A small announcement: my next book, Everything is Predictable, about how Bayes' theorem is the most important little equation in the world, is out in April and will look like this! If you'd like to pre-order, you can do so here geni.us/EIPBook and I will be very grateful

0.3% of the water consumed by US golf courses last year

This is, perversely, good news for Britain, Australia, Japan, Europe, and other countries being cut off that would once have seen themselves as close allies of the United States. It shows us what the future may hold if AI is the strategically and economically decisive technology of the 21st century and is controlled by the US and China. It is good news because *it may be happening early enough to give us time to act.* I think this will be rescinded pretty soon, but it’s a sign of things to come. In a future where frontier models cannot be used outside the US, our industries and economies will fall behind and American businesses may not be able to operate overseas. We won’t be able to defend ourselves militarily with defence systems built on obsolete software. Europe 2031 is a good scenario of what a future like this could mean: europe2031.ai Some of the things we need to do are ‘no regrets’ measures we should do anyway. But some are genuinely costly and risky. We need cheap electricity – powered by gas, coal (this is costly, coal is very bad), deregulated nuclear fission – whatever can provide *cheap, reliable, 24/7* power. This almost certainly excludes wind power, which is enormously expensive and unreliable. We need projects to be able to connect to the grid in days rather than years by paying for fast-track connections. We need to make it incredibly easy to build data centres, with the property taxes retained locally and hypothecated for local tax cuts so there is some direct benefit for locals. This doesn’t need to be nationwide. We need to create new regulatory regimes for innovative businesses that give them the right to hire and fire staff with ease. The difficulty and cost of firing staff is one of the main reasons Europe has fallen behind so badly. We need to create a parallel employment regime that companies and workers can opt in to: worksinprogress.co/issue/why… Even though I think it will probably fail, I think we should probably try to create a good, non-American frontier AI lab. I am quite pessimistic about this – even extremely well-resourced, innovative software companies are struggling to do this. But the stakes are so high that not trying seems foolish. One thing that might work in our favour is the number of brilliant AI engineers who are not US citizens, who under the current export controls do not have access to Mythos/Fable even if they live and work in the US. What happens to Demis Hassabis, Ilya Sutskever, Andrej Karpathy, and the many other Europeans, Canadians, etc who are working on AI models in Britain and America who are affected by this? I do not think we should force our own companies to use model, because this would exacerbate their economic weakness – this lab should have to compete on an even playing field. I am deeply sceptical that this can work, but we cannot rule it out. If we do it, it has to be able to pay US salaries, operate without political constraints. worksinprogress.co/issue/how… It is cope to tell yourself that Trump is an aberration or that these export controls are a one-off. To repeat, I think these specific controls will be lifted quickly and it will be easy to move on and forget it happened. But this is a look into a potential future. Every one of us that is not a US citizen is at risk. The standard political divides do not apply here; the question is whether you grasp the enormity of AI as a technology. We have to act!

hate to say it but eliezer called this in the sequences lesswrong.com/posts/iiWiHgtQ…

rockets used to grow in the forest and they were distributed evenly all over the world until Elon hoarded them out of spite

Huh, we didn’t have this in the scenario until 2029 europe2031.ai/

The UK actually has a ton of frontier or near-frontier global companies for a country of its size and I think its economic problems could basically all be solved with “YIMBY stuff” in a way that isn’t true elsewhere. slowboring.com/p/hard-work-i…

Extremely cogent and well-written scenario, starting from the present, warning about Europe’s dangerous trajectory. I was in Paris for the AI Summit after DeepSeek r1, and I can attest that the level of delusion about what that model meant was exactly as this scenario describes.

