Favorites: Data, Wages, and Space
This was the first post about the SF Bay Area plastic contamination report that was commissioned by Nat Friedman. Interesting stuff, one big takeaway is that deciding how bad the situation is must be based on whether you think the organizations setting the limits have done so correctly. Here's a summary of their findings (cached) in a tweet, or check out the full data which makes you promise not to freak out before it lets you view the page.
Here’s a thread summarizing (cached) a new high quality open source LLM from a Chinese company DeepSeek. There’s a bunch of interesting advancements, but one crazy tidbit is that they trained it for only $5m and it outperforms GPT4o on benchmarks (cached). If you ask it’s name it’ll often say it’s ChatGPT (cached), so they clearly got their training data by scraping OpenAI, which OpenAI says is against their terms of service, but can't really stop. This clearly explains why OpenAI's o-series models hide their 'thinking' steps, given that's now the "secret sauce".
Great thread of infographics, I also liked the aerial photo that looked like a microchip
California raised the fast food worker minimum wage, and it seems to have gone ok, this Atlantic article points to a study showing that employment has actually increased a bit since. On the other hand here's an article from Reason arguing somewhat persuasively that it's a slight decrease instead. Sadly neither say whether automation has increased at all over the same period, which is what I'd want to know. I had Gemini do some research for me and it generated a report with citations that amounts to "yea, automation is probably increasing, but it's too soon to tell". I generally think an increase in automation leading to higher productivity is obviously good, especially if employment stays relatively stable or even decreases slowly.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Warren used her influence after 2016 to kick tech out of the Democratic coalition. After the fact folks have tried to argue that “it’s more complicated than that” but as it was happening, it was very clear. (src)(cached)
– Two seasons of Andor cost more than Rise of Skywalker. But like… that seems like a good deal, given it’s better than any of the new trilogy movies? (src)
– I just found out that part of the rise in Chinese restaurants in the US was because of a weird loophole in the Chinese Exclusion Act. (src)(cached)
– Dark energy model of the universe may be totally wrong, accelerating expansion could be caused by time going faster in the voids between galaxies (src)(cached)
– Amtrak still doesn’t let people line up to board on the platform. They’re mechanically removing one of the biggest advantages trains have over planes. And here’s an example where the train simply left with no passengers because they didn’t open the gate to the platform. They lied twice to journalists (cached) about why they have this dumb procedure, but under oath they admitted that there’s no good reason. (src)(cached)
– Some conservative Twitter inside baseball: here’s a long article about Ian MIles Cheong, a prolific conservative Twitter poster who talks exclusively about the US and Europe despite having lived his whole life in Malaysia. (src)(cached)
– Again with air quality in schools, this time with context: the improvement in test scores from the addition of an air filter was on par with the improvement from going from public to the best private charter school. Worth noting that this isn't a super high quality study, so it should probably only cause you to update your beliefs a little bit. (src)(cached)
– If you haven’t seen it before, this chart of the evolution of the Latin alphabet is very cool. The Greek to Archaic Latin transition for F is a doozy (src)
– And of course Trump Is trying to stop the TikTok divestment law (src)
– I definitely spent more time than I should have on riffing on this Beatles parody. (src)(cached)