Academia Versus Civilization, at Quillette
A talk by Jensen Huang, founder & CEO of NVDIA, at Stanford. Very, very good. Related post and discussion.
Ruxandra Teslo notes that student protestors in the 1960s wanted less bureaucracy and more freedom…today, most of them seem to want less freedom and more bureaucracy.
It’s not the phones, says Marc Andreessen, referring to the psychological dysfunction that seems to afflict so many of today’s young people. He’s responding to a post by Jash Dholani, who says “the young aren’t driving, f******, and drinking because high energy activity is fundamentally incompatible with modern ethics. If you’re always told to be harmless (but also guilty!) then your innate will to power withers. You vegetate. Man, the greatest animal, turned to plant.”
Elon Musk says:
Many movies exist about a lone inventor in a garage having a eureka moment, but almost none about manufacturing, so it’s underappreciated by the public. Compared to the insane pain of reaching high-volume, positive-margin production, prototypes are a piece of cake.
(Not many such movies, but one that comes to mind is Valley of Decision, a 1945 film centered around family-owned steel mill in Pittsburgh. I reviewed the movie, and the book on which it is based, here. Also, there’s Executive Suite, a film from 1954 which involves executive succession at a furniture manufacturer…mentioned in a batch of reviews that I posted here)
In a comment at an earlier version of this post at Ricochet, Gary McVey noted that
“the eastern Europeans (in other words, the Communists, if not always the Soviets) were pretty good about trying to publicize the drama of start-up, the challenges of production. When we mock those days for films “about a couple falling in love at the tractor factory”, we are mocking something that, if you actually see the films, is in fact objectively a good thing. Some of them, by the Poles, Hungarians, and Czechs, were good. The best of them had little or nothing to do with Marxist theories, just the everyday achievements of construction, engineering, and metalwork that sated Western audiences found dull as dishwater.
A tractor factory’s a good thing to have, if you care to eat. There was nothing contemptible about making movies about it.”
Ashwin Varma argues that the usual narrative about WWII industrial production is defective, in that it does not give sufficient credit to the role of government.
The Department of Education embarked on a project to modernize and simplify the process for applying for student aid. It is not going well.
The Biden administration is supporting the reopening of a nuclear plant in Michigan. As Stephen Green says, it’s the right thing to do, but the Democrats doing it reeks of desperation.
gCaptain is a good source on the Baltimore bridge disaster and on all matters nautical.
In my post Visit to a Noteworthy Robot, I described a trip to a store equipped with Amazon’s no-check-out system. Now, Amazon has decided to drop this system in most of the stores in which it is being used…problem is that too much human intervention (1000 people in India reviewing images that the AI can’t reliably interpret) to be cost-effective.
Cultural Theory of Mind and the consequences of not having it, especially the foreign-policy consequences.
Interesting chart: the ratio of commodity prices to the S&P 500.
An argument that the theft of national sovereignty at the Euro level was orchestrated entirely by legal elites – not political, much less economic, ones.
What kind of people tend to block (what they think are) sources of misinformation?
GE’s energy business has now been spun off as a separate corporation, GE Vernova. They seem to be pretty well-positioned in nuclear; it will be interesting to see how much emphasis they put on this sector vis-a-vis their gas and wind businesses.
Speaking of nuclear, here’s a chart on the temperature ranges required for various industrial processes versus the temperature ranges available from various types of reactors.
Here are some videos from ship’s engineers specifically about the Dali allision. Not my usual bad typing, allision is when a ship hits something on shore, collision is between ships.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrf5JLIQ8rs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxeKXjDVqMAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JElUSyNIJGo
Also, Sal Mercogliano is a good source on shipping matters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWQ-PQddGS4
http://gcaptain.com/ has drunk deeply of the climate crisis coolaid but I’ve been following him since the Deep Water Horizon.and he has lots of information and sources usually overlooked by the MSM.
I had read about Amazon dropping AI checkout but not about the why. If I was a whole Paycheck customer, I’d be less than thrilled that they were going to replace them with what are essentially self checkout terminals built into super heavy clumsy shopping carts. Considering the trouble I had keeping the stationary ones working when I was in that business, I can just imagine how hard it’s going to be to keep these contraptions going. How long before you start hearing about people going to the stores only to find no working carts or a long wait to get one?
Funny how none of the gee-whiz articles when they first rolled this out mentioned the Indian monitoring centers. It seems like another case of the 80-20 rule. the first 80% was easy, the last 20% was a disaster. Notice how even after having the system running for years and paying a thousand people to correct it, it doesn’t seem to have gotten any more accurate.
Now Amazon is in a position to make real money on AI by selling compute to everyone that believes it’s just almost, nearly completely, only a matter of another gargantuan training set from being a thing. Sort of the way casinos make money off of the people that don’t know probability.
