Podcast appearances and mentions of simon grimm

In this conversation, Simon Grimm and Matt Palmer discuss the capabilities and evolution of Replit, a platform that allows developers to quickly turn ideas into applications using AI tools. They explore the features of Replit, including its ability to create full stack applications, the integration of AI, and the unique advantages it offers compared to other development tools. The discussion also touches on the possibilities and limitations of using Replit for various types of projects. In this conversation, Simon and Matt discuss the challenges of managing Python environments and the advantages of using Replit for development. They explore how developers can integrate various tools into their workflows, the benefits of building with AI for rapid prototyping, and the importance of effective prompt engineering. The discussion also touches on the future collaboration between Replit and Expo, highlighting the evolving landscape of software development.Learn React Native - https://galaxies.devMatt PalmerMatt leads developer relations and product marketing at Replit, creating everything from tutorials to technical content. He got his start in data, working as a product analyst at AllTrails before moving to data engineering and eventually DevRel. He's worked on content with companies like LinkedIn, O'Reilly Media, xAI and Y Combinator. Outside of work, you can find him lifting weights or exploring the outdoors. Matt currently lives in San Francisco, but hails from Asheville, North Carolina.https://x.com/mattppalhttps://youtube.com/@mattpalmerhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-palmer/https://mattpalmer.io/LinksReplit: https://replit.com/Replit X: https://x.com/replitReplit YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@replitReplit Expo / React Native template: https://replit.com/@replit/ExpoReplit Sign-up:  https://replit.comExpo tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLto9KpJAqHMRuHwQ9OUjkVgZ69efpvslMExpo Blog: https://expo.dev/blog/from-idea-to-app-with-replit-and-expoTakeawaysReplit allows developers to create applications quickly and efficiently.AI integration in Replit enhances the development process.The platform supports multiple programming languages, primarily JavaScript and Python.Replit's workspace is designed for ease of use, requiring no installations.Users can deploy applications with a single click.Replit is evolving rapidly with advancements in AI technology.The platform is suitable for both beginners and experienced developers.Replit's unique features set it apart from other development tools.The community around Replit is growing, with increasing interest and usage.Building complex applications still requires significant effort and planning.  Python environments can be cumbersome for developers.Replit excels in managing single directory projects.AI can significantly speed up the prototyping process.Disposable software allows for quick iterations and testing.Effective prompt engineering can enhance AI outputs.Developers should focus on minimum viable prompts for efficiency.Replit's integration with Expo is a promising development.AI tools can help in learning and understanding code better.Collaboration between tools can streamline the development process.Keeping up with new tools and technologies is essential for developers.

In this conversation, Simon Grimm interviews Dohyun Kim, known as YourAverageTechBro, about his journey as an app developer and content creator. They discuss the challenges and successes in building apps, the importance of marketing, and the technologies used in app development, including React Native, Supabase, and AI tools. Dohyun shares insights on his most successful app, Montee, and the strategies behind its development and marketing, as well as the lessons learned from previous projects. In this conversation, Dohyun discusses the development of his app, Montee, focusing on the use of Next.js and Supabase for differentiation and backend management. He shares insights on API security, handling costs, and user management strategies. The importance of action bias in development is emphasized, along with ideation and keyword research strategies. The discussion also covers social media marketing tactics and preferences between web and mobile app development.Learn React Native - https://galaxies.devDohyun KimYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@YourAverageTechBroTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@youraveragetechbroInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/youraveragetechbroX: https://x.com/youravgtechbroLinksMontee: https://www.montee.aiPerfect Interview: https://www.perfectinterview.aiGemini: https://ai.google.dev/TakeawaysDohyun prefers using technologies that allow for rapid development and shipping.He believes in copying successful ideas rather than focusing on originality.Montee, his AI meeting recorder app, achieved $1,500 in monthly recurring revenue shortly after launch.Dohyun discusses the challenges of app growth and the impact of churn on revenue.He highlights the importance of effective marketing strategies for app success.Dohyun prefers Supabase over Firebase for its relational database capabilities and better documentation.He shares insights on the technology stack used for PerfectInterview.ai, including Next.js and Gemini.Dohyun believes that app growth is often a series of step functions rather than exponential growth. Copy first and differentiate second is a key strategy.API keys should never be exposed in client-side code.User requests should always be traceable to prevent abuse.Action bias is crucial for shipping apps.Keyword research is not the only way to ideate apps.Social media marketing can drive app visibility.Instagram is currently more explosive for growth than TikTok.Web apps allow for faster updates and cash flow management.Developers should focus on building value-adding features.It's important to distinguish between fun projects and income-generating apps.

In this episode of Rocket Ship, Simon Grimm interviews Jack Herrington, a prominent figure in the React Native and Next.js communities. They discuss the challenges and changes in the React Native ecosystem, and the exciting developments around Module Federation and React Server Components (RSCs). Jack shares his experiences with React Native, the benefits of using Expo, and the performance gains associated with RSCs. The conversation also touches on the skepticism surrounding new technologies and the gradual adoption within the industry. In this conversation, Simon and Jack discuss the evolving landscape of React Server Components (RSCs), the impact of AI on app customization, and the rise of AI-driven development tools. They explore the integration of ShadCN, the future of universal apps, and compare RSCs with other frameworks like Svelte and Solid. The discussion highlights the challenges and innovations in the development community, particularly in relation to state management and the potential for AI to transform user experiences. They also delve into the ongoing debate between React Native and Flutter, highlight new features in React 19, and explore the potential of building custom Chrome extensions.Learn React Native - https://galaxies.devJack HerringtonX: https://x.com/jherrYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@jherrGithub: https://github.com/jherrLinksFrontend Fire Podcast: https://front-end-fire.com/Pro Next.js Course: https://www.pronextjs.dev/Zephyr: https://www.zephyr-cloud.io/TakeawaysModule Federation allows for remote module updates without app store submissions.RSCs can improve performance by reducing client-side rendering time.The adoption of RSCs in the industry is slow due to existing codebases and frameworks.Jack's journey with React Native has been cyclical, returning to it multiple times.Performance gains with RSCs can be significant, especially on slower devices.Skepticism exists around new technologies like RSCs, impacting their adoption.Incremental adoption paths for frameworks can ease transitions for large companies. RSCs are still in development and face challenges.AI can significantly enhance app customization for users.Cursor is a popular AI-driven development tool that many developers prefer.ShadCN offers exciting possibilities for UI infrastructure.The concept of universal apps is becoming more feasible.The development landscape is shifting towards AI integration.Frameworks like Quick handle hydration differently than React.Solid and Svelte have similar functionalities to RSCs.AI models require extensive code examples for effective training.Zustand is gaining popularity in state management. Zustand has gained popularity as a state management library.Atomic state management allows for automatic updates based on dependencies.Choosing the right state management tool depends on the application's needs.React 19 introduces significant changes, especially with RSCs.Building custom Chrome extensions can enhance productivity and provide unique solutions.The debate between React Native and Flutter continues with no clear winner.Using the simplest state management solution is often the best approach.Understanding the context of your application is crucial for state management decisions.

In this episode, Simon Grimm welcomes Evan Bacon, the manager of DevTools at Expo, to discuss the latest developments in Expo, including the Expo Router, Expo Web, and the new React Server Components. Evan shares insights on the adoption of Expo Router, the future of Expo Web, and the exciting potential of DOM components. The conversation highlights the challenges and innovations in building universal apps and the importance of making app development accessible to all. In this conversation, Simon and Evan Bacon delve into the evolving landscape of app development with a focus on Expo, React Native, and the introduction of new technologies like RSC and EAS hosting. They discuss the challenges developers face with App Store reviews, the skepticism surrounding new features, and the future of server components. The conversation also highlights the potential of Expo targets for Apple and the exciting possibilities of building widgets and live activities. As they look ahead, they express optimism about the advancements in Expo and the broader React Native ecosystem.Learn React Native - https://galaxies.devEvan BaconTwitter: https://twitter.com/BaconbrixGithub: https://github.com/evanbaconBlog: https://evanbacon.dev/LinksRSC Code Example App: https://github.com/EvanBacon/expo-rsc-moviesExpo RSC: https://docs.expo.dev/guides/server-components/EAS Hosting: https://expo.dev/easTakeawaysExpo Router has been well received in the React Native community.The goal of Expo Router is to enable server-driven UI for developers.Expo Web has improved significantly with features like tree shaking and API routes..Expo Router version 4 is set to finalize the core features of the router.Expo Web is being actively used in new projects at Expo.DOM components allow for easier migration from web to native apps.React Server Components are currently in developer preview, with exciting potential.Skepticism towards new technologies is common but can change over time.RSC allows for running JavaScript not currently on the client.OTA updates are useful for caching and background fetching.EAS hosting provides a flexible solution for deploying apps.Expo targets for Apple enable the creation of various extensions.Widgets can communicate with apps via NSUser defaults.Real-time updates in widgets require clever workarounds.Expo's future includes more components and improved UI design.The integration of AI tools will enhance the development experience.

In this conversation, Simon Grimm interviews Ben Awad, a successful YouTuber and co-founder of the app Voidpet. They discuss Ben's journey from content creation to app development, the challenges and successes he faced, and the technical aspects of building his applications. The conversation also touches on the importance of user experience, monetization strategies, and the evolution of Ben's career in the tech industry. In this conversation, Ben Awad discusses his experiences and insights into React Native, game development, and the integration of AI tools in programming. He shares his journey from Android development to embracing React Native, the challenges of real-time gaming, and the evolution of the developer experience. Ben also touches on animation techniques in game development, his literary interests, and the future of his projects, including Voidpet and the Voidlog series.Learn React Native - https://galaxies.devBen AwadBen X: https://x.com/benawadBen YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bawadBen Github: https://github.com/benawadLinksVoidpet: https://voidpet.comVoidpet garden: https://voidpet.com/o/gardenHands of Greed book: https://handsofgreed.comTakeawaysBen Awad transitioned from YouTube content creation to app development.Voidpet gained popularity on TikTok before any code was written.He has learned from both successful and failed projects.The Voidpet app focuses on mental health themes.Ben's cooking app, Saffron, is still active and successful.He emphasizes the importance of user experience in app development.Ben uses a simple tech stack for his apps to avoid over-engineering.He believes that offline capabilities in apps are not always necessary.Ben prefers native styling in React Native over other styles.A time API is essential for validating timestamps in games.Ben's early experiences with Android development were frustrating.React Native's developer experience has significantly improved over the years.Real-time gaming in React Native presents unique challenges.Animation techniques are crucial for enhancing game visuals.Choosing React Native for game development was a strategic decision.AI tools have become integral to Ben's coding workflow.

In this conversation, Simon Grimm interviews Samuel Newman, a developer at Bluesky, discussing his journey from university to app development, the intricacies of the Bluesky app and its underlying AT protocol, and the challenges and solutions encountered in enhancing user experience with React Native. They explore the role of Expo in app development, the importance of open-source contributions, and the future of Bluesky as it aims for significant user growth.Learn React Native - https://galaxies.devSamuel NewmanSamuel Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/samuel.bsky.teamSamuel X: https://x.com/mozziusSamuel personal: https://samuel.felixnewman.com/Samuel Github: https://github.com/mozziusLinksBluesky: https://bsky.app/AT Protocol: https://atproto.com/AT Proto Browser: https://atproto-browser.vercel.app/TakeawaysSamuel built a client for Bluesky before joining the team.Bluesky is a microblogging app built on the AT protocol.The AT protocol allows users to control their own data.The Bluesky app reached number one on the app store.Samuel's team faced numerous bugs in the app's development.They switched to a native bottom sheet for better performance.React Native requires a different mindset for developers.The AT protocol enables developers to build their own backends.Users genuinely own their data with the AD protocol.

In this conversation, Simon Grimm interviews Jamon Holmgren, co-founder of Infinite Red, discussing the evolution and advantages of React Native in mobile app development. They explore the early adoption of React Native, its comparison with Flutter, the job market for developers, and the importance of open source contributions in the tech industry. Jamon shares insights from his extensive coding experience and the strategic decisions that led Infinite Red to focus on React Native. They delve into the Ignite boilerplate for React Native development, the importance of choosing the right tech stack, and the utility of Reactotron as a developer tool.The discussion also touches on hiring trends in the React Native space, emphasizing the need for cultural fit and the unique hiring process at Infinite Red. In this conversation, Jamon and Simon discuss the importance of building a lasting company culture, essential skills for React Native developers, the significance of self-evaluation and continuous learning, effective networking and job searching strategies in tech, the future of React Native in the context of AI, and the trend towards universal applications while maintaining user experience.Learn React Native - https://galaxies.devJamon HolmgrenJamon X: https://x.com/jamonholmgrenJamon personal: https://jamon.dev/Jamon LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamonholmgren/Jamon Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/jamon.devLinksInfinite Red: https://infinite.red/React Native Radio: https://reactnativeradio.com/Ignite: https://github.com/infinitered/igniteReactotron: https://github.com/infinitered/reactotronTakeawaysInfinite Red was founded through collaboration in open source.React Native was chosen for its cross-platform capabilities.React Native allows for significant code reuse, often exceeding expectations.The community around React Native is a major strength.Open source contributions can accelerate product development.Companies are increasingly investing in open source for strategic benefits.The job market favors React Native developers due to its widespread use.Ignite serves as a valuable resource for React Native developers.Ignite serves as a reliable boilerplate for React Native projects.Choosing the right tech stack can simplify development processes.Reactotron offers unique features that enhance the debugging experience.The UI of Reactotron needs improvement to appeal to developers.Hiring at Infinite Red focuses on cultural fit and seniority.Self-evaluation during the hiring process is crucial for accurate assessment.The job market for React Native developers is becoming more competitive.  Building a company culture that encourages long-term relationships is crucial.Investing in employees and understanding their needs fosters loyalty.React Native developers should focus on performance and state management skills.Self-evaluation helps identify areas for improvement and training needs.Networking is essential for job searching in tech.Active engagement on social media can enhance job prospects.AI will significantly impact the future of software development.Universal applications should prioritize user experience over uniformity.Convergence of tools is beneficial, but UI patterns must remain platform-specific.Continuous learning and adaptation are key to thriving in tech.

In this conversation, Simon Grimm interviews Kim Chouard, a developer and educator, about his journey in coding, the challenges of building a multiplatform music game using React Native, and the innovative app Odisei Play that aims to help users learn to play wind instruments. Kim shares insights on the creative aspects of coding, the evolution of React Native, and the technology stack behind Odisei Play, including audio handling and pitch recognition. The discussion highlights the importance of education, creativity, and community in the tech space. In this conversation, Kim Chouard discusses the evolving landscape of development tools, particularly focusing on AI tools and their implications for new developers. He shares insights on the Expo audio package and the challenges faced in audio synchronization within applications. The discussion also delves into the use of Skia for performance optimization in React Native applications, highlighting its capabilities and the need for better documentation. Finally, Kim emphasizes the importance of a web-first approach in React Native development, advocating for a unified community that leverages the strengths of both web and mobile development.Learn React Native - https://galaxies.devKim ChouardKim X: https://x.com/KimChouardKim personal: https://chouard.kim/Kim LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimchouard/LinksOdisei Music's website (creator of Odisei Play): https://odiseimusic.com/Kim AppJS Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGvhniTxpu4&ab_channel=SoftwareMansionExpo AV: https://docs.expo.dev/versions/latest/sdk/av/Chromatic: https://www.chromatic.com/Storybook: https://storybook.js.org/TakeawaysKim's mission is to leverage games for alternative education.Coding can be a creative process, not just technical.Building a music game requires precise timing and performance.React Native's rapid evolution presents both opportunities and challenges.Odisei Play aims to make learning wind instruments accessible and fun.The app combines elements of gamification and music education.Skia is crucial for the performance of the Odisei Play app.Bluetooth technology can be optimized for real-time music applications.AI tools like Cursor can enhance coding efficiency.Community support is vital for navigating the fast-paced tech landscape. AI tools can accelerate development but may lead to inconsistencies.Expo AV is the only production-ready audio library available now, although it has some limitationNew opportunities of more robust alternatives for audio handling are on the horizon (expo-audio, react-native audio, etc.)Audio synchronization remains a significant challenge in app development.Skia provides a powerful canvas for creating high-performance applications.The integration of web technologies can enhance React Native development.Community collaboration is essential for overcoming development hurdles.Real-time audio recognition is complex and requires advanced algorithms.A web-first approach can simplify the development process for React Native.The React Native community is passionate and supportive.Future advancements in 3D and game development are on the horizon.

In this conversation, Simon Grimm and Britta Evans-Fenton discuss the importance of accessibility in React Native and mobile development. Britta shares her personal journey into accessibility, motivated by her grandmother's experience with macular degeneration. They explore the definition of accessibility, the consequences of neglecting it, and the various tools and features available to enhance accessibility in mobile applications. The discussion emphasizes the need for inclusivity in technology and the potential legal implications of failing to comply with accessibility standards. In this conversation, Simon and Britta Evans-Fenton delve into the complexities of accessibility in React Native applications. They discuss the current state of accessibility resources, practical steps developers can take to improve accessibility in their apps, and the importance of community awareness. Britta emphasizes the need for a mindset shift among developers to prioritize accessibility, considering the growing number of users who will require these features in the future. The conversation also touches on potential improvements for accessibility tools and APIs in React Native.Learn React Native - https://galaxies.devBritta Evans-FentonBritta X: https://x.com/13rittaBritta LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/britta-evans-fenton/LinksAccessibility Cheat Sheet: https://scanqr.to/5e270983Crafting an Inclusive Shopify Point of Sale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoFnQQj4g1AAccessibilityInfo API: https://reactnative.dev/docs/accessibilityinfoTakeawaysAccessibility is crucial for creating inclusive technology.Personal experiences can drive a passion for accessibility.Understanding accessibility benefits everyone, not just those with disabilities.The European Accessibility Act will impose fines for non-compliance.Companies can gain customers by prioritizing accessibility.Accessibility features include screen readers and voice control.There are various layers to accessibility beyond visual impairments.Developers should be aware of both iOS and Android accessibility nuances.Using accessibility tools can enhance user experience for all.Accessibility is about removing barriers for all users. There is a lack of resources on accessibility in React Native compared to web development.Many developers do not consider accessibility because they do not have disabilities themselves.Grouping components can significantly improve accessibility for users with screen readers.Accessibility labels and roles are crucial for making interactive elements understandable.Overloading elements with unnecessary labels can confuse users, especially those with partial vision.Testing apps manually can help identify accessibility issues.Keeping labels concise is essential for effective communication with screen readers.Building a community around accessibility awareness is vital for improvement.The aging population will increasingly require accessible technology.Developers should engage with local organizations to better understand accessibility needs.