This should be a wake-up call for the UK… (Note that this is a per-capita chart)

I'm deeply concerned about Europe's future on AI. One of my biggest worries is our erosion of agency, our ability to stay relevant and fight for our values in a future where AI becomes a civilisationally important technology. Myself, @DadaJudith , @bakkermichiel and others have written a scenario to outline a potential future we worry we are on track towards. europe2031.ai/ Every optimistic and realistic path I can see for Europe runs through a central node - one where Europe has more leverage, more importance and more say. One where Europe grows more, builds more where it matters, and takes ownership over its resilience. Europe 2031 is a five-year scenario of the continent's slide into irrelevance: how AI is driving it, and what can still be done. The co-authors are researchers, scientists and investors who have advised European leaders, co-authored national AI strategies, built and funded these systems from the inside. We have no interest in hype and we deeply care about this continent. Europe 2031 ends with five concrete recommendations: - drastically more compute on European soil - an AI middle-power coalition - labour-market reforms - a bold position in robotics and industrial AI - and a positive vision of what AI can do for society. Europe can still change course if it finds the political will and the courage to engage in the most ambitious political and economic agenda the continent has undertaken in peacetime. I encourage you to read it if you have the time:

I know this is going to annoy literally everyone but I'm going to say it anyway: Whether it's Brixton 1981, London 2011, or Belfast 2026; rioters, looters, and arsonists always try to claim noble political motivations for their thuggery. But it is always bollocks. The Brixton riots weren't really about 'racism'. The London riots weren't really about 'austerity'. And the Belfast riots aren't really about 'public safety'. There's a reason this specific kind of lawlessness, thuggery, and arson only takes place in the summer months. Because it's not about politics. It's about adrenaline. It's about fun. It's a form of grotesque entertainment for a specific type of dimwit with a high propensity to violence. Don't defend the dimwits who are literally torching their communities for laugh. Who are picking fights as a form of entertainment. Who are no more righteous in their anger than your common or garden playground bully. Up with this we must not put. From left nor from right. It's the same low IQ, temperamentally violent bullshit every single time.

Obviously we should do this: at this price (£70 per megawatt hour CfD) this is by some way the cheapest form electricity we can get. Remember that it will produce electricity during price spikes caused by gas interruptions or calm days or clouds/overnight. It doesn’t need any new transmission, will not need balancing, and so on. I think these costs add something like £100 to £150 per mwh onto wind and solar’s true costs. But we have to wonder: how is it going to cost this much? It all exists already. When we actually BUILT this plant (for about 2.5x cheaper per gigawatt than SZC & HPC, our in progress plants), we bought electricity from it for about £50 per megawatt hour in 2026 prices (about 2.5x cheaper than the HPC & SZC CfDs). It is significantly more expensive to extend the life of a power plant in 2026 than it was to build the same plant from scratch in 1994! bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Fable: "write me a rhyming poem with six four line stanzas, each stanza removes another vowel. the first has no u, the second no u or i, etc."

We often complain about 'America-brain', the tendency of Twitter-reared Europeans to misapply American framings to their own countries. In the case of housing, however, America-braining might actually be a good thing. In fact, Europeans could do with being a lot more America-brained than they are today. worksinprogress.co/issue/sho… Lots of Americans believe that: - Their country has a housing shortage; - This shortage is mostly caused by land-use restrictions, especially suburban zoning; - Suburban zoning is caused mostly by NIMBYism; - Expensive environmental and social obligations often make housing shortages worse by making development unviable (the 'everything-bagel'). British people are less likely to believe these things, and continental Europeans hardly talk about them at all. But with some caveats, they are probably just as true of Europe as they are of America. In particular: - European countries not only have housing shortages, but by some measures they have worse shortages than America; - Contrary to popular belief, most European countries have extensive low-density suburbs, from which development is excluded by zoning; - NIMBYism is indeed less visible in Europe, but probably only because nobody is threatening suburbia with densification in the first place. YIMBYism will of course need to be modified if it is to be successfully transplanted to Europe. But Europe *does* need a YIMBY movement, and it can learn much from what the American YIMBYs have already got right.

Slightly taken aback by the Guardian's Gordon Wood obituary. I can find one reference to Wood saying he'd read the opening essay of the 1619 Project and objected to it (not quite "I haven't read most of it"). What follows seems to me to be a guilt-by-association shoehorning.

i asked fable a very basic biology question and it refused??