Favorites August 27th 2024
This is the beginning of a whole thread, but the upshot is that they appear to have accomplished this by making raising many kids high status. They don't do this by spending money, which doesn't appear to work. Instead, the president personally gives an award to every mother of 4 or more children. He even travels to each province do give out the award, so that he gets more time with the recipients.
Relatedly, someone appears to have found the buildings where waymo is outfitting cars with the self driving hardware. It's very large, there are a lot of cars.
I don't really have any thoughts about the French case against the Telegram CEO, but their marketing strategy of pretending to be encrypted is really unsavory. Here's more on the subject from John Gruber.
Also an area where China is getting way ahead of us, both in terms of cost and speed (cached), making this all the better an item to campaign on as an area for improvement.
Longer Reads
• Someone experimented with hooking modern AI chatbots up for a conversation with ELIZA, and we learn a bit about the various chatbot's 'personalities'. But the most impressive was Claude Sonnet which realized after 4 messages that it was talking to an instance of ELIZA. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– A Pension performs significantly better than a 401k, because there are efficiencies when you're working with a larger pool of money. Here's a longer article but I just read the linked tweet. (src)(cached)
– Biden's approval rating shot up now that he's out of the race. (src)(cached)
– Andrej Karpathy has switched from Github Copilot to VS Code Cursor and Claude Sonnet. I haven't subscribed to Claude yet, but Karpathy isn't the first person I've heard say it's better than ChatGPT right now. (src)(cached)
– Lyft and Uber drivers often have many unpaid tickets from automated systems. Municipalities should legally mandate that Uber / Lyft pay the fees out of the driver's earnings. (src)(cached)
– There are now extremely realistic drone piloting video games. Naoh Smith quips: "The Last Starfighter came true" (src)(cached)
– Over 100 cancer vaccines are currently in trials. (src)(cached)
– GLP1 was being developed as a weight loss/diabetes drug in the 1980s, Pfizer stopped funding it because they thought there was no point competing with insulin. Check out the thread for more details, and possible ways to avoid this outcome in the future. (src)(cached)
– A new paper in Nature argues that cultured chicken meat could come down in cost below the real thing, although obviously there are still a ton of problems around scaling up. (src)(cached)
– Research fraud around beta blockers before heart surgery may have killed many thousands of people, a far higher death due to research fraud count than the others I had heard about. Here's a whole thread about the death estimate (cached). Research fraud is very bad! (src)(cached)
– Polling on national defense among voters shows only R+1, that must be the best Democrats polled on defence in like, decades. (src)(cached)
– Pop music about AI based on Less Wrong posts, the music is all AI generated, but the lyrics are human-written (src)
– The Impulse stove continues to look very cool (src)(cached)
– Deng Xiaoping seems to pretty clearly have called for other nations in 1974 to rise up against China if it ever began bullying other nations. (src)(cached)