Favorites April 18th 2024

December, 2023, Palo Alto

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The Nature paper has more detail, including that strawberry yields have increased 2,755% since 1960, and that the biggest improvement was 'perpetually flowering' strawberries, introduced in the 1970s.

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This is great news! It's the beginning of a thread with details: essentially it looks good, but we still need more details

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The reviews are out for the Humane AI Pin, and they are very very bad. The display-on-you-hand, pictured above, does not work as an interface, and that's just one flaw of many. MKBHD says it now holds the title of worst product he's ever reviewed. Some people got upset at him because this will probably help sink Humane, but MKBHD's loyalty isn't to a tech company, it's to his viewers, and I really liked Ben Thompson's weekly article on the subject.

Longer Reads

• US Supreme Court has outlawed cities using crazy high fees on new housing as a way to get revenue. Here's a thread going a bit in depth on it, it's pretty close to the outcome YIMBY was looking for. (src)(cached)
• A very long post explaning how the University of Waterloo's unusual structure helps drive good student outcomes, it's all very copy-able. (src)(cached)
• Long thread explaining a new way to detect SSH attacks across large fleets of machines. (src)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Surprise! College essays are more correlated with household income than SAT scores. (src)(cached)
– Saudis state that Iran's goal is to stop normalization between Israel and the rest of the Arab world. (src)(cached)
– Median American house is much bigger than the median house in Europe. (src)(cached)
– New evidence that the CEO of TikTok comitted purjury during Congressional testimony about data being sent to China. To some extent, these lies were so blatant that it's confusing why he even lied. (src)(cached)
– Article explaining how rules changes in California have made rooftop solar no longer competative. One point I wasn't aware of: half of California's solar is currently rooftop solar, but that's changing quickly. (src)(cached)
– Chart of LLM model performance vs time, open weight models are getting very close to GPT4-level quality (src)
– GPT-4 can play Red Ded Redemption, but only if you pause the game while it calculates what to do next. (If I understand the article correctly) (src)
– Chips act funding didn't end up just all going to Intel, TSMC and Samsung have done ok too (src)(cached)
– Apparently The Zone Of Interest was shot with remote-controlled hidden cameras. (src)
– Moderna's trials of an mRNA cancer vaccine seem to have been somewhat promising (src)(cached)
– Sotomayor should probably retire strategically, same as Breyer did. (src)(cached)
– It's insane that many major cities use their waterfront for a big highway, it's some of the most valuable land in the city, what a waste! Chicago as an example. (src)(cached)
– Yglesias admonishes us to log off and stop doomscrolling, I really liked the piece, but since reading so much twitter/threads/bluesky has not made me pessimistic, I'm not gonna log off. (src)
– A new tool was launched that can turn a set of lyrics into music in arbitrary styles, so now we have Dune: The Broadway Musical. I spent a few minutes messing with it, trying to make a song based on a Money Stuff column, but it definitely still needs work. (src)(cached)
– We're down to 3% inflation, and for a while folks had said that should be the target, but now we're afraid to switch. (src)(cached)
– The two biggest predictors of being Biden2020 / Trump2024 in polling is being young, and having children under 18. (src)(cached)
– Gen Z is unusually depressed, and it seems foolish to dismiss this based on the fact that it's correlated with age. That hasn't happened before. It seems bad! (src)(cached)
– I had no idea, but apparently Desalination can be done for about $2 per 1000 gallons, and that will fall as electricity gets cheaper. (src)(cached)
– We really shouldn't help Israel fight Iran, Israel is plenty rich, and this all seems like a bad idea. (src)(cached)
– "Malthusianism is the dumbest reason to be pro-choice." (src)(cached)
– Gab has a chatbot, and you can extract it's prompt which instructs it to lie about the outcome of the 2020 election. It doesn't even work, you can easily convince it not to lie about it. (src)