Favorite Rejects 2022-10-12
"You pay every time you board a bus, and that makes you think about whether you want to ride it. If you paid every time you used a parking space, you'd also think about whether you want to drive. Free parking doesn’t mean free markets; it often means freeloading."
— @DonaldShoup
DAAM... You saw it here first! Attribution maps for Stable Diffusion based on upscaling and aggregating cross-attention activations in the latent denoising subnetwork: arxiv.org/abs/2210.04885 example for "an angry, bald man doing research" below - demo at daam.ralphtang.com:8080
One of the real oddities of American policy is that there’s this extremely high FDA bar to bring new medicine to market, but if you have a “supplement” that *definitely* doesn’t work you can just do whatever you want.
This is a necessary move from Biden.
US/Saudi relations have always been a cynical deal with the devil. We put up with their shittiness in exchange for them keeping the oil flowing.
If the Saudis aren't going to help us on energy, why on earth should we deal with them at all?
The New York Times @nytimes
Get your new booster! About 1.5 times as effective as the previous vaccine...plus, you're probably due.
Spencer LaVere Smith @Labrigger
Conservatives really struggle to explain how, specifically, liberals are to blame for a broad national increase in murder that mostly happened during Donald Trump’s presidency.
It was because of vaccine mandates? Funding cuts that didn’t happen in the vast majority of places?
I think you can tell a pretty clear story that the crime wave happened because cops reacted to the Floyd protests with a de facto strike, but that winds up not being a flattering narrative for anyone.
It’s kind of trippy that we’re so much closer to having AI that can generate a feature film based on a simple text prompt than to having a robot that can make a turkey sandwich.
I think this is the wrong framing. US wars have run up a huge body count.
The right framing: since the cold war there have been four (4) pretty straightforward "unprovoked" wars of aggression:
Iraq-Kuwait
US-Iraq
Russia-Georgia
Russia-Ukraine
ian bremmer @ianbremmer
