Michelle Qin

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on the atlas — 33

highlights — 142

the most consequential, and the most contested.
The AI rules that Congress is considering, explained - Vox
Rules: New regulations and laws for individuals and companies training AI models, building or selling chips used for AI training, and/or using AI models in their business Institutions: New government agencies or international organizations that can implement and enforce these new regulations and laws Money: Additional funding for research, either to expand AI capabilities or to ensure safety People: Expanded high-skilled immigration and increased education funding to build out a workforce that can build and control AI
The AI rules that Congress is considering, explained - Vox
For example, governments should explore next-generation trade control policies for specific applications of AI-powered software that are deemed security risks, and on specific entities that provide support to AI-related research and development in ways that could threaten global security.
A policy agenda for responsible AI progress: Opportunity, Responsibility, Security
Possibilities include the federal government refusing to buy software or technology products that fail to respect these rights, requiring federal contractors to use technologies that adhere to this “bill of rights,” or adopting new laws and regulations to fill gaps. States might choose to adopt similar practices.
ICYMI: WIRED (Opinion): Americans Need a Bill of Rights for an AI-Powered World | OSTP | The White House
What exactly those are will require discussion, but here are some possibilities: your right to know when and how AI is influencing a decision that affects your civil rights and civil liberties; your freedom from being subjected to AI that hasn’t been carefully audited to ensure that it’s accurate, unbiased, and has been trained on sufficiently representative data sets; your freedom from pervasive or discriminatory surveillance and monitoring in your home, community, and workplace; and your right to meaningful recourse if the use of an algorithm harms you.
ICYMI: WIRED (Opinion): Americans Need a Bill of Rights for an AI-Powered World | OSTP | The White House
Over the next two years, prize competitions, challenges, crowdsourcing, and citizen science will play a key role in renewing and rebuilding relationships with diverse communities. They catalyze the reimagining of how federal agencies drive innovation, and are vehicles to center public participation in science, equity, inclusive knowledge production, and environmental justice. They are a powerful tool to advance President Biden’s mandate that all of America can fully participate in, contribute to, and benefit from science and technology.
White House Office of Science & Technology Policy Releases Fiscal Year 2019-20 Federal Prize and Citizen Science Authority Report | OSTP | The White House
only in the bold attempt.
Quit Your Job
we turned away from the uncertain leaps of faith of collective struggle after fatal ends that would have demanded us to truly live.
Quit Your Job
But the combination of leisurely surplus, mortal intensity, and demand for novel virtue is where you will find life at its healthiest and highest. It is where we will find the most important destinies.
Quit Your Job
If all you end up doing is nursing the money, without ever exercising the authority to decide on which future it shall be spent, it might as well be someone else’s.
Quit Your Job
chasing hunches and interesting problems without narrow material and objective constraints
Quit Your Job
we need an active leisure class in society
Quit Your Job
you have to start by chasing merely interesting novelty in an open-ended way.
Quit Your Job
how to find treasure in complex search spaces: The best search strategies for complex problems like life generally don’t seek out particular homogeneous objectives, but interesting novelty. The search space is too complicated and unknown for linear objective-chasing to work. Biological evolution, in practice, works through a diversity of niches which it explores in parallel to find unpredictable advances.
Quit Your Job
You have to let your life go fallow sometimes, like a crop rotation giving the land time to bring forth new fertility.
Quit Your Job
except it creates its Queries matrix from the layer below it, and takes the Keys and Values matrix from the output of the encoder stack.
The Illustrated Transformer
the only meaning to be found in life is the people in it, and so the solution is to be present every moment possible.
Everything Everywhere All At Once's Real Meaning Explained
because there is no inherent meaning, all things and moments are equally meaningful
Everything Everywhere All At Once's Real Meaning Explained
Software (1.0) is eating the world, and now AI (Software 2.0) is eating software.
Software 2.0. I sometimes see people refer to neural… | by Andrej Karpathy | Medium
solutions that ease everyday burdens for the American people, spark new jobs and opportunities, and restore American leadership on the world stage.
A Letter to Dr. Eric S. Lander, the President’s Science Advisor and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy | OSTP | The White House
How can we reimagine and transform STEM education, empowering teachers and deploying technology to enhance the educational experience? How can we ensure the United States will remain a magnet for the best and brightest minds throughout the world?
A Letter to Dr. Eric S. Lander, the President’s Science Advisor and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy | OSTP | The White House
Technologies and industries have risen and fallen, and the emergence of the digital arena has redefined the ways we innovate, communicate, and experience the world. And the nature of discovery itself has changed by leaps and bounds—reaching celestial heights, and microscopic complexities, that were unimaginable not so long ago.
A Letter to Dr. Eric S. Lander, the President’s Science Advisor and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy | OSTP | The White House
Economist Alfred O. Hirschman describes two options when faced with a bad situation, from a job you don’t like to a flailing relationship: voice your concerns and attempt to fix the situation, or exit and start from scratch.
It's Time to Govern - Letters to a Young Technologist
One tool to address this concern might be the modular model proposed by former U.S. FCC Commissioner Susan Ness and Chris Riley. Following that approach, lawmakers might select some standardized legal language or requirements for consistency across borders, while adopting their own rules where there are grounds for national divergence.
The EU’s new Digital Services Act and the Rest of the World – Verfassungsblog