In this conversation, Simon Grimm interviews Mariusz Stanisz, a React Native developer, about the complexities and challenges of Brownfield integration in mobile applications. Mariusz shares his experiences, insights, and the potential benefits of integrating React Native into existing native applications. The discussion covers the technical aspects of integration, communication between native and React Native apps, and the future of Brownfield integration in the React Native ecosystem.Learn React Native - https://galaxies.devMariusz StaniszMariusz X: https://x.com/staszekscp_Mariusz GitHub: https://github.com/staszekscpLinksMariusz AppJS Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOg29UnIMMA&ab_channel=SoftwareMansionReact Native Brownfield Docs: https://reactnative.dev/docs/integration-with-existing-appsReact Native Brownfield Tools: https://github.com/callstack/react-native-brownfieldTakeawaysBrownfield integration allows for gradual migration to React Native.Challenges arise from integrating into existing large native applications.Communication between native and React Native can be achieved through various methods.Brownfield integration is not widely used, making resources scarce.The integration process can speed up development significantly.Hot Reload works well in simple applications during integration.React Native's new architecture presents both opportunities and challenges.Documentation and community support for Brownfield integration need improvement.Testing and debugging can be more complex in Brownfield scenarios.

In this conversation, Simon Grimm interviews Oskar Franco about the new architecture in React Native. They discuss the current bridge concept, the need for a new architecture, and the three main components of the new architecture: Fabric, JSI, and CodeGen. They also talk about the challenges and benefits of migrating to the new architecture, the use of host objects, and how to create a new architecture-ready native module with JSI. In this conversation, Oscar Franco discusses different module systems in React Native, including Turbo Modules, Expo Modules, and Nitro Modules. He explains that Turbo Modules came with a new architecture and offer benefits such as code generation and lazy initialization. Expo Modules are easy to initialize but may have performance issues for certain use cases. Nitro Modules, are considered the fastest alternative. Oscar also talks about using Rust in React Native and the benefits it provides, such as memory safety and better tooling. He created the OP-SQLite library, which is claimed to be the fastest SQLite library for React Native.Learn React Native - https://galaxies.devOscar FrancoOscar X: https://x.com/ospfrancoOscar website: https://ospfranco.com/Oscar GitHub: https://github.com/ospfrancoOscar YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ospfrancoLinksAbout the New Architecture: https://reactnative.dev/docs/the-new-architecture/landing-pageReact Native Bridgeless Mode for Dummies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5HBIKAjZ4UReact Native Builder Bob: https://github.com/callstack/react-native-builder-bobOP-Sqlite: https://github.com/OP-Engineering/op-sqliteTakeawaysThe current bridge concept in React Native uses JSON serialization, which can become a bottleneck for performance.The new architecture in React Native includes Fabric, JSI, and CodeGen, which aim to improve performance and provide better interoperability between JavaScript and native code.Migrating to the new architecture can be challenging, especially for larger projects and dependencies that are not updated for the new architecture.The use of host objects allows for the creation of hybrid objects that have both native and JavaScript functionality.Creating a new architecture-ready native module with JSI can be facilitated by using tools like React Native Builder Bob.Turbo Modules offer benefits such as code generation and lazy initialization, but setting them up can be painful.Expo Modules are easy to initialize and portable, but they may have performance issues for certain use cases.Nitro Modules, developed by Marc Rousavy, are considered the fastest alternative.Rust is a memory-safe language with integrated tooling and is becoming popular for writing SDKs for React Native.OP-SQLite is a fast SQLite library for React Native that uses host objects for improved performance.

Here comes the moment we've all been waiting for: the first episode released under the new name! Callstack's podcast has changed from The React Native Show to React Universe On Air to reflect a broader scope of topics we want to discuss, spanning not only React Native, but also React and beyond. That's why we decided to kick off the refreshed brand with an episode that also sits at the intersection of both React and React Native ecosystems. And what better way to do this than to get together three podcasters:

In this conversation, Simon Grimm interviews Gant Laborde, CIO at Infinite Red, about his role, his sci-fi novel, and the React Native Paradox. Gant explores the reasons behind React Native's success and its consistency and care as key factors. They also touch on the competition between React Native and Flutter, and the challenges faced by Google in maintaining consistency and community support. In this conversation, Gant Laborde discusses the future of AI and its integration into mobile and web projects. He highlights the importance of understanding the business logic and using AI as a feature to enhance the user experience. Gant also explains ML Kit, a Google initiative that provides pre-trained models for image and text recognition, face detection, and more. He emphasizes the need for developers to explore and experiment with AI to discover innovative ways to improve their products. Gant encourages developers to think about how AI can add value and increase the quality of life for users.Learn React Native - https://galaxies.devGant LabordeGant X: https://x.com/GantLabordeGant website: https://gantlaborde.comGant GitHub: https://github.com/GantManLinksThe React Native Paradox (Chain React 2024): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jo2LjKJp0aA&list=PLFHvL21g9bk0XOO9XK6d6S9w1jBU6Dz_U&index=6React Native Ignite: Building an AI app: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivfXKYPS6Xw&list=PLSk21zn8fFZDMGB9UCnqz4WqLbnOgLnp5&index=3Infinite Red React Native ML Kit template: https://github.com/infinitered/react-native-mlkit Google ML Kit: https://developers.google.com/ml-kitTakeawaysAs CIO at Infinite Red, Gant's role is to drive innovation and explore new technologies for the company.The React Native Paradox refers to the success of React Native despite other technologies attempting to bring web technology to mobile.Consistency and care are key factors in the success of React Native.Flutter, while popular, faces challenges due to Google's history of discontinuing projects and lack of consistency.The community support and open-source nature of React Native contribute to its longevity and adoption.Google's focus on multiple technologies and lack of consistency can hinder the success of its projects.Long-term success in technology requires multi-generational thinking and community support. AI is becoming an integral part of mobile and web projects, and its integration should focus on enhancing the user experience and adding value to the product.ML Kit, a Google initiative, provides pre-trained models for various AI tasks such as image and text recognition, face detection, and more.Developers should explore and experiment with AI to discover innovative ways to improve their products and solve real-world problems.Understanding the business logic and the problem being solved is crucial for effectively integrating AI into projects.

In this conversation, Simon Grimm interviews Giovanni Laquidara, a developer advocate at Amazon, about TV app development with React Native. Giovanni shares his experience working with React Native at Amazon and explains how React Native can be used to develop TV apps. He also discusses the challenges and considerations when developing for TV, such as the 10-foot UI, navigation, and remote control interaction. Giovanni recommends using separate repositories for different TV platforms and emphasizes the importance of designing for readability and accessibility in TV apps. Building TV apps with React Native requires handling fragmentation, focus management, and performance considerations. Integration with TV remotes can be challenging due to different key mappings. Testing on various platforms is crucial. TV apps often focus on streaming media, but there are opportunities for educational, fitness, and gaming apps. The developer experience is improving, and AI services may be integrated into TV apps in the future.Learn React Native - https://galaxies.devGiovanni LaquidaraGiovanni LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/glaquidara/Giovanni Twitter: https://x.com/giolaqLinksGiovanni App.js talk: https://www.youtube.com/live/s0wn7qpBoB8?t=12161sBuild Expo apps for TV: https://docs.expo.dev/guides/building-for-tv/React Native tvOS Github: https://github.com/react-native-tvos/react-native-tvosIgniteTV template: https://github.com/react-native-tvos/IgniteTVTakeawaysReact Native can be used to develop TV apps for platforms like Android TV, Fire TV, and tvOS.Developing for TV requires considering the 10-foot UI, where users are typically three meters away from the screen.TV app navigation should be easy and seamless, with a focus on simplicity and avoiding complex interactions.Separate repositories are recommended for different TV platforms due to the fragmentation and differences in SDKs.Designing for readability and accessibility is crucial in TV app development. Building TV apps with React Native requires handling fragmentation, focus management, and performance considerations.Testing on various platforms is crucial for TV app development.TV apps often focus on streaming media, but there are opportunities for educational, fitness, and gaming apps.The developer experience for TV app development is improving.AI services may be integrated into TV apps in the future.Deployment to app stores follows similar processes as mobile apps.

Jerod sits down with React Native aficionado, Simon Grimm, to catch up on everyone's favorite native app platform & learn about Expo, which Simon thinks is the way forward for devs building with React Native.

Jerod sits down with React Native aficionado, Simon Grimm, to catch up on everyone's favorite native app platform & learn about Expo, which Simon thinks is the way forward for devs building with React Native.

In this conversation, Simon Grimm interviews Maximilian Schwarzmüller, a renowned online course creator, about his experience of creating courses and his vast knowledge of various technologies. They discuss the current state of JavaScript frameworks like Angular, React, and Vue, as well as emerging frameworks like Solid.js and Svelte. They also touch on the Node.js environment and the popularity of Express. The conversation then shifts to mobile app development, with a focus on Ionic and React Native. They explore the strengths and limitations of these frameworks and their relevance in the current market. The conversation explores the pros and cons of cross-platform development frameworks, including Ionic, React Native, and Flutter. They discuss their personal preferences and experiences with each framework, highlighting the advantages and limitations of each. They also touch on the future of cross-platform development and the importance of staying up to date with the latest technologies. The conversation concludes with tips for effective learning, emphasizing the importance of building projects and solving real-world problems.Learn React Native - https://galaxies.devMaximilian SchwarzmüllerMaximilian Twitter: https://twitter.com/maxedapps Maximilian YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@maximilian-schwarzmuellerMaximilian Podcast: https://maximilian-schwarzmueller.com/podcast/Udemy courses: https://www.udemy.com/user/academind/LinksAcademind: https://academind.com/coursesAcademind YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@academindTakeawaysThe JavaScript framework ecosystem is evolving, with established frameworks like React and Angular continuing to innovate and improve.State management is a key area of focus, with many frameworks adopting signals as a way to manage state more efficiently.There is a trend towards full stack development, where the boundaries between front-end and back-end become less clear.Express remains a popular choice for building APIs in the Node.js environment, despite the emergence of newer frameworks.Ionic and React Native are both viable options for mobile app development, with Ionic being more focused on web technologies and React Native providing a more native-like experience. Ionic, React Native, and Flutter are popular cross-platform development frameworks, each with its own advantages and limitations.Ionic is straightforward to work with and suitable for building less complex applications, but it may lack certain features and performance compared to React Native.React Native and Flutter offer the advantage of compiling code to native UI components or machine code, potentially resulting in better performance and a more integrated development experience.The choice between cross-platform and native development depends on the specific requirements of the project and the need for platform-specific features and performance.The future of cross-platform development looks promising, with ongoing advancements in frameworks like React Native and the emergence of new contenders like Tori.To learn effectively, it's important to build projects and solve real-world problems, rather than relying solely on tutorials and courses.

In this conversation, Simon Grimm interviews William Candillon, the creator of Can It Be Done in React Native, about React Native Skia. They discuss the basics of Skia, the benefits of using Skia in React Native, and the performance improvements in React Native Skia. They also talk about the connection between reanimated and React Native Skia, as well as practical examples of what can be done with React Native Skia. William shares the latest release of React Native Skia and provides resources for developers to get started with it.Learn React Native - https://galaxies.devWilliam CandillonWilliam Twitter: https://twitter.com/wcandillonWilliam YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@wcandillonWilliam Github: https://github.com/wcandillonLinksReact Native Skia: https://github.com/Shopify/react-native-skiaWill it Fly video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUbj_NxcgKg&ab_channel=WilliamCandillonDaehyeon Mun: https://twitter.com/DaehyeonMunEnzo Mangano: https://twitter.com/reactiive_Text rendering hates you: https://faultlore.com/blah/text-hates-you/TakeawaysReact Native Skia is a powerful library that brings the best of Skia to React Native, allowing developers to create high-performance animations and graphics.Skia is a 2D graphics library that is used by Flutter and other frameworks. It provides low-level APIs for drawing and rendering graphics.React Native Skia improves performance by bypassing the bridge between native and JavaScript threads, allowing for faster animation and rendering.The connection between reanimated and React Native Skia allows for advanced animations and interactions in React Native applications.Developers can get started with React Native Skia by checking out William Candela's tutorials and the official documentation.

In this episode, Simon Grimm interviews Kacper Kapuściak, a React Native open-source developer at Software Mansion. They explore the importance of microinteractions in app design and how to identify relevant microinteractions. Kacper shares insights on layout animations and the current state of web support for Gesture Handler and Reanimated. They conclude by discussing the future of these libraries, including upcoming features and improvements for Reanimated and the React Native IDE project.Learn React Native - https://galaxies.devKacper KapuściakKacper Twitter: https://twitter.com/kacperkapusciakKacper Github: https://github.com/kacperkapusciakTakeawaysTransitioning from the Animated API to Reanimated can provide more flexibility and better performance for animations in React Native.Microinteractions are small, subtle animations and interactions that enhance the user experience and make an app feel more polished.Layout animations are a powerful tool for animating the appearance and disappearance of components in React Native.Gesture Handler and Reanimated have good web support, allowing developers to create interactive and animated experiences across platforms.The future of Gesture Handler and Reanimated includes features like screen transitions and improvements in multi-threading capabilities. The React Native IDE is currently in a private beta testing phase and will be a VS Code plugin.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Map of the biosecurity landscape (list of GCBR-relevant orgs for newcomers), published by Max Görlitz on September 17, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. When talking to newcomers to the field of biosecurity, I often felt annoyed that there wasn't a single introductory resource I could point them to that gives an overview of all the biosecurity-relevant organizations, upskilling opportunities, and funders. With the help of a lot of contributors, I started this Google doc to provide such a resource. I'm sure that we missed some relevant organizations, and it'd be lovely if some people were to comment on the doc with additional information! I'll copy the current version below, but please check out the link to the doc if you want to comment and see the most up-to-date version in the future! Contributors: Max Görlitz, Simon Grimm, Andreas Prenner, Jasper Götting, Anemone Franz, Eva Siegmann, & more Introduction I would like to see something like aisafety.world for biosecurity. There already exists the Map of Biosecurity Interventions, but I want one for organizations! This is a work-in-progress attempt to create a minimum viable product. Please suggest/comment on additional information, and feel free to add your name to the list of contributors. Also, see this Substack newsletter, "GCBR Organization Updates," which provides a very useful overview and quarterly updates of biosecurity organizations. Policy Think tanks Europe Explicitly focused on catastrophic or existential risks from pandemics International Center for Future Generations (ICFG) is a European think-and-do-tank for improving societal resilience in relation to exponential technologies and existential risks. Based in the Netherlands and Belgium Simon Institute for Longterm Governance SI's mission is to increase the capacity of policy networks to mitigate global catastrophic risks and build resilience for civilization to flourish. Based in Geneva, Switzerland Centre for Long-Term Resilience (CLTR) an independent think tank with a mission to transform global resilience to extreme risks London, UK Pour Demain is a non-profit think tank that develops proposals on neglected issues, positively impacting Switzerland and beyond. Center for Long-Term Policy (Langsikt) Oslo-based think tank, similar to CLTR and Pour Demain, focused on Norway and possibly other Nordic countries. Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) is a unique world-leading research centre that works on big picture questions for human civilisation and explores what can be done now to ensure a flourishing long-term future Oxford, UK The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) an interdisciplinary research centre within the University of Cambridge dedicated to the study and mitigation of existential risks Cambridge, UK Association for Long Term Existence and Resilience (ALTER) A think-and-do thank in Israel focused on both domestic and international policy and research related to building a safe and prosperous global future. Focused on general pandemic preparedness/mitigation or biological weapons CBW network for a comprehensive reinforcement of norms against chemical and biological weapons (CBWNet) The joint project aims to identify options to comprehensively strengthen the norms against chemical and biological weapons (CBW). Collaboration between multiple German universities funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research Independent Pandemic Preparedness Secretariat (IPPS) The IPPS is a wholly independent entity that will serve to ensure join up between relevant states, the private sector, and global health institutions in support of the 100 days mission. The goal of the 100 Days Mission is to prepare as much as possible so that within the first 100 days that a pandemic threat is identified, crucial interventions can be made ava...

