Favorites February 5th 2023

Half Moon Bay February 2023

Dare Obasanjo @Carnage4Life

Seeing the ways ChatGPT & generative AI are changing so much about how people create in just a few months, it’s crazy to think tech spent years convinced the future was selling JPEGs stored in a very slow distributed database. Sorry, just the links to the JPEGs not actual images

He goes on: "This is what an actual technology revolution looks like. It’s not ten years of trying to find use cases. It’s use cases being found and productized faster than you can track them."

Alec Stapp @AlecStapp

Striking chart: Land and other non-produced assets now account for more than half the value of total assets in the United States. Land value tax is a no-brainer.

More and more people are saying. Here's the article.

Bella Chu @bellachu10

One of the most unfortunate trends in modern architecture is when cities require large buildings to “break up the massing” to mimic lots of smaller buildings. The way to get granular development is to make small time development easier. Big buildings can be pretty too.

Threads

• Short thread about how the leading edge of AI research has moved from Academia to Industry, including some stats comparing ChatGPT with leaks of an unlaunched Google AI. TL;DR: these systems are expensive to train and seem like they'll be easy to monetize.

• Relatedly, here's a thread discussing methods Reddit users have developed for getting around ChatGPT's content limits.

• Thread discussing how the US EV sales nearly doubled in 2022 over the prior year.

• Short thread arguing that the United States is actually not an unusually exploitative nation. While it's quite unequal and there are still huge areas of improvement, *median* Americans are quite well off.

• China isn't really reporting their COVID deaths anymore, this Economics professor expands upon some NYTimes reporting to do a back of the envelope estimate that China has had over 4 million deaths in the last 6 weeks. This would make their death rate similar to the US' but in under two months instead of three years. There are definitely huge assumptions being made, and it could be far off.