Favorites December 9th 2022

December 2022

Tom Nichols @RadioFreeTom

Years ago a guy came to a book talk I gave who was absolutely outraged when he found out that five permanent members of the UN security council could veto anything, and he asked me if our Supreme Court knew about it. I assured him that they had been briefed. https://t.co/HAVTR1BW6P

Ondine, MD☕️☕️☕️ @Ondine_MD

@RadioFreeTom @constans Someone said something to the effect of “80% of conservative outrage is just someone finding out how stuff works for the first time”.

(This is a joke about conservatives finding out that social media platforms will reduce the reach of accounts they think make their network look bad)

Abhishek Malhotra @absmalhotra

Looks like the paper on "Accelerating low-carbon innovation" from my PhD thesis is getting loads of attention on here again. We asked ourselves - why do solar PV, LEDs, and EVs improve so fast while nuclear, biomass power, and CCS don't? Here's a THREAD!

Tim Latimer @TimMLatimer

Here is a great overview of the when and how learning curves apply, based on customization. What's interesting is you can also expand this to think about sub-components of energy tech systems--some are standardized, some can not be. https://t.co/9lID9ETwAa https://t.co/ADLBO7026n

The learning curve is the concept that as we make more of something, we often get better at making it, and the product gets cheaper. This chart is really useful in understanding why some energy tech has gotten cheaper as we've made more, and some hasn't. Here's a thread summarizing more details from the source paper. I really like this top grid though, one person commented "A handy 3x3 matrix that pretty much determines the future of the world for the next 30 years."

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Sinema was not very popular with anyone, I'm not sure whether today's move increases or decreases her chances of winning another term (I actually suspect decreases) but they were low to begin with and they remain low.

Matthew Zeitlin summarizes Sinema's strategy "High variance move". The key here is that she's no more popular with Democrats than Republicans, she may not actually be able to convincingly threaten to split the democratic vote in a general election. The fact is, she's just very unpopular with everyone.

Dare Obasanjo 🐀 @Carnage4Life

Google employees explain why we haven’t seen ChatGPT like functionality in their products; the cost to serve an AI result is 10x to 100x as high as a regular web search today plus they’re too slow relative to how quick search results must be returned.

This doesn't even get into the problems with ChatGPT essentially hallucinating answers to questions. I honestly hadn't considered how expensive it must be to run these Transformer text models.

Alec Stapp @AlecStapp

Stunning fact about Operation Warp Speed:

This is from an IMF report. Again this makes me think we should do everything in our power to have an Operation Warp Speed for the common cold / flu using these new mRNA vaccines.

Adam Paluka @APaluka

Ten years ago I found the best classified ad I had ever seen in Oklahoma City. This lives rent free in my head.

Threads

• Thread discussing the possibility of Russia's periferal states seceding. TL;DR: if it is going to happen, it's going to have to be one of the richer regions, and it would probably be quite slow.