Lisa Randall's book "Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs" has that vibe (not about passing stars, but about the solar system passing through an area of the galaxy thick with dark matter - but the imagined impact is the same).
Great short article. Takeaway: because of ancient star flybys
"the uncertainties of Earth’s past orbit make it difficult to be confident more than 50 million years. And that has a significant impact on paleoclimate studies."
"You can also bet that a full stack js dev would rather buy your Kafka wrapper than learn Scala, which will do nothing for her career prospects."
The implicit point is that we often abstract to the level of the company, but we can (sometimes more profitably) abstract just to the level of the purchasing authority (and those are often different and have different incentives).
GPT-4 needed about 50 gigawatt-hours of energy to train. Using our scaling factor of 30x, we expect GPT-5 to need 1,500, GPT-6 to need 45,000, and GPT-7 to need 1.3 million.
In 2022, the largest share of Valentine's Day spending went to Jewelry (45.75%), followed by Evening Out (31.35%) and Clothing (21.46%). This indicates a strong preference for significant, lasting gifts and experiences over more traditional, consumable options like Candy (15.90%) and Flowers (16.71%).