When talking to newcomers to the field of biosecurity, I often felt annoyed that there wasn't a single introductory resource I could point them to that gives an overview of all the biosecurity-relevant organizations, upskilling opportunities, and funders. With the help of a lot of contributors, I started this Google doc to provide such a resource. I'm sure that we missed some relevant organizations, and it'd be lovely if some people were to comment on the doc with additional information!I'll copy the current version below, but please check out the link to the doc if you want to comment and see the most up-to-date version in the future!Contributors: Max Görlitz, Simon Grimm, Andreas Prenner, Jasper Götting, Anemone Franz, Eva Siegmann, & moreIntroductionI would like to see something like aisafety.world for biosecurity. There already exists the Map of Biosecurity Interventions, but I want one for organizations!This is a work-in-progress attempt to [...] ---Outline:(01:25) Policy(01:28) Think tanks(01:31) Europe(04:30) USA(07:11) (Inter)governmental actors(07:15) USA(08:25) Europe(09:21) International actors(11:49) Technical RandD(12:26) GCBR-focused non-profits(14:06) Relevant for-profits(14:27) Academic labs(14:31) Upskilling (fellowships)(14:35) Focused on newcomers(15:44) E-learning resources(16:42) Focused on people with some experience(20:32) Funders of work on biorisk mitigation(20:36) Major funders explicitly focused on catastrophic biorisk(22:17) Smaller funders with some part of their portfolio dedicated to catastrophic biorisk(23:33) Funders that are focused on pandemic preparedness more broadly--- First published: September 17th, 2023 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/28iXeSY75aLsqAagg/map-of-the-biosecurity-landscape-list-of-gcbr-relevant-orgs Linkpost URL:https://bit.ly/biosecurity-map --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

In episode 128 of Jamstack Radio, Brian speaks with Simon Grimm, a prolific content creator and developer educator. Together they explore the Ionic framework, cross-platform app development, and tips for maintaining a cadence and building an audience with original developer content.

In episode 128 of Jamstack Radio, Brian speaks with Simon Grimm, a prolific content creator and developer educator. Together they explore the Ionic framework, cross-platform app development, and tips for maintaining a cadence and building an audience with original developer content.

Simon Grimm is a Creator, Indie Maker & Solopreneur. He is currently working at The Ionic Academy. He joins the show to talk about "cross-platform development frameworks". He also tackles the difference between building native and hybrid apps. Additionally, he explains the different cross-platform apps. On YouTubeCross Platform App Development with Simon Grimm - JSJ 580SponsorsChuck's Resume Template Raygun - Application Monitoring For Web & Mobile AppsBecome a Top 1% Dev with a Top End Devs MembershipLinksThe Ionic AcademySocialsDevdacticGitHub: saimon24LinkedIn: Simon GrimmTwitter: @schlimmsonPicksAJ - Volume MasterAJ - videospeedAJ - SpeechifyAJ - bnna.netAJ - tauri-apps/awesome-tauriCharles - Jason Weimann - Learn Video Game Development with Chuck - BONUSCharles - game.coursesDan - ReactNext - ReactNext: Israel's largest React ConferenceDan - JNation 2023Dan - The main JS conference of 2023 - JSNation 2023Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/javascript-jabber/donationsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

This week Simon Grimm follows his namesake routes and discusses his new app for children's story generation. We explore the world of RSI and how different keyboards and tools can help relieve the pain and discomfort.Subscribe to the Podcast in your player of choice Subscribe hereLinks SimonG's Midjourney art Midjourney Microsoft Surface Ergonomic Keyboard Want more from us? Find Simon B at All The Code Find Simon G at Galaxies.dev Subscribe to the Podcast in your player of choice Subscribe here

Brought to you by Haystack AppIn this episode of The Coder Career, host Cameron sits down with guest Simon Grimm, a software engineer and entrepreneur, to discuss his journey into the world of software engineering and the exciting developments in frontend development. Simon shares his experiences with learning to code, his early career in the tech industry, and how he eventually founded his own company, Galaxies.dev.The conversation delves into the future of frontend development and the exciting new technologies and tools that are shaping the industry. Simon and Cameron discuss the importance of staying up-to-date with new trends and developments in the field, and how to continually improve one's skills as a software engineer.Simon also shares his vision for Galaxies.dev, a platform that empowers developers to create and collaborate on frontend components. He explains how the platform works and how it can help streamline development processes and improve the quality of code.Cam's Content Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Brought to you by Haystack AppIn this episode of The Coder Career, host Cameron sits down with guest Simon Grimm, a software engineer and entrepreneur, to discuss his journey into the world of software engineering and the exciting developments in frontend development. Simon shares his experiences with learning to code, his early career in the tech industry, and how he eventually founded his own company, Galaxies.dev.The conversation delves into the future of frontend development and the exciting new technologies and tools that are shaping the industry. Simon and Cameron discuss the importance of staying up-to-date with new trends and developments in the field, and how to continually improve one's skills as a software engineer.Simon also shares his vision for Galaxies.dev, a platform that empowers developers to create and collaborate on frontend components. He explains how the platform works and how it can help streamline development processes and improve the quality of code.Cam's Content Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qRtD4WqKRYEtT5pi3/the-next-decades-might-be-wildCrossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.I'd like to thank Simon Grimm and Tamay Besiroglu for feedback and discussions.This post is inspired by What 2026 looks like and an AI vignette workshop guided by Tamay Besiroglu. I think of this post as “what would I expect the world to look like if these timelines (median compute for transformative AI ~2036) were true” or “what short-to-medium timelines feel like” since I find it hard to translate a statement like “median TAI year is 20XX” into a coherent imaginable world.I expect some readers to think that the post sounds wild and crazy but that doesn't mean its content couldn't be true. If you had told someone in 1990 or 2000 that there would be more smartphones and computers than humans in 2020, that probably would have sounded wild to them. The same could be true for AIs, i.e. that in 2050 there are more human-level AIs than humans. The fact that this sounds as ridiculous as ubiquitous smartphones sounded to the 1990/2000 person, might just mean that we are bad at predicting exponential growth and disruptive technology. Update: titotal points out in the comments that the correct timeframe for computers is probably 1980 to 2020. So the correct time span is probably 40 years instead of 30. For mobile phones, it's probably 1993 to 2020 if you can trust this statistic.I'm obviously not confident (see confidence and takeaways section) in this particular prediction but many of the things I describe seem like relatively direct consequences of more and more powerful and ubiquitous AI mixed with basic social dynamics and incentives. 

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The next decades might be wild, published by Marius Hobbhahn on December 15, 2022 on LessWrong. I'd like to thank Simon Grimm and Tamay Besiroglu for feedback and discussions. This post is inspired by What 2026 looks like and an AI vignette workshop guided by Tamay Besiroglu. I think of this post as “what would I expect the world to look like if these timelines (median compute for transformative AI ~2036) were true” or “what short-to-medium timelines feel like” since I find it hard to translate a statement like “median TAI year is 20XX” into a coherent imaginable world. I expect some readers to think that the post sounds wild and crazy but that doesn't mean its content couldn't be true. If you had told someone in 1990 or 2000 that there would be more smartphones and computers than humans in 2020, that probably would have sounded wild to them. The same could be true for AIs, i.e. that in 2050 there are more human-level AIs than humans. The fact that this sounds as ridiculous as ubiquitous smartphones sounded to the 1990/2000 person, might just mean that we are bad at predicting exponential growth and disruptive technology. Update: titotal points out in the comments that the correct timeframe for computers is probably 1980 to 2020. So the correct time span is probably 40 years instead of 30. For mobile phones, it's probably 1993 to 2020 if you can trust this statistic. I'm obviously not confident (see confidence and takeaways section) in this particular prediction but many of the things I describe seem like relatively direct consequences of more and more powerful and ubiquitous AI mixed with basic social dynamics and incentives. Taking stock of the past Some claims about the past Tech can be very disruptive: The steam engine, phones, computers, the internet, smartphones, etc; all of these have changed the world in a relatively quick fashion (e.g. often just a few decades between introduction and widespread use). Furthermore, newer technologies disrupt faster (e.g. smartphones were adopted faster than cars) due to faster supply-chain integration, faster R&D, larger investments and much more. People who were born 10 years before me grew up without widespread smartphones and the internet, I grew up with the benefits of both and people who are 10 years younger than me play high-resolution video games on their smartphones. Due to technology, it is the norm, not the exception, that people who are born 10 years apart can have very different childhoods. AI is getting useful: There are more and more tasks in which AI is highly useful in the real world. By now certain narrow tasks can be automated to a large extent, e.g., protein folding prediction, traffic management, image recognition, sales predictions and much more. Some of these, e.g. sales predictions sometimes rely on technology developed before 2000, but many of the more complex and less structured tasks such as traffic predictions are built on top of Deep Learning architectures only developed in the 2010s. Thus we are either one or multiple decades deep in the AI disruption period. Based on this, I consider another AI winter unlikely. You can make money with AI right now and the ML systems can automate a lot of tasks today even if we didn't find any additional breakthroughs. Transformers work astonishingly well: Originally transformers were used mostly on language modeling tasks but by now they have been successfully applied to many computer vision tasks, reinforcement learning, robotics, time series and much more. The basic recipe of “transformer+data+compute+a bit of engineering” seems to work astonishingly well. This was not true for previous architectures such as CNNs or LSTMs. People use AI to build AI: The first large language models (LLMs) that assist human coders seem to genuinely improve their performance, ther...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The next decades might be wild, published by Marius Hobbhahn on December 15, 2022 on LessWrong. I'd like to thank Simon Grimm and Tamay Besiroglu for feedback and discussions. This post is inspired by What 2026 looks like and an AI vignette workshop guided by Tamay Besiroglu. I think of this post as “what would I expect the world to look like if these timelines (median compute for transformative AI ~2036) were true” or “what short-to-medium timelines feel like” since I find it hard to translate a statement like “median TAI year is 20XX” into a coherent imaginable world. I expect some readers to think that the post sounds wild and crazy but that doesn't mean its content couldn't be true. If you had told someone in 1990 or 2000 that there would be more smartphones and computers than humans in 2020, that probably would have sounded wild to them. The same could be true for AIs, i.e. that in 2050 there are more human-level AIs than humans. The fact that this sounds as ridiculous as ubiquitous smartphones sounded to the 1990/2000 person, might just mean that we are bad at predicting exponential growth and disruptive technology. Update: titotal points out in the comments that the correct timeframe for computers is probably 1980 to 2020. So the correct time span is probably 40 years instead of 30. For mobile phones, it's probably 1993 to 2020 if you can trust this statistic. I'm obviously not confident (see confidence and takeaways section) in this particular prediction but many of the things I describe seem like relatively direct consequences of more and more powerful and ubiquitous AI mixed with basic social dynamics and incentives. Taking stock of the past Some claims about the past Tech can be very disruptive: The steam engine, phones, computers, the internet, smartphones, etc; all of these have changed the world in a relatively quick fashion (e.g. often just a few decades between introduction and widespread use). Furthermore, newer technologies disrupt faster (e.g. smartphones were adopted faster than cars) due to faster supply-chain integration, faster R&D, larger investments and much more. People who were born 10 years before me grew up without widespread smartphones and the internet, I grew up with the benefits of both and people who are 10 years younger than me play high-resolution video games on their smartphones. Due to technology, it is the norm, not the exception, that people who are born 10 years apart can have very different childhoods. AI is getting useful: There are more and more tasks in which AI is highly useful in the real world. By now certain narrow tasks can be automated to a large extent, e.g., protein folding prediction, traffic management, image recognition, sales predictions and much more. Some of these, e.g. sales predictions sometimes rely on technology developed before 2000, but many of the more complex and less structured tasks such as traffic predictions are built on top of Deep Learning architectures only developed in the 2010s. Thus we are either one or multiple decades deep in the AI disruption period. Based on this, I consider another AI winter unlikely. You can make money with AI right now and the ML systems can automate a lot of tasks today even if we didn't find any additional breakthroughs. Transformers work astonishingly well: Originally transformers were used mostly on language modeling tasks but by now they have been successfully applied to many computer vision tasks, reinforcement learning, robotics, time series and much more. The basic recipe of “transformer+data+compute+a bit of engineering” seems to work astonishingly well. This was not true for previous architectures such as CNNs or LSTMs. People use AI to build AI: The first large language models (LLMs) that assist human coders seem to genuinely improve their performance, ther...

Janvi Ahuja and Simon Grimm (Future of Humanity Institute) give an overview of the Global Catastrophic Biological Risks (GCBR) space.View the original talk and video here.Effective Altruism is a social movement dedicated to finding ways to do the most good possible, whether through charitable donations, career choices, or volunteer projects. EA Global conferences are gatherings for EAs to meet.Effective Altruism is a social movement dedicated to finding ways to do the most good possible, whether through charitable donations, career choices, or volunteer projects. EA Global conferences are gatherings for EAs to meet. You can also listen to this talk along with its accompanying video on YouTube.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Disagreement with bio anchors that lead to shorter timelines, published by Marius Hobbhahn on November 16, 2022 on The AI Alignment Forum. This would have been a submission to the FTX AI worldview prize. I'd like to thank Daniel Kokotajlo, Ege Erdil, Tamay Besiroglu, Jaime Sevilla, Anson Ho, Keith Wynroe, Pablo Villalobos and Simon Grimm for feedback and discussions. Criticism and feedback are welcome. This post represents my personal views. The causal story for this post was: I first collected my disagreements with the bio anchors report and adapted the model. This then led to shorter timelines. I did NOT only collect disagreements that lead to shorter timelines. If my disagreements would have led to longer timelines, this post would argue for longer timelines. I think the bio anchors report (the one from 2020, not Ajeya's personal updates) puts too little weight on short timelines. I also think that there are a lot of plausible arguments for short timelines that are not well-documented or at least not part of a public model. The bio anchors approach is obviously only one possible way to think about timelines but it is currently the canonical model that many people refer to. I, therefore, think of the following post as “if bio anchors influence your timelines, then you should really consider these arguments and, as a consequence, put more weight on short timelines if you agree with them”. I think there are important considerations that are hard to model with bio anchors and therefore also added my personal timelines in the table below for reference. My best guess bio anchors adaption suggests a median estimate for the availability of compute to train TAI of 2036 (10th percentile: 2025, 75th percentile: 2052). Note that this is not the same as predicting the widespread deployment of AI. Furthermore, I think that the time “when AI has the potential to be dangerous” is earlier than my estimate of TAI because I think that this poses a lower requirement than the potential to be economically transformative (so even though the median estimate for TAI is 2036, I wouldn't be that surprised if, let's say 2033 AIs, could deal some severe societal harm, e.g. > $100B in economic damage). You can find all material related to this piece including the colab notebook, the spreadsheets and the long version in this google folder. Executive summary I think some of the assumptions in the bio anchors report are not accurate. These disagreements still apply to Ajeya's personal updates on timelines. In this post, I want to lay out my disagreements and provide a modified alternative model that includes my best guesses. Important: To model the probability of transformative AI in a given year, the bio anchors report uses the availability of compute (e.g. see this summary). This means that the bio anchors approach is NOT a prediction for when this AI has been trained and rolled out or when the economy has been transformed by such an ML model, it merely predicts when such a model could be trained. I think it could take multiple (I guess 0-4) years until such a model is engineered, trained and actually has a transformative economic impact. My disagreements You can find the long version of all of the disagreements in this google doc, the following is just a summary. I think the baseline for human anchors is too high since humans were “trained” in very inefficient ways compared to NNs. For example, I expect humans to need less compute and smaller brains if we were able to learn on more data or use parallelization. Besides compute efficiency, there are further constraints on humans such as energy use, that don't apply to ML systems. To compensate for the data constraint, I expect human brains to be bigger than they would need to be without them. The energy constraint could imply that human brains a...

