Favorites 2024-08-05
His article starts with "Nobody really knows why stocks go up or down, even though everyone pretends to know." Since he wrote that, the Nikkei 225 opened back up over 10%. One commenter said "Turns out every single explanation for line go down in last 24 hours was wrong. Because line go up now". (cached).
One person said "from Star Wars to Star Trek". The iteration speed on this has been insane, just 4 years separate the engine on the left from the one on the right. Although of course they had earlier prototypes dating back another 10 years. Not only does it look cooler, but if I'm reading the wikipedia page correctly, Raptor 3 has 50% more thrust and like double the thrust to weight ratio. Further, if you’re wondering, like I was, why there are no ribs from the fuel/coolant flowing around the bell, the raptor has those, but they’re inside. I’m not sure how they fab that.
It's sorta wild that of the four technologies that were possible avenues for the current generation of chips, the only one that worked was the one with the most challenges on this table. On the other hand, maybe you find more challenges on the one that succeeds. Maybe the others would have more challenges if we overcame the ones we found. Anyway, if any of these do end up being viable some day, I can imagine the factories being another 10 or 100x more expensive. Imagine trying to explain the situation to a time traveler from 2000 (cached).
If you haven't heard about the RFK bear story, here's one short version (cached), and another (cached)
He says maybe he got the brain worm from the bear, so clearly this evil kermit meme is inaccurate. (cached)
Longer Reads
• I've posted a bit recently about new RCTs of basic income which had disappointing outcomes. Here's a long post arguing that the most recent one was in fact a success. I mostly still favor a UBI, but mostly because of the ease of administration compared to the patchwork of complicated programs we have now. Further, since that article was published, another has come out saying UBI didn’t reduce household debt. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Tesla Cybertruck uses a new 'dry cathode' type battery. If they scale it up, it's expected to require much smaller factories, which could translate to lower battery costs. But watch out, I think Samsung has something even better that I'll link to tomorrow. (src)(cached)
– Earlier Twitter was doing some weird stuff that was inconveniencing the Harris campaign. I said at the time that the problems looked more like bugs than purposeful choices. Today "Progressives for Harris" was shut down for what looked to be politics rather than glitches. Seems bad. (src)(cached)
– Guy inventing dressage: "hey do you think we could get a horse to dance, via the ratatouille method". I was not actually sure what it looks like, and I'm sorry to say, I found it quite boring. (src)(cached)
– JD Vance in an old article goes pretty close to the dril ISIL quote, except for Stalin. (src)(cached)
– More cool demos of ChatGPT Advanced Voice, this time reading a poem in different styles. (src)(cached)
– Looks like homicides per capita have now fallen below pre-covid levels in 2024. (src)(cached)
– It's been just 18 months since Microsoft's chatbot called an AP reporter "Hitler, but ugly". We've come a long way. (src)(cached)
– 97% of car buyers in China say they plan to for their next car to be electric. (src)(cached)
– A nonprofit is trying to block repairs to rail near a beach, previously they've campaigned to protect free parking beside the beach as well. All in the name of environmentalism. (src)(cached)
– It's important to differentiate 'the base' of the Democratic party from left wing coalition members. "base is your core, reliable supporters. For Democrats, that’s Black women and college suburbanites". (src)(cached)
– It's BS that the Olympic committee won't let Taiwan display their flag because Chinese nationalists might have their feelings hurt. (src)(cached)