Favorites August 3rd 2023

Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, July 2023

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This seems really amazing, here's the paper, and a short write up in science. Very very cool. One commenter said "I mean... ChatGPT, LK99 and then this?"

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I am very excited about wildtype. They use a plant-based scaffolding to make the structure for their product, I think they use it so that they don't have to wait around to grow a single blob, they can make lots of individual cells and put them on the substrate. I wonder what that process looks like, is it like sheets of paper?

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Folks argue that congestion pricing is regressive, and not only is that probably not true, but many of the people who experience the negative externalities of heavy car use are also poor. Use cost as a way to try to begin to balance those scales back out.

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Architectural arcades are one of the more minor urban design things that I'm very excited about. this is the start of a great thread which includes photos of arcades all over the world, including some in the US.

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C++ is bad, ok? I say this as a C++ programmer working under almost ideal circumstances.

Threads

• Physics Professor explains why it takes so long to confirm that a newly discovered material is actually a superconductor. Interesting examples of previous instances where folks thought they had it and it took a while to confirm they didn't. (cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Yield curve steepened a ton in the last three days. I spent a few minutes trying to get ChatGPT to say clearly whether it's good or bad, and it was cautiously optimistic. Especially once it heard Yglesias' joke about Krugman's recent article being persuasive. (src)
– Americans don't agree with my analysis of the current economic environment, they think it's bad and getting worse according to polls (src)
– Why did Oakland turn off their automated license plate readers? Seems dumb (src)
– Why did cruise ships get so big? TL;DR: they couldn't compete on speed with planes, so they pivoted to being floating resorts (src)
– We're in a better place regarding inflation than where we were when Reagan gave the 'morning in america' speech. (src)
– Superconductors won't get us high speed trains, magnets aren't the problem there, CEQA is. (src)
– State of california considering reducing the pool of licensed electricians? (src)
– Shortwave for android is now available. I'm a big fan of it on iOS, so I'm happy I'll be able to use it on both platforms now! (src)
– Reduce traffic deaths by redesigning roads (src)
– Palm oil is actually pretty space efficient, replacing it with coconut oil needs 10x as much land. (src)
– Newsom really is going to debate DeSantis. I don't understand why... the losing republican vs a democrat who's not running? (src)
– Japan is becoming much more open to immigration. (src)
– China planning to limit phone time for kids under 18 to 2 hours a day. Wat? (src)
– China has built a massive high speed train network in the time California spent trying to get the paperwork done for our single line. (src)
– California SB35 has gotten 18,000 homes built since 2018, pretty good. (src)
– Americans don't live paycheck to paycheck (src)
– "The YouTube of podcasts is YouTube." (src)