Robert Love

Senior Director of Engineering @GoogleCloud building planet-scale networking.

Previously @ToastTab, @Google Search, @Android, Linux kernel, author.

[Luis Garicano 🇪🇺🇺🇦 @lugaricano]

This plan is incompatible with freedom- a global class of planners telling us how long to work, how much we can grow, what we can eat. It is also completely wrong. All advances for climate (including the huge drop in battery and solar and wind costs) have come (and will come) from more innovation, more competition, firms that grow and invent and innovate and produce energy solutions that replace fossil fuels. If you enforce degrowth in the West you will kill for ever the climate agenda.

[Brian Albrecht @BrianCAlbrecht]

A "compute tax" fails on basically all the basics of optimal taxation.

- Don't tax capital
- Don't tax intermediate goods
- Don't tax easily manipulable things
- Don't tax small tax bases

Overall, a dumb idea.
https://t.co/v3lNfI8anq

[Robert Love @rlove]

The Last Dynasty is a most excellent book on Egypt's Ptolemaic period.

Honored to sponsor the interview's transcript!

[tylercowen @tylercowen]

My excellent Conversation with Toby Wilkinson, https://t.co/6lsPxIs02y, mostly about ancient Egypt.

[John O'Farrell @johnofa]

This would be a huge blow to America's tech sector. This country has always benefited from attracting the world's best and brightest. We should be making that easier, not harder.

[Robert Love @rlove]

@ericfisher When you post an update later, would love to see the model runs for Sunday

[Robert Love @rlove]

Oops

[Elizabeth Warren @SenWarren]

I've warned for months that a @JetBlue-@SpiritAirlines merger would have led to fewer flights and higher fares.

@JusticeATR and @USDOT were right to stand up for consumers and fight against runaway airline consolidation.

This is a Biden win for flyers! https://t.co/lJFGS3ucv3

[Joy He-Yueya @JoyHeYueya]

Scientists often make breakthroughs by synthesizing ideas across papers. In our new paper, we ask whether a language model can anticipate this process: given two parent papers, can it generate the core insight of a future paper built on them? 🧵⬇️

[Robert Love @rlove]

And we returned to the surly bonds of Earth after touching the face of God

[Robert Love @rlove]

The article also cites a shared interest in libertarian politics and PGP as if that doesn't describe everyone on the Internet in the 90s

The linguistic analysis is interesting but you can't use it to single out one individual

[Robert Graham @robertgraham]

Hi. Professional C/C++ programmer here. The open-source code I can find written by Adam Back and Satoshi Nakamoto don't look remotely similar.

Back's code looks typical of academic Unix programmers who also hack their code to run on Windows.

Satoshi code was written by a professional Windows programmer who also wrote for Unix.

Stylistically, they look nothing alike. There's not enough time between 2005 when I can find the newest Adam Back and January 2009 when Satoshi published Bitcoin/0.1 to account for the change. Both are perfectly competent programmers, but stylistically, they are completely different.

The NYTimes tried to compare their English language in posts/emails. I'm compare their C/C++ language in their open-source code. The NYTimes merely points out they both use C++ as if that's another corroborating detail, when the actual code seems to disqualify Adam Back.

[Robert Love @rlove]

So is the Strait of Hormuz open today?

[Jason Furman @jasonfurman]

Can someone please do this for Boston?

[Nature Medicine @NatureMedicine]

In a randomized controlled study of 1,298 participants, performance of humans when assisted by an #LLM was inferior to the LLM alone when assessing 10 medical scenarios.

https://t.co/vCMVfZn9ZW

[nicolas, 30 ans @nic_carter]

Many are wondering "what Google saw" that caused them to revise their post-quantum cryptography transition deadline to 2029 last week. It was this:

https://t.co/dQtmTK9pdz

[Daniel Gross @grossdm]

Pretty astonishing. In Texas, between 10:00 am and 4:00 p.m., 80-90% of electricity comes from carbon free sources. And storage is already a significant contributor in the early morning and evening

[Robert Love @rlove]

@mattyglesias I dunno Blake sounds sarcastic?

[Norn Group @NornGroup]

Multiple lines of evidence are converging on the idea that viruses you picked up decades ago might quietly be driving age-related diseases.

We've known for a few years that EBV raises MS risk 32-fold, and that molecular mimicry between an EBV protein and nerve insulation likely triggers brain autoimmunity. What remained unclear was why some people persistently carry EBV and others don't.

A new paper in @Nature from the @RyanDhindsa (whose lab has been supported by @impetusgrants) and @CalebLareau labs answers that at population scale. They mined ~735,000 human genomes for traces of Epstein-Barr virus, using reads of viral genomes that existing pipelines were throwing out as junk, and found that ~10% of people carry detectable EBV DNA in blood.

Carrying persistent EBV is associated with variable antigen processing, and the broader genetic architecture of viral persistence shares a component with lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and type 1 diabetes.

Meanwhile, a separate line of very recent evidence is also pointing in that direction. The shingles vaccine, targeting another persistent herpesvirus, is showing ~20% dementia risk reduction in quasi-randomized studies which has been replicated across multiple countries.

There seems to be more at the intersection of immunity and age-related disease than we initially thought.

[Robert Love @rlove]

@cojobrien 2024 was a long time ago

[SemiAnalysis @SemiAnalysis_]

Micron’s $100B megafab in NY is at risk of delay due to just 6 “concerned citizens” and their frivolous lawsuit. (1/10) 🧵

[Robert Love @rlove]

@tszzl Top brass is bimodal: Within minutes or not at all.

Personally I like to reply within seconds every once in a while to keep folks on their toes.

[Google Research @GoogleResearch]

We distinguished complex whale vocalizations using a model trained on birds.

We leveraged Google DeepMind's Perch 2.0 bioacoustics foundation model's transfer learning capabilities for classifying complex whale vocalizations to accelerate marine insights.