Favorites December 1st 2024

London, November 2024

(src)(cached)

The key thing about why the Civil Rights movement could succeed was that it was very popular but low salience. Doing things to 'raise awareness' works when the vast majority of people already agree, and you want to drive actual legislation. Raising awareness probably actually makes a cause a bit less popular, because you usually do it in annoying ways, but if your issue is like +40, it works. If your issue is split evenly, or worse, -10, it doesn't work.

(src)

Ok, this seems pretty cool, but I'm not sure that figuring out how to get at the arils (that's what the little red things are called, apparently) is the hard part. For me, the hard part is dealing with the fact that they don't seem to be entirely edible, you have to spit out the inner seed. No fun. Much simpler to just cut them in half and juice them. Also I think this video is sped up.

(src)(cached)

It's true, kids love videos of robots! (This is from Tim Lee's article about the many ways in which human labor will still be valuable in the future, no matter what Geoffrey Hinton says.

Flotsam and Jetsam

– RFK Jr at HHS is like Bush's nomination of Miers for the Supreme Court, totally unqualified (and for RFK some very bad ideas) but if he's shot down, he'll be replaced by an idealogue who's probably more compitent as well. (src)(cached)
– Trump's nominee for Energy seems like an indication that permitting reform may be more likely. (src)(cached)
– The 'Free Tibet' movement is just totally gone. Go back to old simpsons episodes and you'll see that it was mentioned many times. One commenter guesses that it was a wedge issue against normalizing relations with China, and became irrelevant with the fall of Russia as a great power. (src)(cached)
– North Korea is planning to send thousands of additional troops to support Russia in Ukraine. Seems likely China is approving this plan. (src)(cached)
– For a candidate to moderate effectively, others percieved as related need to do so as well. Half of swing voters thought Harris' 2024 platform included 'defund the police'. (src)(cached)
– Claude makes a comic/meme, executes via animated SVG. The meme isn't amazing, but I'm impressed what it accomplished with vector art. (src)
– Mercedes is putting both the Tesla/NACS and the old CCS plug on their 2025 cars. Interesting choice, seems better than an adaptor for sure. (src)
– Making RFK eat McDonalds food that he's called poison is very on brand for Trump (src)
– Depending on the exact data transforms you use, you will get completely different answers to the question "did larger covid stimulus result in more inflation". Seems like the answer is 'yes', but you wouldn't know it from one of these graphs. (src)(cached)
– Trump's margin over Harris will be the 44th smallest out of the 51 elections since 1854. (src)(cached)
– Biden's team considered a bunch of great reforms that would have been anti-inflationary, but each was discarded for annoying a coalition partner. The key to making policy decisions is prioritization. (src)(cached)
– Chinese ships have purposefully cut undersea telecom cables. (src)(cached)
– After giving GPT4o the audio of a 2 hour interview with a person, it could guess their responses to surveys and tasks with 85% accuracy. Here's the paper. On skimming it, the simplest way to see the improvement is to see that is noticably more accurate than just guessing based on demographic info, but still much worse than just asking the same person the same questions again 2 weeks later. (src)
– Aggregate turnout is on track to be very close to 2020. When democrats lose ground and republicans gain ground with similar overall turnout, that indicates swing. People changed their minds. (src)(cached)
– A wild excerpt from 'The Box', theoretically about the rise of the shipping container and globalization, but "really about how much the Longshoremen have always hated both automation and having their pay tied to actual usefulness." (src)(cached)
– China is putting sanctions on US drone companies, so they aren't allowed to buy chinese batteries. Thank goodness for the Inflation Reduction Act's subsidies for domestic battery production. (src)(cached)
– Scott Alexander ran a survey which contained an "AI Art Turing Test", and very few people were able to tell which was which. Even the people who said they absolutely hated AI art still selected AI art pieces as their favorites. (src)(cached)
– The Pete Hegseth misconduct story isn't as funny as the Matt Gaetz misconduct, but mostly that's because it's way worse. And Gaetz withdrew (src)(cached)
– Wall Street folks who want the Treasury Secretary job all have to come up with a non-insane way to describe Trump's tarrif ideas. They do, but they mostly have to ignore everything Trump has said about Tarrifs. (src)(cached)
– Tulsi Gabbard is the FBI's key suspect in the Russian hack of DNC emails, really seems like she shouldn't be in charge of an intelligence agency! (src)(cached)
– Did you know that the ACA actually accomplished the core mission of stopping the growth of healthcare spending as a proportion of GDP? No one talks about this problem anymore because it's solved! (at least for now) (src)(cached)