Screwworm is a flesh-eating maggot!

I skimmed past many posts like this, assuming that it was some kind of stomach worm, or related to the suffering of wild worms (not that I am opposed to either of those, they just don't grab my attention as strongly)

Google Sheets also has a criminally under appreciated tool - Google App Script

You can write custom code, as Javascript, and have it run on a schedule, or as a function in a spreadsheet cell, or as a clickable menu item

Re: Possible investment strategies there is a dialogue on LessWrong from November 2023 which I think still holds up. Quoting from the takeaways:

Invest like 50% of my portfolio into pretty broad index funds with really no particular specialization

• Take like 20% of my portfolio and throw it into some more tech/AI focused index fund. Maybe look around for something that covers some of the companies listed here on the brokerage interface that is presented to me (probably do a bit more research here)
• Invest like 3-5% of my portfolio into each of Nvidia, TSMC, Microsoft, Google, ASML and Amazon
• Take like 2-5% of my portfolio and use it to buy some options (probably some long-term call options on some of the stocks above), making really sure I buy ones that have limited downside, and see whether I can successfully not blow up that part of my portfolio for like 2 years before I do any more here

And then I probably wouldn't bother much with rebalancing and basically forget about it unless I feel like paying much extra attention.

About energy companies, I think the investment idea is less about general global energy consumption via AI, but rather the companies that are helping to build out and power these large data centres.

Microsoft have been investing in nuclear energy, xAI's Colossus cluster was positioned right next to a natural gas plant, Sam Altman invested in and is now chair of the board of nuclear startup Oklo. And my understanding is that power substation equipment is a bottleneck with equipment like transformers now having a lead time of years

I agree with Greg that I'm not sure how causal that all was, as Vitalik says on the 80000 hours podcast:

Yeah. And when I got the Shiba tokens in 2021, I fully identified as EA then, and I was fully on board with defending the EAs against all of the various Twitter criticism. But at the same time, if you look at where I gave those donations, it was just a pretty broad spray across a bunch of things — the largest share of which basically had to do with global public health

(emphasis mine)

And as for the timing, in that same podcast episode he says:

What ended up happening was I was anticipating that these coins would just totally crash and burn, and they’d at most be able to cash out maybe $25 million. And I thought that, OK, there’s this very acute emergency situation in India, and they have to go and act quickly. And let’s act quickly, because if you act slowly, then, one, the COVID issue would… like, the opportunity to help would be gone — but also because that was in the middle of a crazy crypto bubble, and those coins could drop by 90% tomorrow. So I was definitely acting very hastily.

Well put! I will add that the competition includes companies like Amazon creating their own chips and others designing silicon specialised for inference (like Groq (not to be confused with xAI's model Grok))

I got an email from the IDC yesterday saying that they received "over 130 submissions" which is far fewer than I expected.

People who made a submission based on this post are a meaningful portion of all those who engaged with this process!

You might find this post interesting, which covered this and 3 other similar recent economics papers

Matthew Yglesias wrote a Giving Tuesday piece about GiveDirectly that makes a compelling case for effective giving to a general audience. The article addresses why one should consider directing charity to the Global South, what makes cash transfers an appealing intervention, and how this approach can be reconciled with the desire to volunteer locally.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/you-can-help-the-poorest-people-in

My first reaction is that working on AI safety directly is more specialised and niche, so it might be your comparative advantage, while the 80k one might be filled by candidates from a wider range of backgrounds