Favorite Rejects 2023-03-21

Dare Obasanjo @Carnage4Life

The idea that AI will soon day make it possible to identify the authors of anonymous blogs or Twitter accounts is wild. I wonder how many authors will be unmasked in the coming years?

Mike Conover @vagabondjack

GPT-4 is able to infer authorship from a passage of text based on style and content alone. Given the first four paragraphs of the March 13, 2023 @stratechery post on SVB, GPT-4 identified Ben Thompson as the author. https://t.co/G9ObYbvOTX https://t.co/Ecjv83O8No

roon @tszzl

as long as GPUs are scarce and compute is finite there will be work for humans. even if we summon godlike entities they will have quests for you

Andy Boenau @Boenau

K-8 students who live within ONE MILE: in 1969, 89% walked or biked to school. in 2009, 13% walked or biked to school. That suggests parenting culture plays a much larger role than car culture. Or parenting culture IS car culture.

Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz

Wow. @SubstackInc experimented with pricing, reducing it by 1 cent, so e.g. instead of $10/month, do $9.99/month. The result? A significant decrease for the pricing ending with .99. Which goes against conventional pricing wisdom!! Why it's worth running experiments!

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 @Noahpinion

LLMs are to software as machine tools are to hardware.

Matthew C. Klein @M_C_Klein

Interesting argument from @pkedrosky that the biggest impact of LLMs will be reducing the cost of software engineers to ~0: https://t.co/Ue4xjIYQKk

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

There is no energy technology that can’t be sabotaged by inability to get infrastructure projects built. https://t.co/uJLKGK9fBH

James Hewett @JamesHewettDC

PJM basically isn’t building extra high-voltage (345+kV) transmission. Since implementing Order 1000 in 2014, these projects have fallen off a cliff. While a lot of us knew this, actually seeing the numbers in @ClaireWayner’s new @RockyMtnInst blog is something: https://t.co/zxgUElJfFx

Zaid Jilani @ZaidJilani

In San Francisco, which is preparing a $5 million/per person reparations plan that likely will violate state law and thus never be implemented, half of black students can barely read

darrellowens.substack.comHalf of Black Students Can Barely ReadThe racial wealth gap in the Bay Area starts with the stunning test scores coming out of our education system.

Steve Ilardi @dr_ilardi

If covid conclusively originated from a lab, it would be an abject disaster for the field of virology. Funding would dry up; scrutiny, restrictions, and oversight would go through the roof (as they should). Most virologists are thus heavily biased toward natural (non-lab) origin https://t.co/FUN7a0Y2WJ

Alex Washburne @WashburneAlex

Academic scientists are under extreme pressure to placate their peers for reviews, grants, collaborations, etc As their peers are implicated in creating a pandemic & other peers are covering it up, academic virologists are not an objective group. They are an industrial lobby.

Niko McCarty 🧫 @NikoMcCarty

Glass made from amino acids 👓 Chemically modified peptides were melted into a supercooled liquid and quenched to form "biomolecular glass." The glass disintegrates in soil after ~7.5 months. Normal glass takes 1 million years (seriously). science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

TheOmniZaddy 🌹🔰🏗 @TheOmniZaddy

This is why YIMBYs talk about “Housing Denied Is Housing Delayed”. This subsidized housing development was first proposed in 1978! Endless lawsuits and delays have dragged this project on for 40+ years. That is 40+ years of housing being denied to would-be residents. (1/8)

Olivia Killingsworth @olivekilworth

Here's why we joined with @pilarmm98 of @HousingHelpInc1 in calling out these Long Island NIMBYs: she's seen firsthand the damage exclusionary zoning can do. Housing delayed is housing denied. https://t.co/EpWLbklKDk https://t.co/KfRai2FS0G

I watched C-beams glitter in the dark 🇺🇦🇨🇦🇹🇼 @accidentalflyer

The core of the issue. SFPD simply won’t do a thing so criminals will all do crimes in San Francisco. Better income than tech workers with more flexible hours and zero risk of getting laid off. https://t.co/IJIXogeYtV

Darrell Owens @IDoTheThinking

SFPD also doesnt do anything. The ultra viral Package Thief Glitter Bomb YouTube guy exclusively does videos in SF now where he reliably gets the package stolen with a GPS tracker yet SFPD is too lazy to similarly catch the perps. Genuinely crazy the dept just doesnt do anything.