Favorites February 21st 2024
Seems like a pretty big deal! By pushing the Hunter Biden case really hard, the Republicans have been tools for Russian intelligence.
Turns out, building homes can lead to the economy improving. Maybe other states should try it! Also, Salt Lake City and Durham outpacing SF and NY is quite something.
Longer Reads
• Tim Lee has a thread summarizing his recent article which argues that there's a very good chance OpenAI loses their case to the NYTimes. TL;DR: while the Google Books case points towards OpenAI winning, there are multiple other fair use cases that went the other way. Also, some fun examples of OpenAI's halfhearted copyright infringment protections. (src)(cached)
• Simple explanation of proposed federal action to increase nationwide housing supply. TL;DR: redirect federal funding from cities that restrict housing growth to ones that encourage it. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Jon Stewart back at The Daily Show, making fun of Tucker Carlson. He's still very good at this job. (src)(cached)
– The SAT is surprisingly good at predicting outcomes, even when you control for everything else, in a way that GPA isn't. (src)(cached)
– Frederick Douglass opposing Everything Bagel liberalism in 1843 (src)(cached)
– Not only is unemployment very low, job satisfaction is at an all-time high (src)(cached)
– Houthis in Yemen attacked a ship carrying food bound for Yemen. (src)(cached)
– Germany, very close to a live war going on, should maybe figure out how to start producing ammunition again. (src)(cached)
– Along with homes, Texas is also building quite a lot of solar, they've surpassed CA (src)(cached)
– Google's new Gemini model really really wants to ensure diversity in photos it generates. Historical scenes of 1920s germany. Speculation is that the goal was to fix the 'doctors are all white men' problem, but now the Pope is an indigenous woman. Tim Lee asked both ChatGPT and Gemini to proofread his article on their differences, ChatGPT offered to fix Gemini's mistakes. Nate Silver was not impressed either. Everyone united to dump on Gemini (src)(cached)
– Leftmost and Rightmost candidates in CA Senate race are both in favor of cutting Taiwan loose, seems bad (src)(cached)
– GPT4 seems to have had a short outage where it got super dumb (src)
– The likely next Trump scandal will be whatever he ends up having to do to come up with the money to pay the recent $400m judgement against him in the fraud trial. (src)
– The folks preparing to staff a 2025 Trump White House explicitly say their next goal is to end birth control. (src)(cached)
– China and India accounted for more than 100% of net emissions increases in 2023. (src)(cached)