Brian Potter is the author of the excellent Construction Physics blog, where he discusses why the construction industry has been slow to industrialize and innovate.He explains why:* Construction isn't getting cheaper and faster,* We should have mile-high buildings and multi-layer non-intersecting roads,* “Ugly” modern buildings are simply the result of better architecture,* China is so great at building things,* Saudi Arabia's Line is a waste of resources,* Environmental review makes new construction expensive and delayed,* and much much more!Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.More really cool guests coming up; subscribe to find out about future episodes!You may also enjoy my interviews with Tyler Cowen (about talent, collapse, & pessimism of sex). Charles Mann (about the Americas before Columbus & scientific wizardry), and Austin Vernon about (Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha).If you end up enjoying this episode, I would be super grateful if you share it, post it on Twitter, send it to your friends & group chats, and throw it up wherever else people might find it. Can't exaggerate how much it helps a small podcast like mine.A huge thanks to Graham Bessellieu for editing this podcast and Mia Aiyana for producing its transcript.Timestamps(0:00) - Why Saudi Arabia's Line is Insane, Unrealistic, and Never going to Exist (06:54) - Designer Clothes & eBay Arbitrage Adventures (10:10) - Unique Woes of The Construction Industry  (19:28) - The Problems of Prefabrication (26:27) - If Building Regulations didn't exist… (32:20) - China's Real Estate Bubble, Unbound Technocrats, & Japan(44:45) - Automation and Revolutionary Future Technologies (1:00:51) - 3D Printer Pessimism & The Rising Cost of Labour(1:08:02) - AI's Impact on Construction Productivity(1:17:53) - Brian Dreams of Building a Mile High Skyscraper(1:23:43) - Deep Dive into Environmentalism and NEPA(1:42:04) - Software is Stealing Talent from Physical Engineering(1:47:13) - Gaps in the Blog Marketplace of Ideas(1:50:56) - Why is Modern Architecture So Ugly?(2:19:58) - Advice for Aspiring Architects and Young Construction PhysicistsTranscriptWhy Saudi Arabia's Line is Insane, Unrealistic, and Never going to Exist Dwarkesh Patel Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Brian Potter, who is an engineer and the author of the excellent Construction Physics blog, where he writes about how the construction industry works and why it has been slow to industrialize and innovate. It's one of my favorite blogs on the internet, and I highly, highly recommend that people check it out. Brian, my first question is about The Line project in Saudi Arabia. What are your opinions? Brian Potter It's interesting how Saudi Arabia and countries in the Middle East, in general, are willing to do these big, crazy, ambitious building projects and pour huge amounts of money into constructing this infrastructure in a way that you don't see a huge amount in the modern world. China obviously does this too in huge amounts, some other minor places do as well, but in general, you don't see a whole lot of countries building these big, massive, incredibly ambitious projects. So on that level, it's interesting, and it's like, “Yes, I'm glad to see that you're doing this,” but the actual project is clearly insane and makes no sense. Look at the physical arrangement layout–– there's a reason cities grow in two dimensions. A one-dimensional city is the worst possible arrangement for transportation. It's the maximum amount of distance between any two points. So just from that perspective, it's clearly crazy, and there's no real benefit to it other than perhaps some weird hypothetical transportation situation where you had really fast point-to-point transportation. It would probably be some weird bullet train setup; maybe that would make sense. But in general, there's no reason to build a city like that. Even if you wanted to build an entirely enclosed thing (which again doesn't make a huge amount of sense), you would save so much material and effort if you just made it a cube. I would be more interested in the cube than the line. [laughs] But yeah, those are my initial thoughts on it. I will be surprised if it ever gets built. Dwarkesh Patel Are you talking about the cube from the meme about how you can put all the humans in the world in a cube the size of Manhattan? Brian Potter Something like that. If you're just going to build this big, giant megastructure, at least take advantage of what that gets you, which is minimum surface area to volume ratio.Dwarkesh Patel Why is that important? Would it be important for temperature or perhaps other features? Brian Potter This is actually interesting because I'm actually not sure how sure it would work with a giant single city. In general, a lot of economies of scale come from geometric effects. When something gets bigger, your volume increases a lot faster than your surface area does. So for something enclosed, like a tank or a pipe, the cost goes down per thing of unit you're transporting because you can carry a larger amount or a smaller amount of material. It applies to some extent with buildings and construction because the exterior wall assembly is a really burdensome, complicated, and expensive assembly. A building with a really big floor plate, for instance, can get more area per unit, per amount of exterior wall. I'm not sure how that actually works with a single giant enclosed structure because, theoretically, on a small level, it would apply the same way. Your climate control is a function of your exterior surface, at some level, and you get more efficient climate control if you have a larger volume and less area that it can escape from. But for a giant city, I actually don't know if that works, and it may be worse because you're generating so much heat that it's now harder to pump out. For examples like the urban heat island effect, where these cities generate massive amounts of waste heat, I don't know if that would work if it didn't apply the same way. I'm trying to reach back to my physics classes in college, so I'm not sure about the actual mechanics of that. Generally though, that's why you'd want to perhaps build something of this size and shape. Dwarkesh Patel What was the thought process behind designing this thing? Because Scott Alexander had a good blog post about The Line where he said, presumably, that The Line is designed to take up less space and to use less fuel because you can just use the same transportation across. But the only thing that Saudi Arabia has is space and fuel. So what is the thought process behind this construction project? Brian PotterI get the sense that a lot of committees have some amount of success in building big, impressive, physical construction projects that are an attraction just by virtue of their size and impressiveness. A huge amount of stuff in Dubai is something in this category, and they have that giant clock tower in Jeddah, the biggest giant clock building and one of the biggest buildings in the world, or something like that. I think, on some level, they're expecting that you would just see a return from building something that's really impressive or “the biggest thing on some particular axis”. So to some extent, I think they're just optimizing for big and impressive and maybe not diving into it more than that. There's this theory that I think about every so often. It's called the garbage can theory of organizational decision-making, which basically talks about how the choices that organizations make are not the result of any particular recent process. They are the result of how, whenever a problem comes up, people reach into the garbage can of potential solutions. Then whatever they pull out of the garbage can, that's the decision that they end up going with, regardless of how much sense it makes. It was a theory that was invented by academics to describe decision-making in academia. I think about that a lot, especially with reference to big bureaucracies and governments. You can just imagine the draining process of how these decisions evolve. Any random decision can be made, especially when there's such a disconnect between the decision-makers and technical knowledge.Designer Clothes & eBay Arbitrage Adventures Dwarkesh PatelTell me about your eBay arbitrage with designer clothes. Brian Potter Oh man, you really did dive deep. Yeah, so this was a small business that I ran seven or eight years ago at this point. A hobby of mine was high-end men's fashion for a while, which is a very strange hobby for an engineer to have, but there you go. That hobby centers around finding cheap designer stuff, because buying new can be overwhelmingly expensive. However, a lot of times, you can get clothes for a very cheap price if you're even a little bit motivated. Either it shows up on eBay, or it shows up in thrift stores if you know what to look for. A lot of these clothes can last because they're well-made. They last a super, super, super long time–– even if somebody wore it for 10 years or something, it could be fine. So a lot of this hobby centered around finding ways to get really nice clothes cheaply. Majority of it was based around eBay, but it was really tedious to find really nice stuff on eBay. You had to manually search for a bunch of different brands, filter out the obviously bad ones, search for typos in brands, put in titles, and stuff like that. I was in the process of doing this, and I thought, “Oh, this is really annoying. I should figure out a way to automate this process.” So I made a very simple web app where when you searched for shoes or something, it would automatically search the very nice brands of shoes and all the typos of the brand name. Then it would just filter out all the junk and let you search through the good stuff. I set up an affiliate system, basically. So anybody else that used it, I would get a kick of the sales. While I was interested in that hobby, I ran this website for a few years, and it was reasonably successful. It was one of the first things I did that got any real traction on the internet, but it was never successful in proportion to how much effort it took to maintain and update it. So as I moved away from the hobby, I eventually stopped putting time and effort into maintaining the website. I'm curious as to how you even dug that up. Dwarkesh Patel I have a friend who was with you at the Oxford Refugees Conference, Connor Tabarrok. I don't know if you remember him. Brian Potter Nice. Dwarkesh Patel Yeah. Finding other information about you on the internet was quite difficult actually. You've somehow managed to maintain your anonymity. If you're willing to reveal, what was the P&L of this project? Brian Potter Oh, it made maybe a few hundred dollars a month for a few years, but I only ever ran it as a side hobby business, basically. So in terms of time per my effort or whatever, I'm sure it was very low. Pennies to an hour or something like that. Unique Woes of The Construction Industry   Dwarkesh Patel A broad theme that I've gotten from your post is that the construction industry is plagued with these lossy feedback loops, a lack of strong economies of scale, regulation, and mistakes being very costly. Do you think that this is a general characteristic of many industries in our world today, or is there something unique about construction? Brian Potter Interesting question. One thing you think of is that there are a lot of individual factors that are not unique at all. Construction is highly regulated, but it's not necessarily more regulated than medical devices or jet travel, or even probably cars, to some extent, which have a whole vat of performance criteria they need to hit. With a couple of things like land use, for example, people say, “Oh, the land requirements, could you build it on-site,” explaining how those kinds of things make it difficult. But there is a lot that falls into this category that doesn't really share the same structure of how the construction industry works.I think it's the interaction of all those effects. One thing that I think is perhaps underappreciated is that the systems of a building are really highly coupled in a way that a lot of other things are. If you're manufacturing a computer, the hard drive is somewhat independent from the display and somewhat independent from the power supply. These things are coupled, but they can be built by independent people who don't necessarily even talk to each other before being assembled into one structured thing. A building is not really like that at all. Every single part affects every single other part. In some ways, it's like biology. So it's very hard to change something that doesn't end up disrupting something else. Part of that is because a job's building is to create a controlled interior environment, meaning, every single system has to run through and around the surfaces that are creating that controlled interior. Everything is touching each other. Again, that's not unique. Anything really highly engineered, like a plane or an iPhone, share those characteristics to some extent. In terms of the size of it and the relatively small amount you're paying in terms of unit size or unit mass, however, it's quite low. Dwarkesh Patel Is transportation cost the fundamental reason you can't have as much specialization and modularity?Brian Potter Yeah, I think it's really more about just the way a building is. An example of this would be how for the electrical system of your house, you can't have a separate box where if you needed to replace the electrical system, you could take the whole box out and put the new box in. The electrical system runs through the entire house. Same with plumbing. Same with the insulation. Same with the interior finishes and stuff like that. There's not a lot of modularity in a physical sense. Dwarkesh Patel Gotcha. Ben Kuhn  had this interesting comment on your article where he pointed out that many of the reasons you give for why it's hard to innovate in construction, like sequential dependencies and the highly variable delivery timelines are also common in software where Ben Koon works. So why do you think that the same sort of stagnation has not hit other industries that have superficially similar characteristics, like software? Brian Potter How I think about that is that you kind of see a similar structure in anything that's project-based or anything where there's an element of figuring out what you're doing while you're doing it. Compared to a large-scale manufacturing option where you spend a lot of time figuring out what exactly it is that you're building. You spend a lot of time designing it to be built and do your first number of runs through it, then you tweak your process to make it more efficient. There's always an element of tweaking it to make it better, but to some extent, the process of figuring out what you're doing is largely separate from the actual doing of it yourself. For a project-based industry, it's not quite like that. You have to build your process on the fly. Of course, there are best practices that shape it, right? For somebody writing a new software project or anything project-based, like making a movie, they have a rough idea for how it's going to go together. But there's going to be a lot of unforeseen things that kind of come up like that. The biggest difference is that either those things can often scale in a way that you can't with a building. Once you're done with the software project, you can deploy it to 1,000 or 100,000, or 1 million people, right? Once you finish making a movie, 100 million people can watch it or whatever. It doesn't quite look the same with a building. You don't really have the ability to spend a lot of time upfront figuring out how this thing needs to go. You kind of need to figure out a way to get this thing together without spending a huge amount of time that would be justified by the sheer size of it. I was able to dig up a few references for software projects and how often they just have these big, long tails. Sometimes they just go massively, massively over budget. A lot of times, they just don't get completed at all, which is shocking, but because of how many people it can then be deployed to after it's done, the economics of it are slightly different. Dwarkesh Patel I see, yeah. There's a famous law in software that says that a project will take longer than you expect even after you recount for the fact that it will take longer than you expect. Brian Potter Yeah. Hofstadter's law or something like that is what I think it is. Dwarkesh Patel Yeah. I'm curious about what the lack of skill in construction implies for startups. Famously, in software, the fact that there's zero marginal cost to scaling to the next customer is a huge boon to a startup, right? The entire point of which is scaling exponentially. Does that fundamentally constrain the size and quantity of startups you can have in construction if the same scaling is not available?Brian Potter Yeah, that's a really good question. The obvious first part of the answer is that for software, obviously, if you have a construction software company, you can scale it just like any other software business. For physical things, it is a lot more difficult. This lack of zero marginal cost has tended to fight a lot of startups, not just construction ones. But yeah, it's definitely a thing. Construction is particularly brutal because the margins are so low. The empirical fact is that trying what would be a more efficient method of building doesn't actually allow you to do it cheaper and get better margins. The startup that I used to work at, Katerra, their whole business model was basically predicated on that. “Oh, we'll just build all our buildings in these big factories, get huge economies of scale, reduce our costs, and then recoup the billions of dollars that we're pumping into this industry or business.” The math just does not work out. You can't build. In general, you can't build cheap enough to kind of recoup those giant upfront costs. A lot of businesses have been burned that way. The most success you see in prefabrication type of stuff is on the higher end of things where you can get higher margins. A lot of these prefab companies and stuff like that tend to target the higher end of the market, and you see a few different premiums for that. Obviously, if you're targeting the higher end, you're more likely to have higher margins. If you're building to a higher level of quality, that's easier to do in a factory environment. So the delta is a lot different, less enormous than it would be. Building a high level of quality is easier to do in a factory than it is in the field, so a lot of buildings or houses that are built to a really high level of energy performance, for instance, need a really, really high level of air sealing to minimize how much energy this house uses. You tend to see a lot more houses like that built out of prefab construction and other factory-built methods because it's just physically more difficult to achieve that on-site. The Problems of Prefabrication Dwarkesh Patel Can you say more about why you can't use prefabrication in a factory to get economies of scale? Is it just that the transportation costs will eat away any gains you get? What is going on? Brian PotterThere's a combination of effects. I haven't worked through all this, we'll have to save this for the next time. I'll figure it out more by then. At a high level, it's that basically the savings that you get from like using less labor or whatever is not quite enough to offset your increased transportation costs. One thing about construction, especially single-family home construction, is that a huge percentage of your costs are just the materials that you're using, right? A single-family home is roughly 50% labor and 50% materials for the construction costs. Then you have development costs, land costs, and things like that. So a big chunk of that, you just can't move to the factory at all, right?  You can't really build a foundation in a factory. You could prefab the foundation, but it doesn't gain you anything. Your excavation still has to be done on-site, obviously. So a big chunk can't move to the factory at all. For ones that can, you still basically have to pay the same amount for materials. Theoretically, if you're building truly huge volume, you could get material volume discounts, but even then, it's probably not looking at things like asset savings. So you can cut out a big chunk of your labor costs, and you do see that in factory-built construction, right? These prefab companies are like mobile home companies. They have a small fraction of labor as their costs, which is typical of a factory in general, but then they take out all that labor cost while they still have their high material costs, and then they have overhead costs of whatever the factory has cost them. Then you have your additional overhead cost of just transporting it to site, which is pretty limited. The math does not really work out in favor of prefab, in terms of being able to make the cost of building dramatically cheaper. You can obviously build a building in a prefab using prefab-free methods and build a successful construction business, right? Many people do. But in terms of dramatically lowering your costs, you don't really see that. Dwarkesh Patel Yeah, yeah. Austin Vernon has an interesting blog post about why there's not more prefabricated homes. The two things he points out were transportation costs, and the other one was that people prefer to have homes that have unique designs or unique features. When I was reading it, it actually occurred to me that maybe they're actually both the result of the same phenomenon. I don't know if I'm pronouncing it correctly, but have you heard of the Alchian-Allen theorem in economics? Brian Potter Maybe, but I don't think so. Dwarkesh Patel Basically, it's the idea that if you increase the cost of some category of goods in a fixed way––let's say you tax oranges and added a $1 tax to all oranges, or transportation for oranges gets $1 more expensive for all oranges––people will shift consumption towards the higher grade variety because now, the ratio of the cost between the higher, the more expensive orange and the less expensive orange has decreased because of the increase in fixed costs. It seems like you could use that argument to also explain why people have strong preferences for uniqueness and all kinds of design in manufactured houses. Since transportation costs are so high, that's basically a fixed cost, and that fixed cost has the effect of making people shift consumption towards higher-grade options. I definitely think that's true. Brian PotterI would maybe phrase this as, “The construction industry makes it relatively comparatively cheap to deliver a highly customized option compared to a really repetitive option.” So yeah, the ratio between a highly customized one and just a commodity one is relatively small. So you see a kind of industry built around delivering somewhat more customized options. I do think that this is a pretty broad intuition that people just desire too much customization from their homes. That really prevents you from having a mass-produced offering. I do think that is true to some extent. One example is the Levittown houses, which were originally built in huge numbers–– exactly the same model over and over again. Eventually, they had to change their business model to be able to deliver more customized options because the market shipped it. I do think that the effect of that is basically pretty overstated. Empirically, you see that in practice, home builders and developers will deliver fairly repetitive housing. They don't seem to have a really hard time doing that. As an example, I'm living in a new housing development that is just like three or four different houses copy-pasted over and over again in a group of 50. The developer is building a whole bunch of other developments that are very similar in this area. My in-laws live in a very similar development in a whole different state. If you just look like multi-family or apartment housing, it's identical apartments, you know, copy-pasted over and over again in the same building or a bunch of different buildings in the same development. You're not seeing huge amounts of uniqueness in these things. People are clearly willing to just live in these basically copy-pasted apartments. It's also quite possible to get a pretty high amount of product variety using a relatively small number of factors that you vary, right? I mean, the car industry is like this, where there are enough customization options. I was reading this book a while ago that was basically pushing back against the idea that the car industry pre-fifties and sixties we just offering a very uniform product. They basically did the math, and the number of customization options on their car was more than the atoms in the universe. Basically just, there are so many different options. All the permutations, you know, leather seats and this type of stereo and this type of engine, if you add it all up, there's just a huge, massive number of different combinations. Yeah, you can obviously customize the house a huge amount, just by the appliances that you have and the finishes that are in there and the paint colors that you choose and the fixtures and stuff like that. It would not really theoretically change the underlying way the building comes together. So regarding the idea that the fundamental demand for variety is a major obstruction, I don't think there's a whole lot of evidence for that in the construction industry. If Construction Regulation Vanished… Dwarkesh Patel I asked Twitter about what I should ask you, and usually, I don't get interesting responses but the quality of the people and the audience that knows who you are was so high that actually, all the questions I got were fascinating. So I'm going to ask you some questions from Twitter. Brian Potter Okay. Dwarkesh Patel 0:26:45Connor Tabarrok asks, “What is the most unique thing that would or should get built in the absence of construction regulation?”Brian Potter Unique is an interesting qualifier. There are a lot of things that just like should get built, right? Massive amounts of additional housing and creating more lands in these really dense urban environments where we need it, in places like San Francisco–– just fill in a big chunk of that bay. It's basically just mud flat and we should put more housing on it. “Unique thing” is more tricky. One idea that I really like (I read this in the book, The Book Where's My Flying Car),  is that it's basically crazy that our cities are designed with roads that all intersect with each other. That's an insane way to structure a material flow problem. Any sane city would be built with multiple layers of like transportation where each one went in a different direction so your flows would just be massively, massively improved. That just seems like a very obvious one.If you're building your cities from scratch and had your druthers, you would clearly want to build them and know how big they were gonna get, right? So you could plan very long-term in a way that so these transportation systems didn't intersect with each other, which, again, almost no cities did. You'd have the space to scale them or run as much throughput through them as you need without bringing the whole system to a halt. There's a lot of evidence saying that cities tend to scale based on how much you can move from point A to point B through them. I do wonder whether if you changed the way they went together, you could unlock massively different cities. Even if you didn't unlock massive ones, you could perhaps change the agglomeration effects that you see in cities if people could move from point A to point B much quicker than they currently can. Dwarkesh Patel Yeah, I did an episode about the book, where's my flying car with Rohit Krishnan. I don't know if we discussed this, but an interesting part of the book is where he talks about transistor design. If you design transistors this way, can you imagine how slow they would be? [laughs] Okay, so Simon Grimm asks, “What countries are the best at building things?”Brian Potter This is a good question. I'm going to sort of cheat a little bit and do it in terms of space and time, because I think most countries that are doing a good job at building massive amounts of stuff are not ones that are basically doing it currently.The current answer is like China, where they just keep building–– more concrete was used in the last 20 years or so than the entire world used in the time before that, right? They've accomplished massive amounts of urbanization, and built a lot of really interesting buildings and construction. In terms of like raw output, I would also put Japan in the late 20th century on there. At the peak of the concern and wonder of “Is Japan gonna take over the world?”, they were really interested in building stuff quite quickly. They spent a lot of time and effort trying to use their robotics expertise to try to figure out how to build buildings a lot more quickly. They had these like really interesting factories that were designed to basically extrude an entire skyscraper just going up vertically.All these big giant companies and many different factories were trying to develop and trying to do this with robotics. It was a really interesting system that did not end up ever making economic sense, but it is very cool. I think big industrial policy organs of the government basically encouraged a lot of these industrial companies to basically develop prefabricated housing systems. So you see a lot of really interesting systems developed from these sort of industrial companies in a way that you don't see in a lot of other places. From 1850 to maybe 1970 (like a hundred years or something), the US was building huge massive amounts of stuff in a way that lifted up huge parts of the economy, right? I don't know how many thousands of miles of railroad track the US built between like 1850 and 1900, but it was many, many, many thousands of miles of it. Ofcourse, needing to lay all this track and build all these locomotives really sort of forced the development of the machine tool industry, which then led to the development of like better manufacturing methods and interchangeable parts, which of course then led to the development of the automotive industry. Then ofcourse, that explosion just led to even more big giant construction projects. So you really see that this ability to build just big massive amounts of stuff in this virtuous cycle with the US really advanced a lot of technology to raise the standard of development for a super long period of time. So those are my three answers. China's Real Estate Bubble, Unbound Technocrats, and JapanDwarkesh Patel Those three bring up three additional questions, one for each of them! That's really interesting. Have you read The Power Broker, the book about Robert Moses? Brian Potter I think I got a 10th of the way through it. Dwarkesh Patel That's basically a whole book in itself, a 10th of the way. [laughs] I'm a half of the way through, and so far it's basically about the story of how this one guy built a startup within the New York state government that was just so much more effective at building things, didn't have the same corruption and clientelism incompetence. Maybe it turns into tragedy in the second half, but so far it's it seems like we need this guy. Where do we get a second Robert Moses? Do you think that if you had more people like that in government or in construction industries, public works would be more effectively built or is the stagnation there just a result of like other bigger factors? Brian Potter That's an interesting question. I remember reading this article a while ago that was complaining about how horrible Penn Station is in New York. They're basically saying, “Yeah, it would be nice to return to the era of like the sort of unbound technocrat” when these technical experts in high positions of power in government could essentially do whatever they wanted to some extent. If they thought something should be built somewhere, they basically had the power to do it. It's a facet of this problem of how it's really, really hard to get stuff built in the US currently. I'm sure that a part of it is that you don't see these really talented technocrats occupy high positions of government where they can get stuff done. But it's not super obvious to me whether that's the limiting factor. I kind of get the sense that they would end up being bottlenecked by some other part of the process. The whole sort of interlocking set of institutions has just become so risk averse that they would end up just being blocked in a way that they wouldn't when they were operating in the 1950s or 1960s.Dwarkesh Patel Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. All right, so speaking of Japan, I just recently learned about the construction there and how they just keep tearing stuff down every 30 to 40 years and rebuilding it. So you have an interesting series of posts on how you would go about building a house or a building that lasts for a thousand years. But I'm curious, how would you build a house or a building that only lasts for 30 or 40 years? If you're building in Japan and you know they're gonna tear it down soon, what changes about the construction process? Brian Potter Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I'm not an expert on Japanese construction, but I think like a lot of their interior walls are basically just paper and stuff like that. I actually think it's kind of surprising that last time I looked, for a lot of their homes, they use a surprising post and beam construction method, which is actually somewhat labor-intensive to do. The US in the early 1800s used a pretty similar method. Then once we started mass producing conventional lumber, we stopped doing that because it was much cheaper to build out of two-by-fours than it was to build big heavy posts. I think the boring answer to that question is that we'd build like how we build mobile homes–– essentially just using pretty thin walls, pretty low-end materials that are put together in a minimal way. This ends up not being that different from the actual construction method that single-family homes use. It just even further economizes and tightens the use of materials–– where a single-family home might use a half inch plywood, they might try to use three-sixteenths or even an eighth inch plywood or something like that. So we'd probably build a pretty similar way to the way most single-family homes and multi-family homes are built currently, but just with even tighter use of materials which perhaps is something that's not super nice about the way that you guys build your homes. But... [laughs]Dwarkesh Patel Okay, so China is the third one here. There's been a lot of talk about a potential real estate bubble in China because they're building housing in places where people don't really need it. Of course, maybe the demographics aren't there to support the demand. What do you think of all this talk? I don't know if you're familiar with it, but is there a real estate bubble that's created by all this competence in building? Brian PotterOh, gosh, yeah, I have no idea. Like you, I've definitely heard talk of it and I've seen the little YouTube clips of them knocking down all these towers that it turns out they didn't need or the developer couldn't, finish or whatever. I don't know a huge amount about that. In general, I wish I knew a lot more about how things are built in China, but the information is in general, so opaque. I generally kind of assume that any particular piece of data that comes out of China has giant error bars on it as to whether it's true or not or what the context surrounding it is. So in general, I do not have a hard opinion about that. Dwarkesh Patel This is the second part of Simon's question, does greater competence and being able to build stuff translate into other good outcomes for these countries like higher GDP or lower rents or other kinds of foreign outcomes? Brian Potter That's a good question. Japan is an interesting place where basically people point to it as an example of, “Here's a country that builds huge amounts of housing and they don't have housing cost increases.” In general, we should expect that dynamic to be true. Right? There's no reason to not think that housing costs are essentially a supply-demand problem where if you built as much as people wanted, the cost would drop. I have no reason to not think that's true. There is a little bit of evidence that sort of suggests that it's impossible to build housing enough to overcome this sort of mechanical obstacle where the cost of it tends to match and rise to whatever people's income level are. The peak and the sort of flattening of housing costs in Japan also parallel when people basically stopped getting raises and income stopped rising in Japan. So I don't have a good sense of, if it ends up being just more driven by some sort of other factors. Generally though I expect the very basic answer of “If you build a lot more houses, the housing will become cheaper.”Dwarkesh PatelRight. Speaking of how the land keeps gaining value as people's income go up, what is your opinion on Georgism? Does that kind of try and make you think that housing is a special asset that needs to be more heavily taxed because you're not inherently doing something productive just by owning land the way you would be if you like built a company or something similar?Brian Potter I don't have any special deep knowledge of Georgism. It's on my list of topics to read more deeply about. I do think in general, taxing encourages you to produce less of something for something that you can't produce less of. It's a good avenue for something to tax more heavily. And yeah, obviously if you had a really high land value tax in these places that have a lot of single-family homes in dense urban areas, like Seattle or San Francisco, that would probably encourage people to use the land a lot more efficiently. So it makes sense to me, but I don't have a ton of special knowledge about it. Dwarkesh Patel All right, Ben Kuhn asked on Twitter, “What construction-related advice would you give to somebody building a new charter city?”Brian Potter That is interesting. I mean, just off the top of my head, I would be interested in whether you could really figure out a way to build using a method that had really high upfront costs. I think it could otherwise be justified, but if you're gonna build 10,000 buildings or whatever all at once, you could really take advantage of that. One kind of thing that you see in the sort of post-World War II era is that we're building huge massive amounts of housing, and a lot of times we're building them all in one place, right? A lot of town builders were building thousands and thousands of houses in one big development all at once. In California, it's the same thing, you just built like 6 or 10 or 15,000 houses in one big massive development. You end up seeing something like that where they basically build this like little factory on their construction site, and then use that to like fabricate all these things. Then you have something that's almost like a reverse assembly line where a crew will go to one house and install the walls or whatever, and then go to the next house and do the same thing. Following right behind them would be the guys doing the electrical system, plumbing, and stuff like that. So this reverse assembly line system would allow you to sort of get these things up really, really fast, in 30 days or something like that. Then you could have a whole house or just thousands and thousands of houses at once. You would want to be able to do something similar where you could just not do the instruction the way that the normal construction is done, but that's hard, right? Centrally planned cities or top-down planned cities never seem to do particularly well, right? For example, the city of Brasilia, the one that was supposed to be a planned city— the age it goes back to the unfettered technocrat who can sort of build whatever he wants. A lot of times, what you want is something that will respond at a low level and organically sort out the factories as they develop. You don't want something that's totally planned from the top-down, that's disconnected from all the sorts of cases on the ground. A lot of the opposition to Robert Moses ended up being that in a certain form, right? He's bulldozing through these cities that are these buildings and neighborhoods that he's not paying attention to at all. So I think, just to go back to the question, trying to plan your city from the top down doesn't have a super, super great track record. In general, you want your city to develop a little bit more organically. I guess I would think to have a good sort of land-use rules that are really thought through well and encourage the things that you want to encourage and not discourage the things that you don't want to discourage. Don't have equity in zoning and allow a lot of mixed-use construction and stuff like that. I guess that's a somewhat boring answer, but I'd probably do something along those lines. Dwarkesh Patel Interesting, interesting. I guess that implies that there would be high upfront costs to building a city because if you need to build 10,000 homes at once to achieve these economies of scale, then you would need to raise like tens of billions of dollars before you could build a charter city. Brian Potter Yeah, if you were trying to lower your costs of construction, but again, if you have the setup to do that, you wouldn't necessarily need to raise it. These other big developments were built by developers that essentially saw an opportunity. They didn't require public funding to do it. They did in the form of loan guarantees for veterans and things like that, but they didn't have the government go and buy the land. Automation and Revolutionary Future Technologies Dwarkesh Patel Right, okay, so the next question is from Austin Vernon. To be honest, I don't understand the question, you two are too smart for me, but hopefully, you'll be able to explain the question and then also answer it. What are your power rankings for technologies that can tighten construction tolerances? Then he gives examples like ARVR, CNC cutting, and synthetic wood products. Brian Potter Yeah, so this is a very interesting question. Basically, because buildings are built manually on site by hand, there's just a lot of variation in what ends up being built, right? There's only so accurately that a person can put something in place if they don't have any sort of age or stuff like that. Just the placement itself of materials tends to have a lot of variation in it and the materials themselves also have a lot of variation in them. The obvious example is wood, right? Where one two by four is not gonna be exactly the same as another two by four. It may be warped, it may have knots in it, it may be split or something like that. Then also because these materials are sitting just outside in the elements, they sort of end up getting a lot of distortion, they either absorb moisture and sort of expand and contract, or they grow and shrink because of the heat. So there's just a lot of variation that goes into putting a building up.To some extent, it probably constrains what you are able to build and how effectively you're able to build it. I kind of gave an example before of really energy efficient buildings and they're really hard to build on-site using conventional methods because the air ceiling is quite difficult to do. You have to build it in a much more precise way than what is typically done and is really easily achieved on-site. So I guess in terms of examples of things that would make that easier, he gives some good ones like engineered lumber, which is where you take lumber and then grind it up into strands or chips or whatever and basically glue them back together–– which does a couple of things. It spreads all the knots and the defects out so they are concentrated and everything tends to be a lot more uniform when it's made like that. So that's a very obvious one that's already in widespread use. I don't really see that making a substantial change.I guess the one exception to that would be this engineered lumber product called mass timber elements, CLT, which is like a super plywood. Plywood is made from tiny little sheet thin strips of wood, right? But CLT is made from two-by-four-dimensional lumber glued across laminated layers. So instead of a 4 by 9 sheet of plywood, you have a 12 by 40 sheet of dimensional lumber glued together. You end up with a lot of the properties of engineered material where it's really dimensionally stable. It can be produced very, very accurately. It's actually funny that a lot of times, the CLT is the most accurate part of the building. So if you're building a building with it, you tend to run into problems where the rest of the building is not accurate enough for it. So even with something like steel, if you're building a steel building, the steel is not gonna be like dead-on accurate, it's gonna be an inch or so off in terms of where any given component is. The CLT, which is built much more accurately, actually tends to show all these errors that have to be corrected. So in some sense, accuracy or precision is a little bit of like a tricky thing because you can't just make one part of the process more precise. In some ways that actually makes things more difficult because if one part is really precise, then a lot of the time, it means that you can't make adjustments to it easily. So if you have this one really precise thing, it usually means you have to go and compensate for something else that is not built quite as precisely. It actually makes advancing precision quite a bit more complicated. AR VR, is something I'm very bullish on. A big caveat of that is assuming that they can just get the basic technology working. The basic intuition there is that right now the way that pieces are, when a building is put together on site, somebody is looking at a set of paper plans, or an iPad or something that tells them where everything needs to go. So they figure that out and then they take a tape measure or use some other method and go figure out where that's marked on the ground. There's all this set-up time that is really quite time consuming and error prone. Again, there's only so much accuracy that a guy dragging a tape 40 feet across site being held by another guy can attain, there's a limit to how accurate that process can be. It's very easy for me to imagine that AR would just project exactly where the components of your building need to go. That would A, allow you a much higher level of accuracy that you can easily get using manual methods. And then B, just reduce all that time it takes to manually measure things. I can imagine it being much, much, much faster as well, so I'm quite bullish on that. At a high level and a slightly lower level, it's not obvious to me if they will be able to get to the level where it just projects it with perfect accuracy right in front of you. It may be the case that a person moving their head around and constantly changing their point of view wont ever be able to project these things with millimeter precision––it's always gonna be a little bit jumpy or you're gonna end up with some sort of hard limit in terms of like how precisely you can project it. My sense is that locator technology will get good enough, but I don't have any principle reason believing that. The other thing is that being able to take advantage of that technology would require you to have a really, really accurate model of your building that locates where every single element is precisely and exactly what its tolerances are. Right now, buildings aren't designed like that, they are built using a comparatively sparse set of drawings that leaves a lot to sort of be interpreted by the people on site doing the work and efforts that have tried to make these models really, really, really precise, have not really paid off a lot of times. You can get returns on it if you're building something really, really complex where there's a much higher premium to being able to make sure you don't make any error, but for like a simple building like a house, the returns just aren't there. So you see really comparatively sparse drawings. Whether it's gonna be able to work worth this upfront cost of developing this really complex, very precise model of where exactly every component is still has to be determined. There's some interesting companies that are trying to move in this direction where they're making it a lot easier to draw these things really, really precisely and whave every single component exactly where it is. So I'm optimistic about that as well, but it's a little bit TBD. Dwarkesh Patel This raises a question that I actually wanted to ask you, which is in your post about why there aren't automatic brick layers. It was a really interesting post. Somebody left in an interesting comment saying that bricks were designed to be handled and assembled by humans. Then you left a response to that, which I thought was really interesting. You said, “The example I always reach for is with steam power and electricity, where replacing a steam engine with an electric motor in your factory didn't do much for productivity. Improving factory output required totally redesigning the factory around the capabilities of electric motors.” So I was kind of curious about if you apply that analogy to construction, then what does that look like for construction? What is a house building process or building building process that takes automation and these other kinds of tools into account? How would that change how buildings are built and how they end up looking in the end? Brian Potter I think that's a good question. One big component of the lack of construction productivity is everything was designed and has evolved over 100 years or 200 years to be easy for a guy or person on the site to manipulate by hand. Bricks are roughly the size and shape and weight that a person can move it easily around. Dimensional lumber is the same. It's the size and shape and weight that a person can move around easily. And all construction materials are like this and the way that they attach together and stuff is the same. It's all designed so that a person on site can sort of put it all together with as comparatively little effort as possible. But what is easy for a person to do is usually not what is easy for a machine or a robot to do, right? You typically need to redesign and think about what your end goal is and then redesign the mechanism for accomplishing that in terms of what is easy to get to make a machine to do. The obvious example here is how it's way easier to build a wagon or a cart that pulls than it is to build a mechanical set of legs that mimics a human's movement. That's just way, way, way easier. I do think that a big part of advancing construction productivity is to basically figure out how to redesign these building elements in a way that is really easy for a machine to produce and a machine to put together. One reason that we haven't seen it is that a lot of the mechanization you see is people trying to mechanize exactly what a person does. You'd need a really expensive industrial robot that can move exactly the way that a human moves more or less. What that might look like is basically something that can be really easily extruded by a machine in a continuous process that wouldn't require a lot of finicky mechanical movements. A good example of this technology is technology that's called insulated metal panels, which is perhaps one of the cheapest and easiest ways to build an exterior wall. What it is, is it's just like a thin layer of steel. Then on top of that is a layer of insulation. Then on top of that is another layer of steel. Then at the end, the steel is extruded in such a way that it can like these inner panels can like lock together as they go. It's basically the simplest possible method of constructing a wall that you can imagine. But that has the structural system and the water barrier, air barrier, and insulation all in this one really simple assembly. Then when you put it together on site, it just locks together. Of course there are a lot of limitations to this. Like if you want to do anything on top of like add windows, all of a sudden it starts to look quite a bit less good. I think things that are really easy for a machine to do can be put together without a lot of persistent measurement or stuff like that in-field. They can just kind of snap together and actually want to fit together. I think that's kind of what it looks like. 3D Printer Pessimism & The Rising Cost of LabourDwarkesh Patel What would the houses or the buildings that are built using this physically look like? Maybe in 50 to 100 years, we'll look back on the houses we have today and say, “Oh, look at that artisanal creation made by humans.” What is a machine that is like designed for robots first or for automation first? In more interesting ways, would it differ from today's buildings? Brian Potter That's a good question. I'm not especially bullish on 3D building printing in general, but this is another example of a building using an extrusion process that is relatively easy to mechanize. What's interesting there is that when you start doing that, a lot of these other bottlenecks become unlocked a little bit. It's very difficult to build a building using a lot of curved exterior surfaces using conventional methods. You can do it, it's quite expensive to do, but there's a relatively straightforward way for a 3D-printed building to do that. They can build that as easily as if it was a straight wall. So you see a lot of interesting curved architecture on these creations and in a few other areas. There's a company that can build this cool undulating facade that people kind of like. So yeah, it unlocks a lot of options. Machines are more constrained in some things that they can do, but they don't have a lot of the other constraints that you would otherwise see. So I think you'll kind of see a larger variety of aesthetic things like that. That said, at the end of the day, I think a lot of the ways a house goes together is pretty well shaped to just the way that a person living inside it would like to use. I think Stewart Brand makes this point in––Dwarkesh Patel Oh, How Buildings Learn. Brian Potter There we go. He basically makes the point that a lot of people try to use dome-shaped houses or octagon-shaped houses, which are good because, again, going back to surface area volume, they include lots of space using the least amount of material possible. So in some theoretical sense, they're quite efficient, but it's actually quite inconvenient to live inside of a building with a really curved wall, right? Furniture doesn't fit up against it nicely, and pictures are hard to hang on a really curved wall. So I think you would see less variation than maybe you might expect. Dwarkesh Patel Interesting. So why are you pessimistic about 3D printers? For construction, I mean. Brian Potter Yeah, for construction. Oh God, so many reasons. Not pessimistic, but just there's a lot of other interesting questions. I mean, so the big obvious one is like right now a 3D printer can basically print the walls of a building. That is a pretty small amount of the value in a building, right? It's maybe 7% or 8%, something like that. Probably not more than 10% of the value in a building. Because you're not printing the foundation, you're not printing like the overhead vertical, or the overhead spanning structure of the building. You're basically just printing the walls. You're not even really printing the second story walls that you have in multiple stories. I don't think they've quite figured that out yet. So it's a pretty small amount of value added to the building. It's frankly a task that is relatively easy to do by manual labor. It's really pretty easy for a crew to basically put up the structure of a house. This is kind of a recurring theme in mechanization or it goes back to what I was talking about to our previous lead. Where it takes a lot of mechanization and a lot of expensive equipment to replace what basically like two or three guys can do in a day or something like that. The economics of it are pretty brutal. So right now it produces a pretty small value. I think that the value of 3D printing is basically entirely predicated on how successful they are at figuring out how to like deliver more components of the building using their system. There are companies that are trying to do this. There's one that got funded not too long ago called Black Diamond, where they have this crazy system that is like a series of 3D printers that would act simultaneously, like each one building a separate house. Then as you progress, you switch out the print head for like a robot arm. Cause a 3D printer is basically like a robot arm with just a particular manipulator at the end, right?So they switch out their print head for like a robot arm, and the robot arm goes and installs different other systems like the windows or the mechanical systems. So you can figure out how to do that reliably where your print head or your printing system is installing a large fraction of the value of the building. It's not clear to me that it's gonna be economic, but it obviously needs to reach that point. It's not obvious to me that they have gotten there yet. It's really quite hard to get a robot to do a lot of these tasks. For a lot of these players, it seems like they're actually moving away from that. I think in ICON is the biggest construction 3D printer company in the US, as far as I know. And as far as I know, they've moved away from trying to install lots of systems in their walls as they get printed. They've kind of moved on to having that installed separately, which I think has made their job a little bit easier, but again, not quite, it's hard to see how the 3D printer can fulfill its promises if it can't do anything just beyond the vertical elements, whichare really, for most construction, quite cheap and simple to build. Dwarkesh Patel Now, if you take a step back and talk how expensive construction is overall, how much of it can just be explained by the Baumol cost effect? As in labor costs are increasing because labor is more productive than other industries and therefore construction is getting more expensive. Brian Potter I think that's a huge, huge chunk of it. The labor fraction hasn't changed appreciably enough. I haven't actually verified that and I need to, but I remember somebody that said that they used to be much different. You sent me some literature related to it. So let's add a slight asterisk on that. But in general the labor cost has remained a huge fraction of the overall cost of the building. Reliably seeing their costs continue to rise, I think there's no reason to believe that that's not a big part of it. Dwarkesh Patel Now, I know this sounds like a question with an obvious answer, but in your post comparing the prices of construction in different countries, you mentioned how the cost of labor and the cost of materials is not as big a determiner of how expensive it is to construct in different places. But what does matter? Is it the amount of government involvement and administrative overhead? I'm curious why those things (government involvement and administrative overhead) have such a high consequence on the cost of construction. Brian Potter Yeah, that's a good question. I don't actually know if I have a unified theory for that. I mean, basically with any heavily regulated thing, any particular task that you're doing takes longer and is less reliable than it would be if it was not done right. You can't just do it as fast as on your own schedule, right? You end up being bottlenecked by government processes and it reduces and narrows your options. So yeah, in general, I would expect that to kind of be the case, but I actually don't know if I have a unified theory of how that works beyond just, it's a bunch of additional steps at any given part of the process, each of which adds cost. Dwarkesh Patel Yeah. Now, one interesting trend we have in the United States with construction is that a lot of it is done by Latino workers and especially by undocumented Latino workers. What is the effect of this on the price and the quality of construction? If you have a bunch of hardworking undocumented workers who are working for below-market rates in the US, will this dampen the cost of construction over time? What do you think is going to happen? Brian Potter I suspect that's probably one of the reasons why the US has comparatively low construction costs compared to other parts of the world. Well, I'll caveat that. Residential construction, which is single-family homes and multi-family apartment buildings all built in the US and have light framed wood and are put together, like you said, by a lot of like immigrant workers. Because of that, it would not surprise me if those wages are a lot lower than the equivalent wage for like a carpenter in Germany or something like that. I suspect that's a factor in why our cost of residential construction are quite low. AI's Impact on Construction ProductivityDwarkesh Patel Overall, it seems from your blog post that you're kind of pessimistic, or you don't think that different improvements in industrialization have transferred over to construction yet. But what do you think is a prospect of future advances in AI having a big impact on construction? With computer vision and with advances in robotics, do you think we'll finally see some carry-over into construction productivity or is it gonna be more of the same? Brian Potter Yeah, I think there's definitely gonna be progress on that axis. If you can wire up your computer vision systems, robotic systems, and your AI in such a way that your capabilities for a robot system are more expanded, then I kind of foresee robotics being able to take a larger and larger fraction of the tasks done on a typical construction site. I kind of see it being kind of done in narrow avenues that gradually expand outward. You're starting to see a lot of companies that have some robotic system that can do one particular task, but do that task quite well. There's a couple of different robot companies that have these little robots for like drawing wall layouts on like concrete slabs or whatever. So you know exactly where to build your walls, which you would think would not be like a difficult problem in construction, but it turns out that a lot of times people put the walls in the wrong spot and then you have to go back and move them later or just basically deal with it. So yeah, it's basically a little Roomba type device that just draws the wall layout to the concrete slab and all the other systems as well–– for example, where the lines need to run through the slab and things like that. I suspect that you're just gonna start to see robotics and systems like that take a larger and larger share of the tasks on the construction site over time. Dwarkesh Patel Yeah, it's still very far away. It's still very far away. What do you think of Flow? That's Adam Neumann's newest startup and backed with $350 million from Andreeseen Horowitz.Brian Potter I do not have any strong opinions about that other than, “Wow, they've really given him another 350M”. I do not have any particularly strong opinions about this. They made a lot they make a lot of investments that don't make sense to me, but I'm out of venture capital. So there's no reason that my judgment would be any good in this situation–– so I'm just presuming they know something I do not. Dwarkesh Patel I'm going to be interviewing Andreeseen later this month, and I'm hoping I can ask him about that.Brian Potter You know, it may be as simple as he “sees all” about really high variance bets. There's nobody higher variance in the engine than Adam Neumann so, maybe just on those terms, it makes sense. Dwarkesh Patel You had an interesting post about like how a bunch of a lot of the knowledge in the construction industry is informal and contained within best practices or between relationships and expectations that are not articulated all the time. It seems to me that this is also true of software in many cases but software seems much more legible and open source than these other physical disciplines like construction despite having a lot of th

