The most interesting part here is that AI isn't replacing the learning goals, it's replacing the evidence instructors used to measure them

This really reinforces the idea that cordage was less a single invention than a general-purpose mechanical primitive

Indeed. I maintain a mental list of underrated conceptual leaps throughout history and rope is in there. Also on the list is writing, statistics, and the world wide web.

The wheel is overrated. It isn't that innovative (having been invented many times throughout history by various cultures) and to be properly useful it needs environmental adaptations. Controlled fire is neither under- nor overrated, I think.

> I maintain a mental list of underrated conceptual leaps throughout history and rope is in there

One has to wonder how many times they had to be a conceptual leap too. Rope could've been "invented" hundreds of times over the last 100,000 years, depending on how lossy knowledge was.

I think that a huge conceptual leap was the realisation that sex leads to pregnancy. The earliest surviving texts talk of hereditary - implying this was known before writing. This realisation has been the basis of transfer of power and resources, laying the ground for formation of empires and generational blood fueds.

I expect this would be readily learned from observation (of humans [changes in menstruation relating to puberty and during pregnancy would give a faster-acting conceptual connection] and/or of livestock). The exact mechanism might easily be misunderstood and subject to all kinds of wrong theories, but the causal linkage would be hard to avoid learning. Is it not the general consensus among anthropologists that this practical knowledge would long predate writing?

Surely, if ancient humans could understand and then predict the seasonal movement of the stars to plan agriculture, they'd be able to work out that there is a linkage between sex and pregnancy.

Isn't the sex => baby causation well known even among monkeys?

I feel like even in this thread people are missing a huge one:

Pottery.

Can't have soup without pottery. (nit: you can use some sort of leaf bowl but like, eh)

We tend to picture prehistoric technology as a progression of increasingly clever stone tools because stone is what survives, but rope may have been closer to infrastructure

Stone age peoples still existed until fairly recently in Africa and Australia, so stone age technology isn't prehistoric at all. What's prehistoric is stone age technology from other parts of the world.

Being from later developed part of Europe that is Finland. It is fun to consider that Iron age ended in 1000-1300 CE... So whole "ages" thing is really location dependent...

Problem is all those people likely have had various contacts with other cultures and it is unknown what impact that had.

Time to start trying to delineate the Rope Age?

I think the political-risk point is underrated. Even if you somehow get the engineering and construction costs under control, you're still asking investors to commit capital for decades while permitting rules, subsidies, electricity markets, and governments can all change underneath them

What I find interesting is how little the sales pitch seems to have changed. "Yes, smaller reactors lose economies of scale, but we'll make it up through factory production, standardization and repetition" apparently sounded plausible in the 1950s too

> "Yes, smaller reactors lose economies of scale, but we'll make it up through factory production, standardization and repetition"

Why not both? Large Modular Reactors (LMR). You can produce standardized modules in a factory and ship them via barges to their final destination.

See for example: https://whatisnuclear.com/offshore-nuclear-plants.html

Why not Large Modular reactors? You’ll produce fewer of every component, making it less feasible to set up an assembly line for it. You’ll build everything bespoke, because you’ll only build it a few times.

But assembly as well. People learn by doing. The second reactor will be built quicker than the first and third will be quicker than the second.

And you can see it in the Rolls-Royce order book. 3 separate countries have ordered 3 reactors to start with. An order book of 9 reactors strongly incentivises setting up an assembly line.

Then you have the additional expense of bringing the power ashore, and of building the breakwater. Most coastal sites are environmentally sensitive - think of Trump's hatred for offshore wind turbines, and imagine how people would feel about something so much more massive!

But in a slightly more-plausible vein, Rolls Royce are pushing mid-sized MRs in the 0.5 GW range, with the selling point that they can be built on the location of ex-fossil fuel or 1st gen nuclear power plants.

They're still more expensive per MWh than a modern large nuclear plant, but have the benefit of reusing existing grid connections and other infrastructure. Whether that's actually enough to make them a commercial success is another matter, but there's a chance they could prove a useful stopgap until grid-scale storage costs come down further.

> but we'll make it up through factory production, standardization and repetition"

Those are economies of scale, for what it is worth.

I'd love to see the same experiment with responses normalized for length, and with actual essay quality scored separately from how helpful the model's feedback felt

Will give this a shot - we're going to try to work with students and schools better on normalizing this stuff out

The test of whether a work keeps unfolding under sustained attention is much better than asking whether it produces a strong reaction in the first five seconds

What I like here is that the interesting behavior survives after throwing away one of the main assumptions behind boids: locality

The most interesting detail here isn't that an ethics lead left, but that she was apparently the only dedicated ethicist at the company and there’s no replacement