Favorites December 8th 2023
I've been doing this for a long time, and the biggest advantage with pour over for me is that it completely stops ground coffee from sticking to whatever vessel I grind the coffee into. It's like magic.
Here's the paper. I wonder how far off actual communication with whales could be.
Spending money on border security in return for more legal immigration is one of the areas where I think immigration is so important to the US that it's fine to waste money on border security, even if it doesn't work. But if the Republicans won't take the deal, we shouldn't let them pretend it wasn't offered to them.
Longer Reads
• Reporting on where the monetary aid the US is providing to Ukraine goes. TL;DR: over 90% goes to US companies as public procurement. (src)
• Great article from Tim Lee at Understanding AI with everything we can guess is going on with Q*. TL;DR: there are some very promising avenues that we can guess they're exploring, but Lee believes that while this could lead to real AI improvements, a certain level of dynamism is still missing. (src)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Joss Fong argues that the randomness aspect of LLMs is what makes them interesting, it's the reason they're useful. If they were literally just predicting the most likely next word none of this would work. (src)
– We have a shortage of nurses and a backlog of 10,000 nurses trying to get visas. If only there were a solution to this problem! (src)
– Google announced new Large Language Models, and announced them on Threads. (src)
– If it wasn't for China, world emissions would be falling year over year (src)
– World Fertility rates keep falling, especially in China and South Korea. To some extent we understand the initial fall, but it's not clear why it keeps falling. (src)
– Dominican Republic vs Haiti GDP over the last 70 years is crazy, almost as bad as North vs South Korea (src)
– Some reports are saying that Xi has consolidated power by having a bunch of former loyalists killed, most recently their Foreign Minister. Although some are saying the report is poorly sourced. (src)
– Pretty clear that the authors of "Proximal Origin" didn’t believe it was accurate when they released it based on the timeline. (src)
– Meta's new Audiobox model is capable of some very impressive voice transformations. (src)
– Guyana is currently in a very good place, their GDP per capita is going up, they have a multiethnic government in favor of redistribution. Pretty tragic that Venezuela chose this moment to decide to invade. (src)
– Short explanation of the situation in the UK regarding Rwanda. (src)
– Republicans stopping permitting reform that was meant to help domestic chip manufacturing get off the ground. (src)
– While the US has had trouble scaling artillery production, South Korea has produced more shells in 41 to give to Ukraine than all of Europe during the entire conflict. Really good to have South Korea as an ally (src)
– A lot of good candidates for giving in terms of dollars per lives saved, but deploying the new Malaria vaccine is suddenly a very appealing option. (src)
– Banning investors from buying homes tends to raise rents, so bill in congress to ban it probably would be counter-productive. (src)
– I had no idea that Trump’s approval among republicans is a fair amount lower than Biden's approval among Democrats (src)
– When chanting college students were asked "which river" and "which sea" they were chanting about, less than half knew. Many changed their views once the phrase was explained to them. Memes are very powerful. (src)
