Favorites February 15th 2023

Half Moon Bay, February 2023

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 @Noahpinion

A chart of where coal is burned on planet Earth.

He follows up by concluding the largest lever to reduce world CO2 emissions is is the hands of China, and they don't really care what environmentalists in the west think. The good news is that renewable electricity production is growing at fantastic pace world-wide.

Sam Ro 📈 @SamRo

"United’s rewards card program with JPMorgan Chase is valued today at $22 billion. But United’s market capitalization is $16 billion, meaning investors are assigning negative value to the part of its business that flies airplanes. The same goes for American and Delta." @semafor

They're all credit card points programs with side businesses in flying planes.

Ethan Mollick @emollick

I got access to the Bing AI. It still has the problems of ChatGPT, including lying (though its better), but I am not sure that matters as much as folks think. Connecting AI to the internet has resulted in a system that is so much more capable than ChatGPT

oneusefulthing.substack.comI hope you weren’t getting too comfortable.I just got access to the new Bing AI. My initial thoughts are that our assumptions about the limits of AI were wrong.

His example of asking it to learn from Kurt Vonnegut is really quite incredible. Also today, a very short clear explanation of how these LLMs generate text.

Edward Wong @ewong

NEW: Chinese spy balloon was aimed at US bases in Guam & Hawaii, but winds pushed it to Montana, US officials say. Chinese officials didn't use a self-destruct device, then privately told US they'd speed it out of the US. w/ @julianbarnes @adamentous.

nytimes.comHow a Fog of Questions Over a Spy Balloon and U.F.O.s Fed a Diplomatic CrisisU.S. officials now suspect that the balloon was sent to spy on bases in Guam and Hawaii and that other downed objects were not surveillance machines. Washington’s evolving view reflects U.S. and Chinese difficulties in discerning each other’s intentions.

They're also reporting that the other stuff we shot down wasn't surveillance.

Kai Ryssdal @kairyssdal

This is great A Secret for Falling Asleep So Good It’s a British National Treasure - The New York Times

nytimes.comA Secret for Falling Asleep So Good It’s a British National TreasureTune into serenity with the BBC Shipping Forecast, a weather report from deep in the analog era.

It's BBC Shipping Forecast compilations, now I just wonder it works on toddlers.

Threads

• Great thread responding to criticism of a Georgist Land Value Tax.

• Thread by Andrew Prokop doing a retrospective on coverage of the Trump-Russia story over the years. TL;DR: big media establishments were relatively cautious in their coverage of the stuff that turned out to be wrong.

• Short thread showing how an evolutionary algorithm was used to create an algorithm to outperform AdamW, the state of the art stochastic gradient descent system used to train neural nets.