Favorites April 7th 2024
You might just think this is bad because a day on the moon is 29.5 earth days. But actually it's way way worse than that. Because of relativity, an hour on the moon is 2.4 milliseconds longer to an earth observer.
Very cool, here's more details. Although of course, the terrifying angle here is the point that this is an argument that ChatGPT is already superhuman at persuasion.
I've heard that the folks in those Texas AirBnBs got pretty unlucky, it's expected to be cloudy..
I don't want to oversell this, but there were a few times I had trouble reading the text of this game because I was laughing so hard.
Longer Reads
• Dan Schwarz lays out examples of the research of his forecasting LLM, he also recently wrote a short post explaining the link in the forecasting chain his new tool is meant to fill. That post also included a link to his manifold Human vs AI prediction contests, where you can see the various LLMs compete with humans and his specially tuned LLM to make the best predictions. (src)(cached)
• Discussion of accelleration of climate warming over the last few years. TL;DR: we appear to be on track for around 2.2C warming by 2050. Here's a longer article (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– TSMC complained about all the requirements for the fab in Arizona until the check cleared, suddenly the project is way ahead of schedule. (src)(cached)
– Schwarz's article about AI predictions linked to an article from two years back estimating the chance of a Russian nuclear attack against western city. The number is measured in 'micromorts', a one-in-a-million chance of death. Their estimate is between 7 and 61 micromorts. Reassuring, but this was just Russia, not China. (src)
– There's evidence that when people stop working, they don't socialize more, very sad. (src)(cached)
– Some excerpts from a report from The Information, indicating that Amazon's Just Walk Out technology failed their goals, requiring 700 human reviews for every 1000 purchases. Their goal was 50 per 1000. (src)
– The current top explainers of LLMs have a new addition, from 3blue1brown. Previously, from Tim Lee and Stephen Wolfram. (src)(cached)
– Reports that Apple is working on home robotics, which seems like a better idea than trying to develop cars. (src)(cached)
– You can actually decarbonize the atmosphere if you can find ways to de-acidify ocean water. (src)(cached)
– SF promised to make a plan to build 36 thousand units, folks double checked using the city's own tools and found that they're too low by a factor of 4. A friend created a tool to try find a rezoning that works yourself. There are a lot of designs that work. (src)(cached)