Favorites February 11th 2023

December 2022, Woodside California

Darrell Owens @IDoTheThinking

So New Zealand's upzoning and housing boom has basically created the same effect of below inflation rent control on rent prices.

Matthew Maltman @1finaleffort

Since upzoning nominal rents are up 18.8%, lower-quartile rents are up 14.2%, both slower than inflation (+21.5%), and mean household income growth (+34.6%). So real rents are down 2.2%, and real LQ rents are down 6%. The average rent to average income ratio is down ~10% 2/ https://t.co/caPWBWIVXg

This is from a summary of effects of Aukland's massive upzoning 6 years ago. Check out the whole thread, it has amazing graphs. They did it all without the complex value capture system that local groups in California insist upon.

FEside @FreckleEars

What was a simple question asked by a redditor turned into one of the most annoying projects I undertook. I posted it over on @FuckCarsReddit as well. Basically this is how far the ground, and more importantly, children can be seen in front of various vehicles.

This is a hard graphic to read, but suffice to say, an M1 Abrams tank has better visibility for a small child than a Chevy Silverado. Sorta wild what we consider safe on US streets.

TheOmniZaddy 🌹🔰🏗 @TheOmniZaddy

Reports say that the aircraft failed to ID itself in both English AND French https://t.co/xTR6tDNEVO

Justin Trudeau @JustinTrudeau

I ordered the take down of an unidentified object that violated Canadian airspace. @NORADCommand shot down the object over the Yukon. Canadian and U.S. aircraft were scrambled, and a U.S. F-22 successfully fired at the object.

Two unidentified flying objects shot down in 24 hours. Nate Silver jokes that it's "definitely not aliens, but if you were making a movie where it was aliens having the Chinese weather balloon thing happen a few days earlier would be a great head-fake."

Warren J. Wells, AICP 🚴🏙️🦀 @WarrenJWells

The numbers in the headline are just for 7-11 stores, but there are 30,000 car-into-business crashes in the US *every year* killing 2,000 people. And the crazy thing is that those deaths are not included in state crash databases because they occur on private property.

StreetsblogLA @StreetsblogLA

"Over a 15-year period, 6,253 cars crashed into 7-Eleven storefronts in the U.S. – an average of 1.14 per day." https://t.co/ZAMN49Q97O

So the easy to find stat of 40k traffic deaths per year doesn't include this 2k deaths per year from storefront crashes. Plus anything else that happens in a driveway is still unaccounted for as well. Oh, and for some reason 7-11 is liable if bystanders are hit?

Erik Brynjolfsson @erikbryn

We live in interesting times. “These findings suggest that a “theory of mind”-like ability (thus far considered to be uniquely human) may have spontaneously emerged as a byproduct of language models' improving language skills.” arxiv.org/abs/2302.02083

So, first of all, apparently there are Theory-of-mind tests, and no LLMs could pass them pre-2022. In January 2022 GPT3 achieved a score on par with a 7-year-old, and by December could perform as well as a 9-year-old. This is without the model being trained for this ability at all. On the subject, here's a thread summarizing Ted Chiang’s New Yorker piece "ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web". Pretty good for a compression artifact.

Jack Clark @jackclarkSF

A mental model I have of AI is it was roughly ~linear progress from 1960s-2010, then exponential 2010-2020s, then has started to display 'compounding exponential' properties in 2021/22 onwards. In other words, next few years will yield progress that intuitively feels nuts.

The three examples he gives are bonkers: 1) You can use Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate lots of text, and then use it as additional training data for a new model, and the results *improve*. 2) You can give LLMs access to deterministic tools (like a calculator) to improve their abilities. 3) you can add in a second language model that trains the first model using reinforcement.

The Cultural Tutor @culturaltutor

India is home to some of the most beautiful and diverse architecture in the world. Here's just a few of the best: Hawa Mahal in Jaipur (1799)

Threads

• Cute thread of portraits that famous photographers took of their partners. I'm somewhat surprised how many famous photographers have famous spouses.

• A thread by a journalist from The Economist who has come around to the view that America may have turned out to have a better approach than the EU to regulating big corporations.