Michael Goff

Researcher into energy and urban systems.

[Michael Goff @MichaelKGoff]

@paulg @jakobgreenfeld My experienced based on a single data point (my own business, still alive but not really successful) is that for a small business, competitors are the least of our worries. In fact, small businesses are usually more interested in the health of the industry than in dominating it.

[Michael Goff @MichaelKGoff]

I predict that adding "permanent underclass" to my list of muted words/phrases will improve the experience.

[Michael Goff @MichaelKGoff]

@ramez @ben_golub It also seems(ed?) obvious that the Great Filter is nuclear war, climate change, resource depletion, and demographic collapse. A hazard in the Fermi Paradox is to extrapolate currently fashionable narratives to intelligences all over the universe.

[Michael Goff @MichaelKGoff]

@TrevMcKendrick That said, I don't think it was the not doing much that was bad. It was the fear about whether I would have a good future and the sense of failure that comes with unemployment.

I see many reasons why UBI would be unworkable, but I don't think mass depression would be among them.

[Michael Goff @MichaelKGoff]

@TrevMcKendrick I was out of work for seven months after I finish grad school in 2010. I was still doing things during that time, but it was the most miserable experience of my life with the exception of when my first wife died.

[Michael Goff @MichaelKGoff]

@AniC_dev I suppose we could experiment by sending a deliberately bad idea to YC and seeing if we get the "top 10%" treatment.

[Michael Goff @MichaelKGoff]

@financedystop Did this really happen? An anonymous Reddit post isn't exactly the most reliable source.

[Michael Goff @MichaelKGoff]

@perrymetzger I find that errors are much less frequent than they were 2-3 years ago but still occur. Despite that, I have a hard time seeing how I would do my work without them.

People warn me that I shouldn't trust the model's output blindly. No shit.

[Michael Goff @MichaelKGoff]

@_andrewthecoder No problem, since I assume the company assumes that people will inflate their experience, and it's a polite fiction that five years really means two years, which really means six months.

[Michael Goff @MichaelKGoff]

@7homaslin Kurt Gödel might have something to say about that.

[Michael Goff @MichaelKGoff]

@togelius @harryjwang I would be more sympathetic to this claim if AI detectors were more reliable. But they are opaque and make judgments that I at least cannot distinguish between guesswork. Maybe we need an AI that can understand the detectors and make writing sound more humanlike.

[Michael Goff @MichaelKGoff]

@CathyYoung63 Sometimes people hold their views out of conviction. Sometimes they hold views out of expedience fashionability. It is usually hard to tell the difference, but sometimes it is obvious.

It is also much easier to spot opportunism in odious views than in one's ideological allies.

[Michael Goff @MichaelKGoff]

@CCMarimba @patrickc Here's a paper. Declining natural gas prices and increased exports from China are major factors.
https://t.co/tFu91XIH4W

[Michael Goff @MichaelKGoff]

@LinkedInLunat1c Honestly, aside from a bit of cringey LinkedIn-speak, this isn't a bad idea. I've done something like that before but no longer do. Most people are too afraid to think about mortality, even though it is a fact of all our lives.

[Michael Goff @MichaelKGoff]

@LinkedInLunat1c George Costanza always has something ready to go.

[Michael Goff @MichaelKGoff]

Blog post this week re-examining urban scaling. I identify five reasons why results might not be as strong and as reliable as thought.

https://t.co/C3NRAawxk8

[Michael Goff @MichaelKGoff]

@ben_j_todd "Follow your passion" is not wrong per se, but it is horribly cliched and unhelpful.

[Michael Goff @MichaelKGoff]

How we know AGI is close at hand.

Me: How many r's are in 'strawberry'?
AI: Are you kidding me with this bullcrap?

[Michael Goff @MichaelKGoff]

@DrPhiltill I'm not sure that cognitive capacity is the bottleneck. The sheer volume is higher than ever before, but a major reason why it feels marginal is that we are moving farther from the frontier. AI will, if anything, accelerate this reality.