Favorites January 30th 2023

Rengstorff House, Mountain View, August 2020

Ethan Mollick @emollick

Want to shape the law? Write a Wikipedia article. Clever paper created detailed Wikipedia articles on 77 Irish Supreme Court cases, and finds those cases are more likely to be cited by lower courts... who also echo the language of the Wikipedia articles! papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

I recall when Cory Doctorow taught a class, he assigned each student to upgrade and maintain a Wikipedia article. Sometimes we forget how important a resource Wikipedia has become.

Tweets from Zach Weinberg @zachweinberg

Kids next! RSV in kids suuuuucks. Any parent will tell you.

Moderna @moderna_tx

We announced today that mRNA-1345, an investigational #vaccine candidate for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), has been granted Breakthrough Therapy Designation by the U.S. FDA for the prevention of RSV-associated lower respiratory tract disease in adults aged 60 years or older. https://t.co/lifpAAEeLu

This is great! I hope they bring it to kids soon, they say RSV is worse for kids than COVID.

sam @sam_d_1995

it’s pretty remarkable how switching from beef to pork/chicken reduces carbon emissions far more than going from pork/chicken to vegetarian

Ok, I had never seen this graph, absolutely wild.

More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS

J&J's legal strategy—to avoid baby powder liabilities by transferring them to a subsidiary & putting that subsidiary into bankruptcy—had been inspired by the Sackler family's attempts to escape penalties over opioid sales. See this thread by @moetkacik:

moe tkacik @moetkacik

J&J's lead medical director predicted in 1969 that the company would face mountains of litigation from grieving families "in 40 years" if it didn't pull the baby powder from the market. So... for more than 40 years J&J covered up their findings & kept the cancer powder in stores https://t.co/7ogECfU42d

40 year coverup... seems bad folks.

Smoke-away @SmokeAwayyy

❗BREAKING ChatGPT Update: "We’ve upgraded the ChatGPT model with improved factuality and mathematical capabilities." help.openai.com/en/articles/68…

I like the idea of finding ways to integrate other deterministic models within an LLM, I wonder how exactly they did it. The release notes don't give much away. Google built a model called PaLM that was trained to do non-language tasks as well, but I'm not sure it's deterministic in the way you'd want for math.

Paul Griffiths @paul_griffiths

Whole Foods is out here tearing families apart

Threads

• Thread discussing what it would take for Ukraine to retake Crimea. TL;DR: they're going to need to take and hold everything else first, and it will take quite a while.

• Short thread discussing why the US has so little automated traffic enforcement. Biggest takeaway: police unions are opposed.