In this episode of Info Product Mastery, I sit down with Simon Grimm and discuss his path from JavaScript developer to content creator, and how it’s given him an incredible lifestyle and balance with his family. Topics covered [01:25] Adrian introduces Simon Grimm, a podcaster, developer, and info product creator. [03:00] Simon talks to Adrian about how their backgrounds are similar but also completely different as developers. [04:32] Being that Simon specializes in Javascript, Adrian asks where Ionic fits into the overall framework of Javascript. [05:49] “It’s more of a UI library..” - Simon referring to Ionic [07:02] Simon discusses how he went from being a developer to an info product creator. [07:29] “I can’t exactly why I started a blog in the first place. I think it was just to document whatever I learned.” - Simon [10:43] “Create content, get out of your comfort zone, and if you find that you're learning something new….and especially if you find that the documentation for a library is poor….that is in your face market validation….” - Adrian [11:53] “You were consistent. It took years to do, it wasn’t overnight…..” - Adrian responding to Simon talking about the beginning of this blog and the time and effort it took to build it. [13:53] “And by the way. About the beginnings of my blog. This was so bad…..” - Simon joking about his early content but also knowing that you have to start somewhere. [15:18] Adrian remarks on early content and how even if it isn’t the best or greatest, it still had value to someone. You can look back at your early work and see that after a period of time of publishing consistently. [17:03] “I never want to lose that ability to hit publish on something.” - Adrian remarking on the feeling of putting yourself out there. [18:48] After the guys joke about OnlyFans, Adrian asks Simon about the journey for the subscriber. How does he get customers to opt in and purchase content? [21:17] “Right now I’m a big fish in a small pond..Ionic is a small niche, and people know me as an expert.” - Simon remarking on future plans for his business after talking about the customer journey and the difficulties he faces. [23:47] “Niching down to the point where you can find this area that you can dominate….and then from there you start climbing up the ladder to these larger and larger markets” - Adrian on how to start creating and then grow and transition your business. [28:32] After Simon talks about transitioning his business and preparing for the inevitable future in which he will have to learn and teach new ideas, Adrian responds by saying “the most intelligent people are all eventually successful.” In the end it's about showing up and doing the work. [30:28]

