Favorites April 13th 2023

Mountain View, April 2022

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From the article, a big part of the problem is that the fuel economy standards don't apply to SUVs, and tarrifs protect them from foreign competition, so they're more profitable. This is a bummer, because the size of these cars makes them more dangerous cyclists and pedestrians, although it's only part of the problem, the other part is probably that americans drive more, especially for short trips.

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This new Dolly model looks pretty cool, like a legitimately open equivalent of LLaMA. Apparently folks have already translated the finetuning instruction/response pairs into other languages.

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I'm a fan of tall bulidings with step backs like this, I'd be in favor of 100 more. Here's a detailed explanation of the land use loophole they're using for this. Here's another explanation, including drawings of each of the intermediate steps

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It's sorta wild to me that the US share of G7 GDP is increasing over time so consistantly. Stapp continues: "A trucker in Oklahoma can earn more than a doctor in Portugal. The consumption gap is even starker. Britons, some of Europe’s best-off inhabitants, spent 80% as much as Americans in 1990. By 2021 that was down to 69%.”

This can’t be true color, right? maybe? I’m not sure.

Threads

• Fun thread of infrastructure that looks like sci fi.

• Thread from a nuclear (weapons) policy expert, who has recently come around to the view that probabilistic forecasting for nuclear use is valuable, at least when it's focused on specific scenarios.