Favorites: From Sky Shows to Social Ties
So, one, that's really cool looking. But two, a reminder again, drone sky performances are absolutely a display of military power.
If you were wondering, the 2003 G5 had 256 MB of ram, the Series 9 watch has 1GB. The watch has a 250mAh battery, which @kornel estimates would give an Electric Car 6 meters of range.
I'm feeling vindicated about having ignored the study, I’m not the only one. Here's the article explaining the mistake. Sorta terrifying that you can absolutely have a huge math error and still get published. Anyway, study has been retracted. Finally it seems that if you ask OpenAI o1 to find math errors in the paper, it can find the problem on the first try (cached)
We need more excuses to regularly meet with a single group of people regularly. The workplace is pretty much the only thing left that most people take part in, it's a good reason to think twice about increasing the rate of remote work. Perhaps more housing could be designed to provide this sense of community.
Longer Reads
• I'm sure you weren't looking to Gladiator II as an example of historical accuracy in filmmaking, but if you wanted details about why it's inaccurate, historian Bret Devereaux absolutely has you covered in this extremely detailed Roman history blog post you can find here: part 1 and part 2. TL;DR: Romans weren't actually that into gladiators. Commodus' whole deal was that he was weirdly obsessed with them, once he's dead, you have to really contort history to come up with an excuse to have them feature in politics. (src)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– If you're wondering, 61% of americans have a negative view of Luigi Mangione, only 19% have a positive view of him. (src)(cached)
– Short summary of Meta's paper which presents a way to move from word size tokens to byte-size tokens for large language models. Seems promising. Forcing LLMs to not be able to 'see' anything smaller than a word seems likely to be responsible for some of their language reasoning mistakes. (src)(cached)
– Iranian women standing up to the mullahs are showing true bravery. (src)(cached)
– A lot of people are very reasonably annoyed about some of the folks Biden just granted clemency to. It appears they just took the ACLU's recommendation at face value and without double checking it. The people mad about it are the same people who supported the idea that nonviolent offenders should not be imprisoned. But there are some really heinous nonviolent offenders out there. Details in this thread (cached). (src)(cached)
– Stewart Hicks argues in this youtube video that modern McMansions were made possible by the invention of truss connector plates (aka gang plates). TL;DR: they made it cheaper to build suburban homes by allowing larger spans to be factory built and delivered to the site. (src)
– Microsoft has released an open source tool to convert many documents (including office docs) to markdown. (src)
– Titanic played on a slide whistle is very funny. (src)
– Trump's trade policy ideas are very dumb, it's going to be very unpopular if avocados become a luxury item. (src)(cached)
– You don't want Jensen Huang next to you at the urinal in the employee bathrooms at Nvidia. (src)(cached)
– If you really want it, here's a thread of damage to the US in various nuclear war scenarios. Surprise, it's not pretty! (src)(cached)
– Google Spanner is a really cool invention, and you can just read the paper if you want. (src)(cached)
– Did you know that the MMR vaccine was associated with a reduction in Autism (within the margin of error) in a Danish RCT? (src)(cached)
– Trump says he wants to privatize the USPS. This would absolutely be terrible for rural voters who overwhelmingly voted for him. (src)(cached)