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Defender's Advantage of Interpretability, published by Marius Hobbhahn on September 14, 2022 on LessWrong. TL;DR: In this post, I want to argue why Interpretability & Transparency tools have a defender's advantage if they are used correctly, i.e. they improve alignment much more than new capabilities and therefore mitigate risks of dual use. I draw parallels from biosecurity researchers who have thought about the risks of dual-use and defender's advantages in more detail and I think that the AI safety community can learn a lot from them. Lastly, I want to point out that not all interpretability tools have a clear defender's advantage and some interpretability research might still carry a lot of risks when used incorrectly. I'd like to thank Lee Sharkey and Simon Grimm for their feedback on this post. Introduction Most technology is dual-use in some way--a knife can be used as a household appliance or as a weapon. However, different technologies have different propensities to be used for good or bad, e.g. more research into walls will likely benefit the defender more than the attacker while more research into the capabilities of viruses benefits attackers more than defenders. I feel like we, the AI safety community, have not thought enough about which approaches have a clear defender's advantage or how we could steer existing approaches to have more of a defender's advantage. To my (very limited) understanding, the biosecurity community has thought a bit more about these kinds of dual-use trade-offs. Therefore, we could probably learn some things from them. In this post, I want to briefly look at some of the possible lessons from biosecurity and see if we can translate them to AI safety. Then I want to argue why interpretability is one of the approaches that plausibly has a defender's advantage. I'm certainly not the first person to have come to the conclusion that interpretability is important for alignment. Chris Olah has made the case for interpretability for years. Neel Nanda has provided a long theory of impacts of interpretability research. Quintin Pope has made the case for optimism about interpretability. Evan Hubinger has provided 11 proposals to build safe AI that are all essentially something+interpretability, has developed an interpretability tech tree and summarized transformer circuits. ARC is working on ELK (and related topics) that certainly read to me as if they are intended to prevent deceptive alignment. There are many further good posts on aspects of interpretability (see e.g. here, here, here, or here). The reason why I add this post to the long list of posts arguing for the importance of interpretability is that I feel like the “defender's advantage” framework allows for an easy way to decide which kind of interpretability research will help more with alignment than with capabilities and thus alleviates one major concern that some people have against it (personal conversations, not sure if someone wrote this down). Lessons from Biosecurity Most of the following comes from personal discussions with biosecurity researchers or podcasts like “Hear This Idea”s interview with Kevin Esvelt and Jonas Sandbrink. I'm not a biosecurity researcher myself and the following is likely to lack nuance. Gain-of-function(Enhancement of potential pandemic pathogens) = bad: More specifically, approaches that require us to build a new capability in order to learn how to safeguard against it makes offensive scaling easier than defensive scaling, e.g. the new capability enables the attacker to do more new things than the defender. Firstly, you have created a deadly virus with certainty but the development of the vaccine is uncertain--you stacked the odds against you. Secondly, even if your vaccine (or other defense) is successful, it's likely easy to modify the new ...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Defender's Advantage of Interpretability, published by Marius Hobbhahn on September 14, 2022 on LessWrong. TL;DR: In this post, I want to argue why Interpretability & Transparency tools have a defender's advantage if they are used correctly, i.e. they improve alignment much more than new capabilities and therefore mitigate risks of dual use. I draw parallels from biosecurity researchers who have thought about the risks of dual-use and defender's advantages in more detail and I think that the AI safety community can learn a lot from them. Lastly, I want to point out that not all interpretability tools have a clear defender's advantage and some interpretability research might still carry a lot of risks when used incorrectly. I'd like to thank Lee Sharkey and Simon Grimm for their feedback on this post. Introduction Most technology is dual-use in some way--a knife can be used as a household appliance or as a weapon. However, different technologies have different propensities to be used for good or bad, e.g. more research into walls will likely benefit the defender more than the attacker while more research into the capabilities of viruses benefits attackers more than defenders. I feel like we, the AI safety community, have not thought enough about which approaches have a clear defender's advantage or how we could steer existing approaches to have more of a defender's advantage. To my (very limited) understanding, the biosecurity community has thought a bit more about these kinds of dual-use trade-offs. Therefore, we could probably learn some things from them. In this post, I want to briefly look at some of the possible lessons from biosecurity and see if we can translate them to AI safety. Then I want to argue why interpretability is one of the approaches that plausibly has a defender's advantage. I'm certainly not the first person to have come to the conclusion that interpretability is important for alignment. Chris Olah has made the case for interpretability for years. Neel Nanda has provided a long theory of impacts of interpretability research. Quintin Pope has made the case for optimism about interpretability. Evan Hubinger has provided 11 proposals to build safe AI that are all essentially something+interpretability, has developed an interpretability tech tree and summarized transformer circuits. ARC is working on ELK (and related topics) that certainly read to me as if they are intended to prevent deceptive alignment. There are many further good posts on aspects of interpretability (see e.g. here, here, here, or here). The reason why I add this post to the long list of posts arguing for the importance of interpretability is that I feel like the “defender's advantage” framework allows for an easy way to decide which kind of interpretability research will help more with alignment than with capabilities and thus alleviates one major concern that some people have against it (personal conversations, not sure if someone wrote this down). Lessons from Biosecurity Most of the following comes from personal discussions with biosecurity researchers or podcasts like “Hear This Idea”s interview with Kevin Esvelt and Jonas Sandbrink. I'm not a biosecurity researcher myself and the following is likely to lack nuance. Gain-of-function(Enhancement of potential pandemic pathogens) = bad: More specifically, approaches that require us to build a new capability in order to learn how to safeguard against it makes offensive scaling easier than defensive scaling, e.g. the new capability enables the attacker to do more new things than the defender. Firstly, you have created a deadly virus with certainty but the development of the vaccine is uncertain--you stacked the odds against you. Secondly, even if your vaccine (or other defense) is successful, it's likely easy to modify the new ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: All moral decisions in life are on a heavy-tailed distribution, published by Max Görlitz on July 4, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. (epistemic status: Written in the spirit of "strong opinions, weakly held" and in a way that is accessible for people who are new to effective altruism. Also, I am pretty sure this idea isn't original, but I haven't seen it written up. So please point me there in case I missed something.) Heavy tails explained I think of recognizing heavy-tailed distributions in many places as one of the key insights of the effective altruism mindset. In a heavy-tailed distribution, a large part of the probability mass lies in the “tail”. It goes to zero more slowly than an exponential distribution. This means extreme values are likelier and outlier data points occur more often. Examples Here are a few examples that indicate underlying heavy-tailed distributions in real life, as they clearly exhibit a significant skewness. The most effective health interventions are multiple orders of magnitude more cost-effective than the typical intervention. As most people know, global income is distributed highly unevenly. Some problems we can choose to work on are hundreds of times more important than others. For example, depending on your worldview (!), preventing pandemics might be 100x more important than global health, and mitigating risks from AI might again be 100x more important. If you want to avert fewer tons of CO2, the lifestyle choice that makes by far the biggest difference is having one fewer child. But then, donating to certain climate charities is again many times more impactful than any lifestyle choice. Conclusion Now, here is what I mean by "all moral decisions in life are on a heavy-tailed distribution": The intuition is that a few decisions in life are of vast moral importance compared to many others, which are way less important. Now, what could those crucial decisions be? 80,000 Hours argues that career choice is among them. Donating a significant amount of your lifetime earnings to effective charities could also be high up there. I often find it helpful to think about this. If this hypothesis is true and I want to live a moral life, I need to get the big things right. This insight should lead me to put a lot of time into thinking about what the massively important decisions are and how to make better choices about them. Most everyday decisions probably matter less, and I ought not to worry much about, e.g., whether to take the train or a plane in a specific instance. Of course, these more minor things can also add up over a lifetime, and making moral choices on them is better than doing nothing. Nonetheless, I think many people should think less about these and take seriously the possibility that only a few of your judgment calls matter 1000x more than many others. Figure out what the big, morally important decisions are and try to get them right. Thanks to Simon Grimm, Moritz Hanke, and Katja Michlbauer for their helpful comments on this post. Appendix Click here for a nice explainer of heavy-tailed distributions in video format by Anders Sandberg. You might have heard of other names of concepts that hint at a very similar idea as heavy-tailed distributions: Pareto principle, 80-20 rule, power laws, fat-tailed distribution, tail risk, and black swan events. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: What success looks like, published by mariushobbhahn on June 28, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This article was written by Marius Hobbhahn, Max Räuker, Yannick Mühlhäuser, Jasper Götting and Simon Grimm. We are grateful for feedback from and discussions with Lennart Heim, SE and AO. Summary Thinking through scenarios where TAI goes well informs our goals regarding AI safety and leads to concrete action plans. Thus, in this post, We sketch stories where the development and deployment of transformative AI go well. We broadly cluster them like Alignment won't be a problem, . Because alignment is easy: Scenario 1 We get lucky with the first AI: Scenario 4 Alignment is hard, but . We can solve it together, because . We can effectively deploy governance and technical strategies in combination together: Scenario 2 Humanity will wake up due to an accident: Scenario 3 The US and China will realize their shared interests: Scenario 5 One player can win the race, by . Launching an Apollo Project for AI: Scenario 6 We categorize central points of influence that seem relevant for causing the success of our sketches. The categories with some examples are: Governance: domestic laws, international treaties, safety regulations, whistleblower protection, auditing firms, compute governance and contingency plans Technical: Red teaming, benchmarks, fire alarms, forecasting and information security Societal: Norms in AI, publicity and field-building We lay out some central causal variables for our stories in the third chapter. They include the level of cooperation, AI timelines, take-off speeds, size of the alignment tax, type of actors and number of actors Introduction There are many posts in AI alignment on sketching out failure scenarios. However, there seems to be less (public) work that talks about possible pathways to success. Holden Karnofsky writes in the appendix of Important, actionable research questions for the most important century: Quote (Holden Karnofsky): I think there's a big vacuum when it comes to well-thought-through visions of what [a realistic best-case transition to transformative AI] could look like, and such a vision could quickly receive wide endorsement from AI labs (and, potentially, from key people in government). I think such an outcome would be easily worth billions of dollars of longtermist capital. We want to sketch out such best-case scenarios for the transition to transformative AI. This post is inspired by Paul Christiano's What Failure Looks Like. Our goals are To better understand how positive scenarios could look like To better understand what levers are available to make positive outcomes more likely To better understand subgoals to work towards To make our reasoning transparent and receive feedback on our misconceptions Scenarios In the following, we will sketch out what some of the success stories for relevant subcomponents of TAI could look like. We know that these scenarios often lack important detailed counterarguments. We are also aware that every single point here could be its own article but we want this post to merely give a broad overview. Scenario 1: Alignment is much easier than expected The alignment problem turns out much easier than expected. Increasingly better AI models have a better understanding of human values, and they do not naturally develop strong influence-seeking tendencies. Moreover, in cases of malfunctions and for preventative measures, interpretability tools now allow us to understand important parts of large models on the most basic level and ELK-like tools allow us to honestly communicate with AI systems. We know of many systems where a more powerful actor is relatively well aligned to one or many powerless actors. Parents usually protect their children who couldn't survive without them, democratic governments...

