Favorites January 31st 2023

December 2022, Filoli Historic House

Eli Dourado @elidourado

I'm fascinated by the fact that cargo airships get more efficient as they get bigger, forever. How far can we push it? My friends and I hired an engineer to design us the biggest flying object ever to find out.

elidourado.comCargo airships could be bigA capital-intensive, high-risk way to revolutionize global commerce

If you check out the article, he thinks the sweet spot would be an airship 388 meters long and 78 meters in diameter. Making it the largest flying vehicle ever built, although getting into the question of the largest concept aircraft you run the risk of falling down the rabbit hole of the CL-1201, a proposed nuclear powered airplane.

roon @tszzl

everyone young dev needs to at some point work at Facebook to learn the lesson that you can in fact create zero tests or documentation, avoid all best practices, just push code and you can run (formerly) trillion dollar companies this way

If you're wondering how it could possibly work that way, the answer is that they do progressive rollouts of changes, as described in detail by one commenter.

Ethan Mollick @emollick

Huge, huge finding: across grade levels & subjects, students improve in academic performance at the same rate with each practice session The gap between good & bad students is initial knowledge, anyone can get mastery with practice (7 sessions on average) psyarxiv.com/pxsfh/

"Our evidence suggests that given favorable learning conditions for deliberate practice and given the learner invests effort in sufficient learning opportunities, indeed, anyone can learn anything they want."

Threads

• Interesting thread arguing against the idea that any decoupling from the Chinese economy will increase the chances of a war. Main point: there are tons of examples where countries attacked a smaller country hoping that their trade ties with larger countries would stop those countries from intervening.

• Details on why the US will probably soon authorize giving F-16s to Ukraine, along with the tanks. TL;DR: The M1 Abrams tanks we already gave them are actually a bigger deal than F-16s are. (We stopped buying new F-16s in 2005, but continue to buy new M1 Abrams.)

• Good news, despite Russia cutting off gas exports, Europe has already managed to bring down the amount of coal it's using. Here's a long thread with details.