Favorites February 11th 2024
They have a whole website set up where you can use it a small amount for free, or pay to use it more or with a commercial license. It also can do sound effects.
They really did destroy a Waymo, although really that should be a curse on San Francisco, and the 49ers are from Santa Clara right?
And definitely don't tip it a nickel, that makes it angry, better to not tip. Here's the write-up.
Longer Reads
• A thread discussing our most recent understanding of our trajectory for climate change. Currently expecting 2.6° of warming by 2100. Relatedly, here's a thread discussing a study of what interventions change people's behavior around emmissions. Unfortunately, tha answer was that nothing worked. (src)(cached)
• A great walkthrough of the differences between Google Gemini and ChatGPT-4. The main one that I noted, ChatGPT is still better at writing code to solve problems. (src)
• Texas has a large economy and it's growing quickly. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Toll Evasion on bay area bridges up since they removed the toll booths. Although I think the increases in other kinds of bad traffic behavior, especially around obscured plates. (src)(cached)
– Hydrogen Fueling stations across California are all offline. Seems like a bad system. Just use batteries (src)(cached)
– Increase in immigration to the US means our economy is growing faster, meaning more tax receipts. Hard for the US to default on it's debt when millions want to move here. (src)(cached)
– Imports from Mexico to the US surpassed imports from China in 2023 (src)(cached)
– The Senate passed a foreign aid package for Taiwan, Ukraine, and Israel. But it can't pass the house, maybe they should add a border security package as a sweetener? /s (src)(cached)
– A bunch of rock structures discovered at the bottom of the great lakes (src)(cached)
– A metaphor for posting in anger to social media for likes, don't go to the Dark Side don't become a Sith. (src)
– Putin says WWII was Poland's fault. Quite a take? Also, he apparently paid Tucker Carlson to interview him? (src)(cached)
– Turkey has pretty conclusively shown that you can't lower inflation by lowering interest rates. A very painful experiment. (src)(cached)
– There's now a 14 point gap in favor of democrats amongst regular voters vs irregular voters. (src)(cached)
– Some very weird stuff gets built in Houston because of their lack of zoning. (src)(cached)
– LLMs are now essentially the same effectiveness at contract review as a lawyer, but are much cheaper. Realistically though, folks will still want to hire a lawyer who they can sue for legal malpractice. (src)(cached)
– Batteries on a very nice S-curve trajectory. (src)(cached)