This episodes guest is Simon Grimm from Ionic Academy, hear about his journey from sensible software developer working his was up that ladder to independent YouTuber teaching people how to make mobile apps with JavaScriptLast week I launched my new website All The Code so go take a look

Listen and subscribe at www.JustProWrestlingNews.com Like the show? Support the show and get bonus content at https://www.patreon.com/justprowrestlingnews I'm Matt Carlins and this is JUST Pro Wrestling News for Thursday, March 31, 2022. A special welcome to those of you listening on TheWrestlingRevolution.com. If you want to bring our updates to your website...email us: desk@justprowrestlingnews.com. WrestleMania weekend basically begins today. A bunch of promotions are running shows in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. The Collective kicks off its offerings at Noon Eastern with Glory Pro's “Cemetery Gates”. Later in the afternoon, it's Josh Barnett's Bloodsport 8…with Jon Moxley vs. Biff Busick…Minoru Suzuki vs. Chris Dickinson…the former John Morrison vs. Simon Grimm…and more. Tonight, Moxley defends the GCW Championship against AJ Gray at Joey Janela's Spring Break 6 Part 1. Janela himself is on that card. He'll take on Sean Waltman. Plus, Mickie James vs. Allie Katch. AAA is running a show at WrestleCon early this evening. Laredo Kid defends AAA's Cruiserweight title in a 3-way against Bandido and Flamita. La Rebelion defends the NWA Tag Titles against Aero Star & Drago. Plus, Psycho Clown vs. Black Taurus. Later tonight at WrestleCon, it's the Mark Hitchcock Memorial SuperShow…with Minoru Suzuki vs. Biff Busick…Timothy Thatcher vs. Tomohiro Ishii…The Briscoes vs. Homicide & Low Ki. Plus, Atsushi Onita and the Rock n Roll Express are set to appear. Major League Wrestling and Control Your Narrative are running TV tapings in Dallas today. (STINGER: AEW) Toni Storm is All Elite! She made her AEW debut on last night's Dynamite and beat The Bunny. Storm is the first to qualify for the Owen Hart Foundation Women's Tournament. FTR beat the Gunn Club and later challenged the Young Bucks to a match. We also saw some tension in The Pinnacle between FTR and MJF. Andrade El Idolo beat Darby Allin in last night's main event. Bryan Danielson beat Wheeler Yuta. Jon Moxley beat Jay Lethal. CM Punk beat Max Caster and made it clear he's going after the AEW Championship. Speaking of the champ, Hangman Page and Jurassic Express got their stolen title belts back from Adam Cole and reDRagon. Eddie Kingston, Santana & Ortiz returned to Dynamite, but couldn't overcome the numbers advantage of the Jericho Appreciation Society. The 30th opponent for the undefeated TBS Champion Jade Cargill will be…Marina Shafir. Fightful reports AEW will not renew Marko Stunt's contract. (STINGER: Impact) A new #1 Contender for the Knockouts Championship will be decided in a battle royal on tonight's Impact. Also on the show, Josh Alexander vs. Madman Fulton.. Jonathan Gresham vs. Kenny King Bullet Club's Jay White & Chris Bey vs. the Motor City Machine Guns. And Deonna Purrazzo holds another Champ Champ Challenge. Before The Impact has Deaner vs. Black Taurus. (STINGER: WWE) The Heritage Cup Championship is on the line on today's NXT UK. Noam Dar defends against Mark Coffey. One-half of the NXT UK Tag champs Trent Seven faces Ashton Smith. If Smith wins, he and Oliver Carter get another title shot against Seven & Tyler Bate. Also on the show, Amale vs. Xia Brookside. That's JUST Pro Wrestling News for Thursday, March 31st. Our next update comes your way tomorrow morning, so be sure to subscribe to this feed. We also thank you in advance for leaving a glowing rating or review.. I'm Matt Carlins. Thank YOU for listening. ~~~Full run down at www.justprowrestlingnews.com ~~~ • • • • • wwe #wrestling #prowrestling #smackdown #wwenetwork #wweraw #romanreigns #ajstyles #NXT #raw #njpw #wwenxt #SethRollins #TNA #johncena #RandyOrton #wrestlemania #ROH #WWF #summerslam #tripleh #aewdynamite #professionalwrestling #aew #allelitewrestling #aewontnt #DeanAmbrose #nxt #KevinOwens #wwesmackdown 

Listen and subscribe at www.JustProWrestlingNews.com Like the show? Support the show and get bonus content at https://www.patreon.com/justprowrestlingnews I'm Matt Carlins and this is JUST Pro Wrestling News for Thursday, March 31, 2022. A special welcome to those of you listening on TheWrestlingRevolution.com. If you want to bring our updates to your website...email us: desk@justprowrestlingnews.com. WrestleMania weekend basically begins today. A bunch of promotions are running shows in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. The Collective kicks off its offerings at Noon Eastern with Glory Pro's “Cemetery Gates”. Later in the afternoon, it's Josh Barnett's Bloodsport 8…with Jon Moxley vs. Biff Busick…Minoru Suzuki vs. Chris Dickinson…the former John Morrison vs. Simon Grimm…and more. Tonight, Moxley defends the GCW Championship against AJ Gray at Joey Janela's Spring Break 6 Part 1. Janela himself is on that card. He'll take on Sean Waltman. Plus, Mickie James vs. Allie Katch. AAA is running a show at WrestleCon early this evening. Laredo Kid defends AAA's Cruiserweight title in a 3-way against Bandido and Flamita. La Rebelion defends the NWA Tag Titles against Aero Star & Drago. Plus, Psycho Clown vs. Black Taurus. Later tonight at WrestleCon, it's the Mark Hitchcock Memorial SuperShow…with Minoru Suzuki vs. Biff Busick…Timothy Thatcher vs. Tomohiro Ishii…The Briscoes vs. Homicide & Low Ki. Plus, Atsushi Onita and the Rock n Roll Express are set to appear. Major League Wrestling and Control Your Narrative are running TV tapings in Dallas today. (STINGER: AEW) Toni Storm is All Elite! She made her AEW debut on last night's Dynamite and beat The Bunny. Storm is the first to qualify for the Owen Hart Foundation Women's Tournament. FTR beat the Gunn Club and later challenged the Young Bucks to a match. We also saw some tension in The Pinnacle between FTR and MJF. Andrade El Idolo beat Darby Allin in last night's main event. Bryan Danielson beat Wheeler Yuta. Jon Moxley beat Jay Lethal. CM Punk beat Max Caster and made it clear he's going after the AEW Championship. Speaking of the champ, Hangman Page and Jurassic Express got their stolen title belts back from Adam Cole and reDRagon. Eddie Kingston, Santana & Ortiz returned to Dynamite, but couldn't overcome the numbers advantage of the Jericho Appreciation Society. The 30th opponent for the undefeated TBS Champion Jade Cargill will be…Marina Shafir. Fightful reports AEW will not renew Marko Stunt's contract. (STINGER: Impact) A new #1 Contender for the Knockouts Championship will be decided in a battle royal on tonight's Impact. Also on the show, Josh Alexander vs. Madman Fulton.. Jonathan Gresham vs. Kenny King Bullet Club's Jay White & Chris Bey vs. the Motor City Machine Guns. And Deonna Purrazzo holds another Champ Champ Challenge. Before The Impact has Deaner vs. Black Taurus. (STINGER: WWE) The Heritage Cup Championship is on the line on today's NXT UK. Noam Dar defends against Mark Coffey. One-half of the NXT UK Tag champs Trent Seven faces Ashton Smith. If Smith wins, he and Oliver Carter get another title shot against Seven & Tyler Bate. Also on the show, Amale vs. Xia Brookside. That's JUST Pro Wrestling News for Thursday, March 31st. Our next update comes your way tomorrow morning, so be sure to subscribe to this feed. We also thank you in advance for leaving a glowing rating or review.. I'm Matt Carlins. Thank YOU for listening. ~Full run down at www.justprowrestlingnews.com ~ • • • • • wwe #wrestling #prowrestling #smackdown #wwenetwork #wweraw #romanreigns #ajstyles #NXT #raw #njpw #wwenxt #SethRollins #TNA #johncena #RandyOrton #wrestlemania #ROH #WWF #summerslam #tripleh #aewdynamite #professionalwrestling #aew #allelitewrestling #aewontnt #DeanAmbrose #nxt #KevinOwens #wwesmackdown 

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: How to write better blog posts, published by mariushobbhahn on January 25, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. About two years ago I started my personal blog and then branched out to the EA forum and LessWrong. My experience was overwhelmingly positive (much better than anticipated). This post is intended to encourage people, share some lessons and make it easier to start. I'd like to thank Max Räuker, Moritz Hanke and Simon Grimm for their feedback. Clarification: these tips are intended for less experienced writers. I don't claim to know everything and am interested in improving further. Feedback and discussions are welcome. Also, there is a forum post called “How to use the forum” (2018) but I don't think most people know it exists. So it makes sense to reiterate some of their guidelines. TL;DR: writing blog posts is good for lots of reasons, e.g. gaining clarity, education, interaction with others and career building. There are different tips and tricks to write better ranging from cutting content aggressively to quantifying uncertainty. The most important one is to just start writing and then iterate. If you dislike having your own blog, write posts on the forum and hop on other people's projects. Why write a blog post? You learn a lot: Aiming at writing a post is a way of gaining clarity on what you know and what you don't know. It will structure your thinking and lead you to research more thoroughly. Expecting others to read your post will likely also give you extra motivation to improve the article. Furthermore, I think people underestimate how much you can learn with 20 hours of focused googling, reading abstracts, skimming papers or videos, etc. By now, when I want to get a better grasp of a topic, I start writing a blog post. It's a positive experience: Most of my initial intuitive concerns were very wrong. The world didn't fall apart after sharing the first post and the feedback I got was positive. Most of the time, not that many people read your first posts and they are usually part of some ingroup, thus more forgiving. On the other hand, once my blog posts got better, the experience just became more and more satisfying. People responded to my posts, answered important questions, reached out via DM or mail, etc. It makes me feel like I contribute something to solving important problems, which is a great experience. You help others: We don't have the time and energy to research every topic or think about every question in detail. However, we can read a 10-minute summary to get a sufficiently good grasp of the issue. If you did a decent job with your post, most people will be very thankful for that. It might get you a job: Work trials at some EA organizations are comparable to writing a blog post, i.e. you are supposed to research a question and write down your results in a given amount of time. Having experience with that type of work is beneficial. Furthermore, your blog can already function as a signal for motivation and quality to potential future employers. I personally know of cases where people were hired because of blogposts they wrote. What should I write about? Here are some suggestions. I mostly chose example posts that are of very high quality in my opinion. I would frame them as something to aspire to, not the threshold for starting. Write about obvious things. We have a hard time understanding how large the understanding gap between experts and non-experts really is. Thus, extracting and summarizing your latent knowledge is super useful for others. A good example is Neel Nanda's post “AI alignment a bird's eye view”. Your latest research: Research speed increases by sharing your latest findings. A positive example of such a post is Ajeya Cotra's “Why AI alignment could be hard with modern deep learning”. Clarifying beliefs: Writing down bel...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA Analysis of the German Coalition Agreement 2021–2025, published by Yannick Muehlhaeuser on January 24, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. On 24 November 2021 three German parties (SPD, FDP and the Greens) agreed on a coalition agreement (PDF in German) that sets the German government's plans for the next four years. Here, we will analyse this agreement with effective altruist considerations in mind. We hope this post will improve the effective altruist community's model of the new German government and what to concretely expect for various cause areas. Epistemic Status: Overall we expect to have a positive bias towards the new government's plans. Furthermore, all of us are non-experts in the covered policy fields, limiting the depth of our analyses. Across all authors we've spent around 40-50h on this post. As every government is incentivised to present itself in the best possible light, we expect our methodology of focussing solely on the coalition agreement to slightly—though systematically—overrate the coalition. Planning fallacies on the government's side will likely also limit some policy proposals' full execution and impact. Max Räuker, Jasper Götting, Marius Hobbhahn, Simon Grimm, Ludwig Bald and Yannick Mühlhäuser contributed equally to this project. Executive Summary Across the government's agenda we found only a few concrete policy proposals on core EA topics. We considered the following proposals particularly promising: Plans to increase PPE stockpiles Measures to enhance farmed animal welfare Increased and more sophisticated state investments in R&D Streamlining permitting procedures and addressing NIMBYism (largely) technology-agnostic climate change mitigation The government's continued stance against nuclear energy strikes us as a mistake. Given the COVID-19 pandemic, we also found the lack of ambition on biosecurity surprising. The coalition agreement puts significant focus on shortening and streamlining permitting procedures and other bureaucratic hurdles, which we welcome. German policy-making currently seems more in flux than usual. Hence, the case for EA engagement with German politics arguably got stronger (see conclusion). Background Germany is the wealthiest and most populous member of the EU and plays a key role in international affairs. Germany has high favorability ratings throughout the world and relatively high state capacity. We therefore think that the plans of the next German government are particularly relevant for effective altruists focused on policy. The new government consists of three parties: SPD: center-left social democratic party Greens: progressive party with major focus on climate change FDP: socially liberal, fiscally conservative party All three parties are in general supporters of stronger European integration and social liberalism. Remaining differences are biggest in climate and fiscal policy. The Greens favour a more expansionary fiscal policy, which the FDP opposes. The FDP supports more moderate free-market solutions on climate change, while the Greens endorse more ambitious state-directed projects. We have the impression that coalition agreements are a relatively honest representation of the government's goals, though the language is often very finely crafted and might hide disagreement. Nevertheless, according to one estimate the last government fulfilled around 80% of its promises—we expect similar to slightly lower results for this government. The rest of this post will first focus on major EA cause areas; further below you will find a summary of other policy changes we thought notable. Core EA Issues Artificial Intelligence Overall, the government's stance is very vague, e.g. it is not clear how they want to balance regulation and innovation. There is no explicit stance on AGI or AI safety. The government ...

