving equipment and party balloons, would likely face deeper cuts.

    8 votes