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(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)
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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."
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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.
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![I work at Alphabet and I recently went to an internal tech talk about deploying large language models like this at Google. As a disclaimer I'll first note that this is not my area of expertise, I just attended the tech talk because it sounded interesting.
Large language models like GPT are one of the biggest areas of active ML research at Google, and there's a ton of pretty obvious applications for how they can be used to answer queries, index information, etc. There is a huge budget at Google related to staffing people to work on these kinds of models and do the actual training, which is very expensive because it takes a ton of compute capacity to train these super huge language models. However what I gathered from the talk is the economics of actually using these kinds of language models in the biggest Google products (e.g. search, gmail) isn't quite there yet.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_600,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fpbs.substack.com%2Fmedia%2FFjjDhwiaYAI3Tie.jpg)
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.
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.
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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.