Favorites: Cooking Revelations, Political Confrontations
Fires, AI feats, and a GOP pivot on spending, February 12th, 2025
Somehow the boom bounces off some part of the atmosphere, but only when they fly really high and between Mach 1.1 and 1.3, which is why they needed to design custom engines.
Given that we’re all going to be paying more for insurance in California to cover destruction in LA, it seems like a bad trade for them to build the exact same fire-vulnerable structures again. Max Dubler suggests repealing prop 103 (cached), which is what makes it hard for insurance companies to raise rates more for fire-prone areas.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Stanford researchers managed to get near o1 level performance on hard questions with a training strategy using only 1000 examples. But it’s entirely possible to game these performance metrics, even accidentally. (src)(cached)
– Gemini thinking tokens aren't nearly as anxious seeming as DeepSeek (src)(cached)
– US / Japan joint statement on the Taiwan strait is more clear and forceful (cached) than any previous one, for what that’s worth. (src)(cached)
– 3% of federal workers accepted Musk’s “buyout” offer, 7% quit annually, so this probably isn’t much. (src)(cached)
– William Easterly, the most famously anti-foreign-aid academic, is not happy about the cuts to USAID, it’s just so obviously illegal. (src)(cached)
– Big news in cooking eggs, "periodic cooking", 2 minutes at boiling then 2 at 32°C, cycled 8 times. Could probably do it with a temperature sensing range (cached), if you have one. (src)(cached)
– Advocacy for feminism happened via women’s magazines. (src)(cached)
– Renaming the Gulf of Mexico polls surprisingly poorly (src)(cached)
– Interesting write up of ai basis (src)(cached)
– Ben Thompson really likes the Patterns app for building regular expressions. I usually use Textmate, but I'm willing to give this a shot. (src)(cached)
– I don’t want to take a random study too seriously, but you’d seems to be saying that a good approach to anxiety and fears is basically “distract yourself” (src)(cached)
– Musk tweets quite a lot, and doesn’t seem to sleep much. Linked data visualization of his tweet habits are absolutely wild. (src)(cached)
– Are Republicans going to do spending cuts? Maybe. Currently, they're saying they plan to cut 880 Billion from medicaid (cached). Are they going to blow more than that on tax cuts? Yes, definitely. (src)(cached)
– Kanye West’s store selling swastika shirts was taken down by Shopify, but not because of the content: they think he’s not going to ship the shirts. (src)
– Great news, Trudeau is calling for an end to tariffs between Canadian provinces. Sorta seems like something they should have done decades ago. (src)(cached)
– Oh good, Trump says he’ll abide by court orders. On the other hand, JD Vance said the opposite just recently, super weird for Trump to be the sane sounding one in his administration. I doubt that's a feeling that will last. (src)(cached)
– 10 year old post on the physiology of wait screens. The highlight is that if you use the system-standard wait spinner, people blame the OS for load times, but if you make a custom one, people blame your app. (src)(cached)