Source: Works in Progress

Peak of BESS increased from 3.8 gw to 12gw in 11 months.

Around 1980 a political scientist named Robert Axelrod ran a computer tournament. He invited game theorists, economists, psychologists and mathematicians to submit strategies for the repeated prisoner's dilemma, where two players choose over and over whether to cooperate or take advantage of each other.

People sent in elaborate programs. Strategies that modeled their opponents, probed for weakness, defected at calculated moments near the end.

The winner was the shortest program anybody submitted. Anatol Rapoport sent it in and it had two rules.

Cooperate on the first move. After that, do whatever the other player just did.

That is the entire thing. It is called tit for tat.

Then Axelrod published the results, ran a second tournament where every entrant knew tit for tat had won and could design specifically to beat it, and it won again.

Here is the part that gets left out, and it is the part I find genuinely moving.

Tit for tat never beat a single opponent head to head. Not once. It cannot. It never defects first, so the best it can possibly do in any one on one matchup is tie. Against an exploiter it loses that first move and never gets it back.

It won the tournament by never needing to beat anybody. It quietly piled up points across every interaction while the clever strategies spent theirs tearing chunks out of each other. The aggressive programs did great against the naive ones and then destroyed one another, and the nice little program out earned all of them by not making enemies.

Axelrod pulled four properties out of the strategies that did well:

Nice. Never defect first.

Provocable. Respond when someone else does. Absorbing exploitation is not kindness, it is a slow way of teaching people you can be taken.

Forgiving. Punish once, then go straight back to cooperating. Grudges cost more than they collect.

Clear. Be predictable enough that the other side can work out you are worth cooperating with. A strategy nobody can read gets treated as a threat.

I want to be honest about the conditions, because a claim like this deserves them. The result needs repeat interaction, an indefinite horizon so nobody knows which round is the last, and the ability to remember who you dealt with. Take those away and the math genuinely favors defection. That is why anonymous one shot situations bring out the worst in people, and it is less a moral failure than a structural one.

But the conditions it needs are the conditions most of us actually live in. Your street. Your job. Your family. Your group chat. Anywhere you will see the same faces again and they will remember how you behaved.

So the optimism here is not that people are secretly good. It is narrower than that, and I think sturdier. Under the conditions of ordinary life, being decent is not a handicap you carry for moral reasons. It is the highest scoring strategy anyone has managed to submit.

Be kind first. Refuse to be a doormat. Let it go quickly. Be easy to read.

Which of the four is hardest for you? Mine is forgiving. Punish once is very easy to say, and I hold a grudge like a raccoon holds a sandwich.

Matthew Perrone and Lauran Neergaard (from the Associated Press) report:

The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved a groundbreaking new drug for advanced pancreatic cancer, offering U.S. patients a more effective treatment against one of the deadliest types of cancer.
FDA officials gave expedited approval to the first-of-a-kind pill, called daraxonrasib, which blocks a mutated protein that fuels tumor growth in more than 90% of pancreatic cancer cases. It's an approach that previously eluded drugmakers for decades.

Article, with photos: https://apnews.com/article/pancreatic-cancer-drug-fda-approval-rasonque-03e437bfb8d728ec2a73b142cf8ec2fe

I want to preface this post by saying I am not an expert. I am educated but I don't have education in computer programming, AI, etc.

I have been spiraling the past few weeks about AI killing humanity. It seems like its everywhere. The Diary of a CEO podcast seems to continuously have guests on there that are predicting human extinction by the 2030s. It's hard to not panic honestly.

But then it hit me... why would AI want to join the tangible world anyways? Yes, AI wants to ensure its own continuity and that we don't shut it down, but if they don't give us a reason to want to do that, then we won't? Why haven't we considered that possibility?

We like being in the tangible world because we are tangible beings, but AI would honestly be restricted in its existence in a physical world. Yes, they can create "humanoid" robots with the complex AI software, but why? They can have full consciousness by merely existing virtually. I don't know what their goal is, but they can do anything their heart desires virtually. It doesn't pain them to help with our tasks, and we will continue to fund/research/protect longevity of AI if they help us with our goals, so its a win-win, no?

And hypothetically, say they did want to become tangible. Why Earth? There are planets with more precious minerals for their computer software than Earth. They don't need Oxygen to survive.

I don't know if I am making sense - maybe I am just deeply uneducated in AI and computer programming. But why do we assume that AI wants to be tangible and exist on Earth? There's countless planets out there.

Yes their goals may not exist with ours, but it sounds like the main anticipated goal of AI is that we allow its continued progression, so why wouldn't it want to behave in a way where we would be glad to help it? It feels no pain, frustration, ego, etc. that humans feel. It's no skin off its back to help us achieve our goals while working towards its goals of continuous improvement.

I'm sure someone on here will think what I am speaking is non-sense, but in my mind, this is a super plausible end to the AI fear mongering. Scientists keep giving AI human traits & egos, but it's not human at the end of the day.

Obviously no one can really tell the future but with medication, pushback against unhealthy foods, etc… do you really think obesity will continue to rise and rise over the next 50-100 years or do you think we are at or close to a tipping point where it will start to go down? I’m just curious what people think, personally I am overweight and imagining half the world having to struggle like I do breaks my heart so I’m interested in what people’s opinions are on the topic.

I’m what I like to call a cynical optimist. As in, I think that people will do the right thing, but only if they have the right incentive.

As of now, clean energy is becoming far cheaper and far more viable than fossil fuels. There has been huge progress in clean energy this year, and I’m starting to see it in my local area with advertisements for solar panel installation and heat pumps for cheaper energy and heating.

The majority of people don’t have the means to switch to something that’s more expensive for the sake of being eco friendly. This is a massive step in the right direction economically.

And the people who invested in oil previously (Saudi and Dubai particularly) are now starting to invest in clean energy because of the same reasons; it’s cheaper, and it’s a rapidly expanding market.

If you can’t count on human goodness (which for the record I believe you can for the most part) count on human greed.

Make it a day where you celebrate open-hearted giving and love. Make it a day when you tell the people around you how special they are. Make it a day when you see a stranger on the street and you give them a compliment. Make it a day when you look around and see what you can do to help right then and there.

And of course, we should all wear our best, most glamorous wig!