The reactor temperature chart is interesting but mostly irrelevant. The reactor only needs to get hot enough to make electricity. A carbon arc is thousands of degrees hotter than the surface of the sun and plasma hotter still. Electricity is also infinitely easier to control and transport. Raising the temperature enough to make super critical steam would make electrical generation somewhat more efficient from a thermal standpoint but the fuel efficiency of nuclear isn’t an issue. Nuclear plants are classed with hydro-electric plants for fuel cost, negligible. It would come down to a matter of added cost and supercritical steam is economic for fossil fuel where fuel cost is important but it’s hard to see how it could work and I expect that’s why it is marked as future and will be for a long time. The real barrier as proven by the ease with which reactors are built in the rest of the world are all man made.
Many movies exist about a lone inventor in a garage having a eureka moment, but almost none about manufacturing, so it’s underappreciated by the public. Compared to the insane pain of reaching high-volume, positive-margin production, prototypes are a piece of cake.
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Genius’ Is 10% Inspiration, 90% Perspiration
some say 1% and 99% but you get the point.
This reminds me of the debate I’ve seen Tim Pool have on the origins of wokeness. And basically they boil down to an argument of seed vs fertilizer.
At a glance, it strikes me that modern ethics are the seed, and phones are the fertilizer.
I think Musk’s comment is more about there aren’t any movies about Musk and Tesla and SpaceX. First, give it a little time, I’m pretty sure there will be. Second, if either one of them crashes and burns, there will be plenty of movies and books, right quick, be careful what you wish for. Third, he’ll just have to accept the consolation of a couple of hundred billion dollars.
There are movies about Thomas Edison but none I know of about the company that eventually became GE. The same for Alexander Graham Bell and the Bell System, at least movies produced by someone other than the Bell System. Rockefeller and the oil industry. There’s also the counter example of how the Wrights failed to build a successful company to exploit the airplane. You could make a pretty long list, maybe if they start making movies about real people again instead of comic book characters some daring producer could take a chance.
Michael Crichton has a book, nota movie about the airplane manufacturing business. It’s called “Airframe.” Pretty good story.
Also we’re going to discuss movies about manufacturing and nobody brings up Tucker?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucker:_The_Man_and_His_Dream
For those into industrial automation, and videogames, here’s a recommendation:
Factorio
Starting from crash-landing on an alien planet, hand-mining a few things, build up factories to build yourself a rocket. You can go absolutely nuts optimizing things, or a “good enough for now” approach. Think Simcity, but organizing production lines vs power lines and roads.
Free demo at the game’s name + .com
Nate Winchester…”At a glance, it strikes me that modern ethics are the seed, and phones are the fertilizer.”
Pretty good analogy.
Manufacturing movies…the 2019 film The Current War does include George Westinghouse as a major character, as opposed to portraying AC vs DC as purely an Edison vs Tesla thing, and IIRC there were some sequences set in the Westinghouse factory.
The 19th century might be called the century of the lone inventor. There’s a long list of inventors that went on to found successful companies. I think that by the start of the 20th the level of complexity had surpassed the point where a single person could take an idea from conception through profitable production by himself.
An example I keep coming back to is the Wright brothers. They invented the airplane, but even though they had a fairly successful bicycle manufacturing business, they never really got beyond building a few hand built planes. Much was because they were completely unwilling to compromise control over their invention for any reason. They wasted five years and more, trying to develop a suitable engine. Not that there were engines readily available, but there were a lot of others much closer to producing one than they were. Notably, Glen Curtis. Lots of books about that war.
Another was what they saw as their key invention. Warping the wings to control roll. Where the real invention was rolling the plane to turn. Warping made the wings inherently complicated, fragile and weak. Strong, stiff wings would take too much force to warp sufficiently for control, especially as speed and power increased. At the same time, wing warping was probably what made the original, woefully under powered Wright Flyer work at all. I’m willing to bet that Curtis ailerons would have produced too much drag and rendered the plane uncontrollable. The original flight was at less than 20 MPH.
That sort of encapsulates a lot of the reasons there’s also a long list of inventions that weren’t developed until the rights passed, for a variety of reasons, to someone with a little more objective view point, and/or, more money.
By now, the odds against a lone inventor are very long, all but insurmountable. A patent is nothing but an invitation for endless litigation. Whichever side runs out of money first, loses.
Edison really does come off as evil in contemporary accounts, even dr who, once upon a time, Gates fancied himself the inventor Edison, so does Zuckerberg, Jobs probably retained some of that eccentricity though his life
I was thinking Coppola’s Tucker a Man and His Dream, where youngish Jeff Bridges fares off against the Big Three flacked by Senator Holland ([played by his father Jeff Bridges) yes the same Senator Holland that stymied insurance regulation for generations, a generation later Bridges plays the villain to Downeys Stark in Iron Man, which is a little about design, as well as inspiration, as the character is along Musk lines with some Howard Hughes thrown in, the hearing in the sequel is right out of Hughes, bout with Senator Brewster, over the Spruce Goose,