Chinese doctors were able to use high speed internet and robotics to conduct a gallbladder removal from 2,800 miles away. Much like remote work allowed select digital workers to escape the tyranny of place, access to remote medical care will also remove geography as a barrier to the highest quality medical care.
Did you think there were only 4 layers of the earth? Well, turns out there’s a 5th layer that a team of Australians were able to detect by recording how much time it takes waves to travel from one seismic station to the next.
Aaronson asks whether GPT should exist and introduces the interesting concept of a “Faust Parameter” which is the probability that you would accept an existential catastrophe in order to learn the answers to all of humanity’s greatest questions.
The US has gradually increased our support for Ukraine. Now the question is how this ends? Stephen Kotkin argues that either 1) Ukraine ramps up the production of weaponry to win a war of attrition or 2) they accept membership in the E.U. while Crimea and Donbas remain in Russian hands.
"The Investment Office will continue to manage a well-balanced portfolio, and does not anticipate a significant negative impact to the endowment as a result of this divestment policy." – "Significant" is doing a lot of work here. I'd like to see a portfolio backtest inclusive of 2021/2022 to see the impact of this.
You'll recall that in the not-too-distant-past this was considered a "fringe conspiracy theory" with the NYT concluding "Although much remains unknown about the coronavirus, experts generally dismiss the idea that it was created by human hands."