Favorites August 25th 2023
Bikes are a lot smaller than cars! Each marginal person you can get out of a car improves traffic for everyone else. Also, I learned from this article that there are ebikes now available for less than $1000.
I've been wondering about this for a while. AlphaZero was capable of learning from only self-play, it's got to be possible to find ways for large language models to learn from their own work. I wonder how this could work with non-code tasks.
If you want a US example, check out the Chicago lakefront, (except for the dumb highway). If you build more in your high resource areas, you don't have to build as much in wildfire zones.
Longer Reads
• Longish thread describing in detail China's economic history since 1994.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Nice to see a GOP candidate get booed for calling climate change a hoax. (src)
– Skyscraper in Vietnam lit up in Ukrainian colors for their independence day. (src)
– Price to sequence a human genome falling faster than Moore's law (src)
– Trump skipped the republican debate, dropped a bit in polling. (src)
– At the debate, the republican candidates all seemed pretty keen on invading mexico. (src)
– On the other hand, none of the candidates raised their hand to indicate they believe climate change is caused by humans. (src)
– UCLA study finds that development in SF is so expensive that nothing under 10 units pencils. (src)
– The Japanese nuclear wastewater release is not hazardous, don't let anyone tell you otherwise (src)
– Ramaswamy is transparently running to be Trump's VP (src)
– Paper straws tend to have high levels of PFAS, which is bad. (src)
– British cities other than London have transit systems that combine worst of the US plus the worst of Europe . (src)
– Norway can build a tunnel for less than it costs Britain to do the planning application. (src)
– Singer of "Rich men North of Richmond" says he's surprised Republicans played it before their debate, since it's meant to be a criticism of them. (src)