Lawmakers around the world are champing at the bit to enact their own new platform regulations. My suggestion to them would be to wait a few years before enacting laws that look like the DSA. There is plenty of other regulatory work to be done in the meantime. The U.S., for example, is in dire need of a real federal privacy law.
The EU’s new Digital Services Act and the Rest of the World – Verfassungsblog
Investors and entrepreneurs around the world will factor in the now-substantial compliance costs that come with attracting EU users before they even consider launching new platform businesses.
The EU’s new Digital Services Act and the Rest of the World – Verfassungsblog
As I discussed in a previous post, it is not clear that requiring platforms with just a few hundred employees to build out detailed and cumbersome new content moderation, “due process”, and transparency capabilities will have upsides sufficient to justify the barriers to market entry these burdens will create.
The EU’s new Digital Services Act and the Rest of the World – Verfassungsblog
The resulting standards have been publicly criticized by civil society groups for bypassing democratic processes and forfeiting users’ fundamental rights. Whatever we think of the current set of regulators and platform representatives who will negotiate comparable new agreements under the DSA, we should be wary of granting too much discretion and power over fundamental rights to their successors.
The EU’s new Digital Services Act and the Rest of the World – Verfassungsblog
platforms’ more clearly articulated speech policies under Article 14 and better explanations of algorithms under Articles 27 and 38 will improve understanding both inside and outside the EU.
The EU’s new Digital Services Act and the Rest of the World – Verfassungsblog
Yet the status quo of tree planting efforts, haunted by the demons of relentless quantification and hopeless romanticism, cannot stand.
Kernel | Trees Won’t Save Us
Yet that very same romanticism can cloud our judgments, doing inadvertent harm to ecosystems and the people who live among them.
Kernel | Trees Won’t Save Us
MrBeast and Donald Trump (and their fans) did not endorse mass afforestation on the strength of exquisitely error-tested scientific models; a rigorous fisking of those models will not dislodge them from their beliefs.
Kernel | Trees Won’t Save Us
wave of mass tree planting initiatives is not that there are scams run off it but that the core of its appeal is that it feels almost scam-like
Kernel | Trees Won’t Save Us
It’s no surprise that so many of the most prominent backers of mass afforestation are arch-capitalists — masters of the optimization games of capital and self-image that pervade the modern economy. To a Bezos, a Benioff, or even a MrBeast, tree starts have become yet another number to coax upwards divorced from context, no different from orders shipped, monthly users, or subscribers.
Kernel | Trees Won’t Save Us
It is these networks precisely that help determine the success of a stand of trees. Connections between trees of different ages, as well as the mycorrhizal linkages between tree roots and fungal networks, provide nutrients and even some forms of information sharing, allowing for the development of greater resilience and longevity within forest systems.
Kernel | Trees Won’t Save Us
The soil, and the decompositional respiration processes at constant work within it, contribute nearly as much carbon dioxide — if not more — to atmospheric concentrations as photosynthesis takes away, according to decades’ worth of emissions studies.
Kernel | Trees Won’t Save Us
faith in the potency of trees (and especially genetically engineered super-trees) as climate sinks
Kernel | Trees Won’t Save Us
In order to reduce the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere to safe, pre-industrial levels and forestall catastrophic global warming, we as a species needed to plant a trillion trees and harness their natural capacity for carbon sequestration. It was, in the words of the paper’s abstract, “our most effective climate change solution to date.”
Kernel | Trees Won’t Save Us
As former U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright puts it, “citizens are speaking to their governments using 21st century technologies, governments are listening on 20th century technology and providing 19th century solutions.”
Rethinking technology policy and governance for the 21st Century
Most importantly, values such as fairness, inclusiveness, and accountability need to be consciously and carefully built into both our governance systems and the technologies themselves to ensure that their direct risks to users and negative externalities to others are well managed.
Rethinking technology policy and governance for the 21st Century
structural shifts in the sources and wielders of economic, social and political power—and the urgent threats that accompany such changes—suggests a need for new forms of regulation and governance that ensure common social values survive and thrive.
Rethinking technology policy and governance for the 21st Century
Those incentives aren’t in place yet. Current tax policies favor companies that install machines instead of hiring workers, Spence explains. “If you shifted the tax system so it was less favorable to capital and more favorable to employing people, you’d probably get more focus on people and maybe more focus on augmentation as well,” he says.
A Human-Centered Approach to the AI Revolution
A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing.
The Need to Read
The reason it would matter is that writing is not just a way to convey ideas, but also a way to have them.
The Need to Read
Reading about x doesn't just teach you about x; it also teaches you how to write.
The Need to Read
Ultimately, finding a pursuit that can sustain that illusion of alpha is all we can ask for in a life’s work.
The Trouble with Optionality | Opinion | The Harvard Crimson
one never even knows if one has attained alpha
The Trouble with Optionality | Opinion | The Harvard Crimson
it is very hard to attain in a sustainable way and the only path to alpha is hard work and a disciplined dedication to a core set of beliefs.
The Trouble with Optionality | Opinion | The Harvard Crimson
By emphasizing optionality, these students ignore the most important life lesson from finance: the pursuit of alpha. Alpha is the macho finance shorthand for an exemplary life. It is the excess return earned beyond the return required given risks assumed. It is finance nirvana.
The Trouble with Optionality | Opinion | The Harvard Crimson
While the serial option and lottery ticket buyers seem like different creatures, they are, in fact, close cousins. Both types postpone their dreams and undertake choices that they think will enable their dreams. But they fail to understand that all of these intervening choices will change them fundamentally—and they are, in fact, the sum total of those choices.
The Trouble with Optionality | Opinion | The Harvard Crimson