Favorites January 5th 2024
The standard for youtube has always been to never read the comments, now that he mentions it, they really seem better now. In a follow-up he mentions the downside, now most of the comments are people saying they love the video.
That's... a lot of movement right?
I suspect this kind of household robot is still a bit far off, but the way they trained this one is really interesting. They have a rig that can be set up with it so that a person can operate it like a mech to train it on what the task is supposed to look like. They found this kind of training was more effective than expected. Also impressive: they put this thing togther for $20k. It's just a laptop with a mobile 3070ti. Also check out the video of it making horrible mistakes.
I had not realized that the standard is 90 seconds, but what I have read in the past is that the biggest danger is suffocation, especially because jet fuel fumes are pretty toxic.
Longer Reads
• Short thread discussing The Truly Disadvantaged by William Julius Wilson. One tidbit: discussion of why black neighborhoods got worse in the post-civil rights era.
• A thread of famous paintings recreated as photographs with midjourney. When I saw it I thought 1) that it was pretty cheasy, and 2) that it would be pretty easy to do. So I gave it a shot, and blew half an hour and couldn't get any of them as good as I wanted using Midjourney alone.
I really didn’t like their Jatte or Wave, but to do better I think I’d need to bring thees into Photoshop. The hardest part is actually getting the overall parts of the picture to be in the right place and to be the right size. And don’t even try to ask Midjourney for Mt Fuji anywhere in The Wave, because if it hears “Fuji” it’s instantly the whole image.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Another paper showing significant LLM quality improvements using AI generated inputs along with human inputs rather than human input alone. (src)
– High quality georgist animated gif meme (src)
– Estimates of increase in number of photos taken per year from 1999:80 billion photos, 2022: at least 10 trillion (src)
– New starlink satalites going up that will be able to connect directly to normal phones. Will only be capable of text messages initially (src)
– With Houthis blocking the Suez, we're about to experience a rerun of the situation in 2021 where the Ever Given got stuck in the Suez. Will it cause the same supply chain related inflation? (src)
– The first US large-scale offshore wind project is now online. (src)
– Supreme court bringing back death panels to decide who is in enough mortal danger that they're allowed an abortion. (src)
– Meta has a paper where they create avatars for a speaker based exclusively on the audio of them speaking. There's a video of course. (src)
– Cryptocurrencies are now half as old as the Internet, and not much to show for it. Seems like that means something? (src)
– Japan's post-Fukushima retrofits of their nuclear plants worked great during the recent earthquake (src)
– There really are people who want to remove all punishments for carrying guns illegally. Seems like a bad idea? (src)
– There are literally 10x as many high-skilled applicants to come to the US as we are willing to accept. (src)
– Yet another example that the way you get affordable housing is by building luxury housing and waiting. (src)
– The NYC teacher's union opposing the congestion pricing, absolutely deranged. (src)
– ISIS claims responsibility for bombing in Iran. (src)
– "Uruguay gets 90-95% of its electricity from renewables." Seems pretty good. (src)
– I did not realize how much more often Biden goes to church than any other 21st century president. (src)
– The US has a different certification for elevators from almost the entire rest of the world (src)