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Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
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8 Jan, 4 tweets, 2 min read
Maybe Twitter should alert it's users that some of the claims in this tweet are disputed.
I have emailed Twitter to ask whether the tweet violates Twitter's rule against hateful conduct. Image
Email from Twitter spokesperson: "This Tweet is not in violation of our policies." Cc: @jbarro Image
My story on this arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…

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Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
19 Dec 20
There's an under-appreciated interaction between macroeconomics and manufacturing economics when it comes to renewable energy policy.
A basic factor driving progress in renewable energy is the learning rate: the more of something (batteries, solar panels, windmills) you make, the cheaper it gets.
In the early years, this was the policy rationale for heavily subsidizing green energy technology heavily even though it didn't otherwise pass a basic cost/benefit calculation.
Read 12 tweets
Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
7 Dec 20
Waymo is in a weird place right now. They're now operating an honest-to-goodness commercial driverless taxi service. No safety drivers. No rider non-disclosure agreements. A pretty big service area (~50 square miles). But it's growing very very slowly. arstechnica.com/cars/2020/12/t…
Three years ago, I thought that if Waymo "solved" the self-driving problem first, as seemed likely, its big challenge would be scaling up quickly enough to grab territory before other companies came to market. I was wrong. arstechnica.com/cars/2017/10/w…
Waymo has driverless cars that can operating in most situations in the Phoenix suburbs. But for some reason they don't seem to be trying very hard to scale up. They haven't provided a clear answer about why not.
Read 14 tweets
Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
29 Nov 20
The fact that three different companies have apparently made COVID vaccines in ~8 months makes me wonder if there's room to be a lot more ambitious about other technology projects. Like maybe we should follow the UK and ban internal combustion engines in 2030.
A lot of corporate decision-making is driven by risk aversion about future market conditions. What if your car company goes 100 percent electric and it turns out customers don't want electric cars? When that uncertainty is removed an industry can move pretty fast.
The de facto US ban on incandescent light bulbs a decade seems like an under-appreciated model. It seems to have significantly accelerated light bulb technology, and the transition happened so smoothly that most consumers barely noticed.
Read 4 tweets
Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
27 Nov 20
Robert Caro's first LBJ biography includes a passage that explains how rural electrification transformed the lives of farm families, especially women. It makes a powerful case for Robert Gordon's thesis that innovations of the last 50 years pale in comparison to what came before.
The arrival of electrification relieved farm families of several categories of back-breaking labor: washing clothes by hand, milking cows by hand, canning, hauling wood to (and tending) woodstoves. Refrigeration drastically reduced milk spoilage. Plus of course electric lighting.
Big-screen TVs and smartphones are nice but they just aren't transformational the way washing machines and electric lights were to our great grandparents.
Read 5 tweets
Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
25 Nov 20
Nobody refers to Twitter as a "micro-blogging" platform any more but I think it's under-appreciated how much Twitter today fills the same niche that early blogging did.
A lot of early blog posts block-quoted a paragraph of text and then offered 1-3 paragraphs of analysis. Now we screenshot a paragraph from an article and offer 1-3 tweets of analysis.
Early bloggers spent a lot of time responding to other bloggers. Bloggers today (especially professionals) don't do that much because they're trying to maximize the readership of each post. Instead, we do short, blog-style responses here on Twitter.
Read 4 tweets
Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
19 Nov 20
Nvidia has an amazing new technology that essentially uses deepfake AI technology to reduce the bandwidth needs of video calling by 10x. Full explanation of how it works here: arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/1…
The software sends a single frame of video. Then for subsequent frames it just sends data on the positions of the subject's eyes, nose, mouth, etc—much less data than a whole frame. The receiving computer then uses a neural network to re-create the subject's face.
Our comments have a lot of hand-wringing about how this "doesn't show reality," but I think this is based on a philosophically untenable conception of reality. A conventional video isn't "reality" it's a pixel-by-pixel approximation of reality. Even more so with compression.
Read 5 tweets

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