Favorites December 14th 2023
Word2Vec in 2013 was an early example of creating embeddings for individual words, the paper was just given an award for standing the test of time. It worked so well that we kept going, and now ChatGPT is like an embedding for the entire internet. It makes sense to start trying it for biological applications.
The Verge's articles on the "Death of Twitter" were really good. Perhaps no surprise, I particularly enjoyed their 'best tweets' (The Scrollback of Alexandria) one, from expired advil to pretending to be a detective I couldn't stop laughing. But watch out, it's extremely extremely long.
Yes, I had to look it up, and it turns out "chips" can mean "Championships" and 'flops' is a word for falling in an exaggerated way to try to draw a penalty.
Blocks transmission, works across all variants, this sounds great! I couldn't quickly figure out how long the protection lasts, but it seems like they're describing a vaccine that you'd take with an inhaler? Here’s the article.
The Fed announced that they'll be lowering interest rates, everybody liked that. If you exclude shelter, we've actually had two months of slight deflation. Reminder that we should be doing things to reduce barriers to building homes, it's a constant drag on our economy.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Test scores for US children continue to fall, and not just because of the pandemic. It's probably cell phones. (src)
– Meta is not the only company open-sourcing their foundation Large Language Model, Minstral, a French startup is also giving theirs away as well. (src)
– Nobody has two kids so that they can be handling a toddler and a newborn at the same time. The payoff is much later. (src)
– It's been a month since the summit where President Xi said that they would reconnect communications between their military leaders and US military leaders. Surprise! They didn't actually do it. (src)
– Russia has lost more total troops in Ukraine than the US lost in Vietnam. (src)
– Chomsky is still mad about the Mexican-American war over 150 years ago, but he's cool with Russia invading Ukraine right now. (src)
– Universal health could be a very good system, but it's proponents don't seem to fully grasp that you'd have to raise taxes to do it. (src)
– GLP-1 doesn't just reduce appetite, it changes what things people want to eat! (src)
– Corporate tax write offs for R&D actually increase innovation, not just spending on R&D (src)
– Microsoft is training an LLM on Nuclear Regulatory Commision documents to try to write paperwork for deploying nuclear reactors faster. Even better, we should do the same for NEPA/CEQA (src)
– Meta is deploying both their Segment Anything paper and their generative image paper in Instagram, allowing you to replace backgrounds in pictures. (src)
– Joss Fong and Phil Edwards have both left Vox in just a few days. Those were the only remaining Vox staffers I could name! (src)
– The supreme court let Illinois' new stricter gun regulations stand. Sort of a surprise to me. (src)