Favorites February 13th 2023

October 2016, Agua Caliente California

Ned Resnikoff @resnikoff

If you've been wondering why lately YIMBYs seem to be obsessed with the number of staircases in an apartment building, this @alfred_twu piece is probably the best answer you'll find.

sfchronicle.comHow new fire codes can fix California’s housing crisis and its architectureThrough single stair codes for mid-rise apartment buildings, we can have housing that is...

A new article on the need to allow single-staircase buildings. One point I thought was interesting here was that there's a clear argument that the dual staircase mandate could be increasing danger from fires rather than decreasing it.

Jim Fan @DrJimFan

We’ve seen a gazillion startups using OpenAI APIs to do “co-pilot for X”. What’s next? Enter *physical* co-pilot! Here’s a compelling demo: you improvise by playing a “low resolution” piano, and the co-pilot compiles it real-time to Hi-Fi music! It unleashes our inner pianist.🧵

Pretty cool, there's a demo here, but it doesn't do anything about rythm for you, so it's still quite difficult to get good results.

Bojan Tunguz @tunguz

This is insane. This is what I’ve been alluding to for months now. This is an epochal transformative technology that will soon touch - and radically transform - ALL knowledge work. If most of your work involves sitting in front of a computer, you will be disrupted very, very… https://t.co/c9a4VRlpgp

I think that it's worth noting that there are more people on the internet now than there were when any of these other services first started. But still, wow.

Science Is Strategic @scienceisstrat1

China 🇨🇳 looks set to take over the offshore wind industry the way it earlier did with solar and batteries (1/3)

If you're wondering, here's a picture of that massive 280 meter diameter turbine.

Threads

• Short thread on the effectiveness of OpenAI's ChatGPT detector. TL;DR: it's actually not particularly effective, on long text it's still gives 74% false negatives and 9% false positives.

• Here's an amazing thread that argues that it wasn't environmental regulation that stopped nuclear power in the 80s. TL;DR: it was the deregulation of the electricity market, that's why France kept making progress, they didn't deregulate when the US did. Turns out, only governments can work on long enough time scales to fund nuclear.

• Today the Chinese accused the US of flying 10 balloons (UFOs?) into their airspace since the beginning of last year. here's a short thread about high altitude balloons. TL;DR: the more recently identified balloons are much smaller than the first one that was shot down, and there are very few regulations on ballons with a payload under 6kg.