Favorites February 19th 2024

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Here's a comparison with the previous state of the art systems. This is a huge step up. Will Smith even went ahead and remade the old spaghetti video as a joke (he filmed it for real, joking that it's Sora). Sora is not yet released to the public, it's just an announcement so far, but they did include some examples of it's failures, which are fun

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Cargo Bikes, for delivery! Cool! It would mean fewer double-parked delivery vans, and less danger to pedestrians. Here's the full story.

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Probably not a good idea to have AI chatbots do raw customer service just yet.

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By refusing to approve aid for Ukraine either with or without border security, the Republican party has handed Putin a huge win in Ukraine this week.

Flotsam and Jetsam

– SF School District completed it's study of the effects of pushing Algebra back a year. TL;DR: bad, the effects were bad. (src)(cached)
– A lot of people were talking about this story about a NYMagazine Finance writer getting scammed out of $50k. Although some people have pointed out that the story seems to have some holes. The most obvious being that banks don't actually let you pull out that much cash on short notice. Also there are jokes. (src)(cached)
– Benedict Evans: "The lasting achievement of communism was to take a country full of Germans and make it poor" (src)

– Tucker Carlson is amazed by how cheap groceries are in Russia, when converted to USD. What he doesn't realize is that the bill he's looking at is 70% of the median russian weekly salary. Also, I don't think he's been to an American grocery store in decades. (src)(cached)
– In Dune part 1, Villeneuve seems to have added a line specifically to make fun of Chalamet, although it also makes the movie better. (src)(cached)
– Tim Lee goes ahead and tries some non-trick questions on google's new Gemini Advanced and... it does not go well. (src)(cached)
– Reproductive rights groups fracturing because Biden is too supportive of Israel is... not going to result in good outcomes for reproductive rights. And this is happening in other progressive activist groups, seems like a very bad trend. (src)(cached)
– Plans to suspend CEQA in downtown SF, hopefully this helps. In other good news, a judge ruled that some common CEQA strategies are illegal (src)(cached)
– California's racially segregated amber alert system seems... pretty weird. (src)(cached)
– Two things stick out in a global deaths per year chart since 1950: COVID, and the Great Leap Forward. (src)

– We really need to get our defense production back, "In one day, the Navy fired 45% more Tomahawks at the Houthis than it procures in a year" (src)(cached)
– Apple's upcoming support for RCS is because China made them do it, not the EU. (src)
– In other countries, cars going the other way don't blind you, everyone else has technology to fix this. (src)(cached)