Für die Themenfolge zu Cannabis hat Vic sich mit Simon Grimm unterhalten. Simon ist Polizist und kandidiert für die Partei der Humanisten. Außerdem ist er bei dem Verein "Law Inforcement Against Prohibition" aktiv. Aufgrund seiner umfassenden Erfahrung konnte uns die gesellschaftliche und die Gesetzeslage in Deutschland etwas näher bringen. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/waswaehlstdueigentlich/message

Let's discuss Bloodsport 6 matches and my thoughts on them. I love Bloodsport shows and this one did not disappoint. Jon Moxley vs Josh Barnett which was the main event was very worth watching the whole show. However, you get Super Beast, Lio Rush, Alex Coughlin, Simon Grimm, Allysin Kaye, Davey Boy Smith Jr., Chavo Guerrero Jr., Rocky Romero and Chris Dickinson. Can't wait to talk to you.

At long last, the Simon Grimm interview! Simon Grimm - or occasionally Simon Gotch) is a twenty-year veteran of the biz. Formerly of the Vaudevillains in WWE, he is currently (as of the time we recorded this in early March) with MLW as well as Josh Barnett’s Bloodsport. Find him on Twitter https://twitter.com/deviousjourney on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/gotchstylewwe/ and buy merch at prowrestlingtees.com/simonsays We talked to him for nearly two hours - if you’d like the complete interview, it’s up in two parts on YouTube (here: https://youtu.be/7_n0MvmGbbU and here: https://youtu.be/R6JYR5lJJlQ) - he goes into waaaaay more depth about movies, wrestling history, and absolutely disgusting stories about wrestlers and promotions backstage. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/aedoubleback/message

MMA and pro wrestling legend Josh Barnett sits down with the hosts of AE Double Back to talk about his promotion, Josh Barnett’s Bloodsport and their upcoming PPV, Bloodsport 5 - featuring AEW stalwart Jon Moxley. Josh is one of the smartest - and funniest - minds in the fight game and he shares his decades of love and experience with three goofballs who know next to nothing. Find out how hard it is to find fighters with the skills required to make it in a Bloodsport ring, who he compares to the Samsonite gorilla and, of course, who wins: Godzilla or King Kong. Bloodsport 5 airs this Saturday, February 20th at 4 p.m. PST on fite.tv and https://www.bloodsport.watch/. Jon Moxley! Simon Grimm! Super Duper Beast? AE Doubleback drops new episodes every Thursday morning after AEW Dynamite and occasionally other times (psst - like this Monday when our Bloodsport 5 recap comes out!) at https://anchor.fm/aedoubleback or wherever you get your podcasts. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/aedoubleback/message

Andrew and Christian welcome back to the show "Weapon X" Matt Makowski who takes on Simon Grimm at Josh Barnett's Bloodsport 3. Makowski talks about his match with Grimm, what he's been doing to survive the pandemic, his thoughts on Colby Covington, having a match indoors vs. outdoors, and a host of other topics. #bloodsport #simongrimm #mattmakowski #wrestling #joshbarnett You can follow Matt Makowski at: Twitter: TheMattMakowski Instagram: matthewmakowski You can buy his merchandise at: https://mattmakowski.bigcartel.com/ You can purchase Josh Barnett's Bloodsport live and on demand on FITE.TV or through the FITE app: https://www.fite.tv/watch/josh-barnetts-bloodsport-2020/2p6f3/ Follow We are RIZIN at: Twitter: WeareRizinPod Andrew's Twitter: abenja1 J. Christian Gary's Twitter: Chrisgary92 Listen to us on Apple Podcasts (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... ) Soundcloud (https://soundcloud.com/user-112624935 ) RIZIN/JMMA Discord: https://discord.gg/SVmfH8

EP175 is with special guest Simon Grimm. He is a professional wrestler. Former WWE NXT Tag Champion, current member of the Contra Unit in MLW. We talk about his upcoming match on Josh Barnett's Bloodsport 3, the business of professional wrestling and it's culture, how people treat each other on social media, video games and more! Cheers! Video Version: https://youtu.be/j1JpJCUZoK8 Follow him on IG: @gotchstylewwe Pick up merch: https://www.prowrestlingtees.com/wrestler-t-shirts/simonsays.html Intro & Outro: "Vanity Fair" by Mr. Bungle Don't forget to like, share & subscribe and follow us on social media Instagram & Twitter: @RRBGPodcast PLEASE check out the Patreon page. Support the podcast and earn exclusive content like full audio interviews from Psycho Las Vegas from acts like Andrew WK, Red Fang, CKY and more. www.patreon.com/rrbg RRBG is a proud member of the Podbelly Network! Check out all the great shows on our network here: https://podbelly.com/ Sponsors! Kill Cliff! The premier recovery & energy drinks come from Kill Cliff. Their Mango Tango comes with 25 MG of CBD and it's the perfect way to recover from a hard work out or to work on your yoga practice. Check out their variety of flavors and styles. https://killcliff.com/ Saint Joints Check out our friends at Saints Joints providing the Pacific Northwest with carefully crafted Mixed Strain Joint packs. Featuring artwork from artists such as Skinner. https://www.saintsjoints.com/ Thunderking Coffee! Based out of Costa Mesa this coffee company brings you the best Cold Brew concentrates and beans roasted all locally in Southern California. Check out their products at: www.thunderkingbrewing.com

Hal and Danielle are joined by Simon Grimm (aka Simon Gotch). He’s perhaps best known for his time in WWE and NXT where he was one half of the Vaudvillains tag team with Aiden English. He’ll tell us all about what it’s been like to navigate the waters of COVID-19 as an independent wrestler who can’t wrestle right now. He’s also got thoughts on things like WWE and AEW’s empty arena shows, the evolution of the modern fans’ sensibilities and some of the most disgusting diseases that wrestlers are vulnerable to.The Three CountSimon put over Leyla Hirsh and Matt Makowski.Danielle put over wrestling twitter after darkHal put over Dr. Britt Baker DDS’ tour of her office.Hosted by Hal Lublin, Danielle Radford and Simon Gotch.Produced by Julian Burrell for Maximum Fun.If you want to talk about more wrestling throughout the week be sure to join us on Facebook and @TightsFights on Twitter and Instagram. PLUS! Check out our Tights and Fights Discord!If you liked the show, please share it with your friends and be sure to leave us a quick review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get podcasts.Plus our brand new T-Shirt is available now!

Part 2 of our explosive interview with Simon Grimm.

Hey #12sOfDozens! 2020 begins with a BANG (and a 2 parter!) with the devious Simon Grimm!! In Part 1: - Movies that have made Simon cry - Fighting waves of 2nd graders - Elsa from Frozen IS a villain - and a LOT MORE! This is one that you HAVE to hear!

One of the sports true pioneers joins Sucka Radio this week, Josh Barnett. For all you MMA purists, sit back and relax, because there will be some MMA talk, but we cover all things from face-punching to pro wrestling. Josh Barnett talks Bloodsport 2 and more Barnett opens up about how he came together with GCW Bloodsport, his match-up in the first event, the cancellation of his fight with Jon Moxley, what goes into bookings, his Bellator contract and more. Josh Barnett's Bloodsport 2 goes down on September 14 and features the likes of Killer Kross, Allysin Kay, Tom Lawlor, Ikuhisa "Minowaman" Minowa, Zachary Wentz, JR Kratos, Matt “Weapon X” Makowski, Anthony Henry, Chris Dickinson, Davey Boy Smith Jr., Santino Marella and Simon Grimm.

DALE! CULO! PRESTIGE WRESTLING! MR. WORLDWIDE! The Wrestleboys are joined this week by Will Quintana, owner of Pacific Northwest independent wrestling promotion PRESTIGE Wrestling! We talk with Will about his history as a wrestling fan, running an independent wrestling company, how he got started as a wrestling promotor, what it's like to book talent and put together shows, building relationships with wrestlers like "Filthy" Tom Lawlor and Simon Grimm (aka Simon Gotch), his love of hardcore music, and a bunch of great wrestler stories! Before our chat with Will, the 'boys go over the week in wrestling, including Raw, SmackDown, 205 Live, NXT, NXT UK, NJPW'S G1 Climax 29 Tournament, the builds to the upcoming SummerSlam and NXT TakeOver: Toronto PPVs, and the always-buckwild AAA Triplemanía XXVII in Mexico coming up this weekend, and for some reason, Pitbull aka Mr. Worldwide himself! FOLLOW WILL & PRESTIGE WRESTLINGWill on Twitter: @WillQuintanaNWPrestigeWrestling.netPRESTIGE Wrestling on Twitter: @WrestlePrestigePRESTIGE Wrestling on Instagram: @WrestlePrestigeWatch PRESTIGE Wrestling: IndependentWrestling.TV/promotion/PRESTIGEPRESTIGE Wrestling on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC84C218lL4X6zxjj7ECvwrA/videosSUPPORT GENUINE WRESTLEBOYSListen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts and make sure to leave us a rating & review!Buy our merch on our What a Maneuver store!Get a FREE 30-day trial of Audible while supporting Genuine Wrestleboys!FOLLOW GENUINE WRESTLEBOYSVisit Our WebsiteFollow Genuine Wrestleboys on Twitter: @WrestleboysCastFollow Genuine Wrestleboys on Instagram: @GenuineWrestleboysFollow Derek on Twitter: @ostercoaster!Follow Derek on Instagram: @bleuostercvlt!Follow Esai on Twitter: @duckshirt!Follow Esai on Instagram: @duckshirt!Follow Matt on Twitter: @wrestledrums!Follow Matt on Instagram: @mattondrums!Follow Matt's wrestling drums account on Instagram: @wrestledrums!Follow Zack on Twitter: @KayfabeDad!Follow Zack on Instagram: @mychemicaldadpants!This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

Film Brain discusses the biopic of wrestler Paige, produced by Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, and who better to do that with than other wrestlers, who talk about the film and how closely it represents the industry.

This past weekend, Blackcraft Wrestling and Destiny Wrestling had an incredible co-branded PPV "The Ritual" from the Don Kolov Arena in Toronto and Jonny was on hand for commentary! Following the event, he caught up with the two competitors from the main event, Simon Grimm and the Destiny World Champion, Josh Alexander who received a contract from Impact Wrestling by the executive vice president Scott D'Amore immediately after the event ended. The PPV is available on FITE TV but you can hear all about it on this special bonus episode of the Wrestling Compadres Slamcast!  Shop Compadres merch at www.DragonWagonShop.com

Shane Strickland & Monteasy Moore bring you Episode 7 Feat. Simon Grimm “Jack Reach Around” Guest: Simmon Grimm https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/s… Follow the podcast on twitter & Instagram @swervecitypodcast Follow Monteasy on twitter & Instagram @monteasymoore Follow Shane Strickland on twitter & Instagram @stricklandshane

Live From Starrcast in Chicago, IL, The Mat Mania Podcast celebrates 100 episodes! Started in November 2016 from a tour stop in Houston TX, Mat Mania has grown into a weekly update show for your favorite wrestling and music news and madness. We talk PWI’s top 10 wrestlers, top fighting games and so much more, live from Starrcast’s Westwood One Podcast Center. Special guests stop by including Lynx Kinetic, Maffew of Botchamania, Simon Grimm, Steve Wright and more. Thank you for listening and your support of the Mat Mania Podcast!

In this episode, Nikki & Jennifer discuss Big Cass' WWE departure, ROH vowing revenge against the WWE for the MSG show, Simon Grimm's opinion on Enzo's song, Cody's brand new Youtube Channel, All In, Money In The Bank, Takeover Chicago, Raw, Smackdown, and More! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Simon Grimm is ready to join the Nation of Conversation! Grimm formerly wrestled for WWE under the name Simon Gotch. There he was a member of the NXT Tag-team champion Vaudvillains. From there, he made his way to the Smackdown live main roster along with his partner, Aiden English. Then he was let go by the WWE, a decision he says he couldn’t be happier about. Why? Because the independent wrestling scene is thriving. And Grimm sees tons of talented wrestlers that he can’t wait to work with. Grimm will tell Hal, Mike and Danielle all about what it’s like to transition to the indies after being in the WWE, why he doesn’t believe in giving advice to wrestlers and he’ll even discuss what he thinks about that, "Bobby Lashley’s sisters" segment that was on Monday Night RAW this week. Hosted by Hal Lublin, Danielle Radford , and Simon Grimm. Produced by Julian Burrell for Maximum Fun. If you want to talk about more wrestling throughout the week be sure to join us on Facebook or @TightsFights on Twitter. If you liked the show, please share it with your friends and be sure to leave us a quick review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get podcasts.

Joining me this week is Simon Grimm. He is a former NXT Tag Team Champion as one half of The Vaudevillains & formerly known as Simon Gotch during his time with WWE. A lot gets covered in this conversation so pay attention because you aren't gonna want to miss any thing. Check it out!Support the show (http://spotlightseries.bigcartel.com)

By Haydn Gleed, ProWrestling.net Staffer (@haydngleed)Haydn Gleed hosts the Prowrestling.net Free Podcast and reviews the latest ROH TV show featuring Dalton Castle's first appearance as ROH Champion, Marty Scurll vs. Flip Gordon, Silas Young vs. Simon Grimm for the ROH TV Title (30:50)... 

  The caped crusader has faced many villains over the last 80 years; his rogue's gallery is one of the most notorious in comics, if not the most. But which dastardly do-badder is the worst of the worst? Professional Wrestler Simon Grimm joins us to find answer! See Mark and Hal LIVE in San Francisco on Sunday, January 14th with guests Cameron Esposito and Rhea Butcher! Get tickets here.

Today The Two Man Power Trip of Wrestling welcomes former WWE Superstar and one half of the Vaudevillians tag team as Simon Grimm FKA Simon Gotch joins the program. In a 90+ minute interview with Chad and John Poz, Grimm takes us deep into his tenure in the WWE while a member of the NXT brand and candidly discusses the very fast growth of the "developmental system" NXT has become for the company. We are also joined in the second half of the show by PCW ULTRA's Owner Mike Scharnagl as he discusses PCW Ultra's HUGE card PCW: Refuse to Lose. For this and every other episode of The Two Man Power Trip of Wrestling and The Triple Threat Podcast featuring "The Franchise" Shane Douglas please subscribe to us on iTunes, Podomatic, Player FM, Tune In Radio and Podbean. Also follow us on Twitter @TwoManPowerTrip

In this GAWP Interview Ben gets to chat with current Indie Star, former WWE/NXT star, and former NXT Tag Team Champion Simon Grimm, formally Gotch. Hear about where the Vaudevillians Gimmick came from and if he’s kept up with Aiden English since departing WWE. Also, hear about Simon’s taste in Horror Cinema, his thoughts on the 2017 Death Note Trailer, his ideal casting for the Joker, and why he decided to get into Wrestling in the first place. Enjoy this interview that is almost as awesome as Simon’s Moustache… Almost.

Welcome back to the Mat Madness Wrestling Podcast! Eric Trembicki, Aaron Lloyd, Josh Iguina and Ron Pasceri are back with a WWE Battleground preview and prediction episode along with a blockbuster interview with former NXT Tag Team Champion Simon Grimm (54 mins). Grimm took us from his days as a toddler watching wrestling with his brother all the way to what he's working on now with a lot of great stories and career details from NXT and SmackDown in between, including some ideas he pitched along the way. Ronnie Vs. The World is back with a takedown of the cancellation of Talking Smack and of course the guys weighed in on the Kurt Angle/Jason Jordan reveal on Raw. Oh, and everyone on the panel is excited for Brock Lesnar defending his Universal Championship agains Samoa Joe, Roman Reigns and Braun Strowman. Join the MVP (Most Valuable Podcast) for an especially great show!

Kervin D. interviews Simon Grimm, formerly known as WWE's Simon Gotch of The Vaudevillains, where he tag teamed with Aiden English. Get to know where and how he started in wrestling, his amazing Dusty Rhodes impression, and much more . Like, comment, share, and don’t forget to subscribe to our channels: Audio Version: @yepilw Video Version: YouTube.com/yepilw . You can also find us at the links below... . WEBSITE * yepilw.com EVENTS * Yepilw.EventBrite.com T-SHIRT STORE * ProWrestlingTees.com/yepilw SOCIAL MEDIA * Facebook.com/yepilw * Instagram.com/yepilw * Twitter.com/yepilw

You've come to know him as Simon Gotch of the Vaudevillains, but now you'll get to know Simon Grimm on Journey of a Frontman. Following his departure from WWE, the former NXT tag team champion and pop culture enthusiast has an incredibly engaging chat with Alex. There's plenty to talk about including stories from his time in the WWE, traveling the world with his fellow colleagues, his eclectic taste in music, his favorite television shows and the dynamic superstar's future plans. Everything's coming up Simon!

Simon Grimm is a Creator, Indie Maker & Solopreneur. He is currently working at The Ionic Academy. He joins the panel to talk about React Native and Capacitor. He starts by explaining how a "Capacitor" contributes to your web application. They talk about how to build web applications with a capacitor and how it differs from using a React Native. On YouTubeCreating Apps with Capacitor and React Native - RRU 217SponsorsChuck's Resume TemplateRaygun - Application Monitoring For Web & Mobile AppsBecome a Top 1% Dev with a Top End Devs MembershipLinksThe Ionic AcademySocialsDevdacticGitHub: saimon24LinkedIn: Simon GrimmTwitter: @schlimmsonPicksJack - Shop Polarized SunglassesPaige - Unseen Sunscreen SPF 40 | Oil-Free Face SunscreenSimon - Gandalf the Grey™ & Balrog™TJ - 11/22/63: A Novel: King, StephenAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy