Favorites December 23rd 2023
This is the clearest evidence that renewables are now the cheapest option. India isn't going with renewables because they're trying to do their part to stop climate change, they're doing it because it's cheapest!
So, not only is that 4% figure absolutely wild, but also, I never thought of Cuba as an archipelago, but look at all those little islands. Here’s an article Freeman linked about it
Meta is also looking for ways to render avatars for people, here's their pose estimaiton based on VR headset camera data. Lots of interesting academic papers coming from Apple recently. They also just published a paper about how to run LLMs performantly even when they require more than the available amount of RAM. (By shuffling data to and from flash memory). Maybe they'll use it to improve Siri.
In a more serious take, David French argues that the whole point of the 14th amendment is to be anti-democratic, and therefore Trump should be disqualified from the ballot. And here's a link to some very well thought out pro and con arguments. Biden's response to a question about it was quite effective. Finally, here's the McSweeney's article quoted above.
Huge improvement here. I was also impressed by the fake poster and stills of an imagined Dicaprio Lenin biopic. I spent a while trying to make a Simon Bolivar biopic poster starring Oscar Issac. This was as far as I got, I’m still not that happy with it
Flotsam and Jetsam
– BBC found a Russian influence campaign on TikTok (src)
– Spotify avoids having to talk about christmas music in their year-end summaries by doing the summaries in November. (src)
– Awards for best visual/data driven articles of the year (src)
– Scary number of people are convinced that Trump's presidency ended in 2019, blame Biden for everything that happened during pandemic (src)
– Mercedes adds new running lights: blue-turquoise for self-driving (src)
– Argument that with modern LEDs, it doesn't matter nearly as much if you turn off the lights when you're not in the room (src)
– Congo and Rwanda were planning to fight a month ago, but the US struck agreements that successfully diffused the situation. (src)
– California regulators are making a mistake by making rooftop solar no longer economical (src)
– Folks on instagram trying to avoid projecting patriarchical/colonial concepts to their dogs, perhaps there's a point where barriers to communication were good? Krugman thought the internet wouldn't go anywhere because no one would have anything to say to each other. Unfortunately he was wrong. (src)
– Paris is massively expanding their subway system (src)
– WB and Paramount considering merging. (src)
– More economic indicators looking great, also available in meme form (src)
– EV sales forecasts under-estimate future sales year after year (src)
– Variety ranks the best TV series of all time. If you're wondering: the top was 1. I Love Lucy, 2. Mad Men, 3 The Sopranos, 4. The Simpsons, 5 Breaking Bad, 6. Sex and the City, 7. The Wire, 8. Seinfeld, 9. The Mary Tyler Moore Show, 10. Roots. (src)
– AI used to discover a new class of antibiotics (src)
– Always nice to see Yglesias list in one place all the good opportunities to reduce regulatory capture in the US. Car dealerships are evil! (src)
– Big advancement for treatment of breast cancer (src)
– The teenager who hacked Rockstar and leaked clips of GTA 6 was at the time confined by police to a hotel room without a laptop, he used the amazon fire stick that came with the hotel room! (src)
“Mercedes adds new running lights: blue-turquoise for self-driving”
Totally makes sense. The driving behavior, particularly in stop and go traffic, can change between the driving and the automated systems and the driver behind may become annoyed or try to predict the wrong behavior.
That said, one of the fears a few years ago was that regular drivers would “bully” self-driving vehicles, knowing they would always defer to the safer option. This indicator may actually cause more of that to happen.