Favorites July 28th 2023
Cash benefits reduced the probability of someone in the treatment group becoming homeless from 4.1% to 0.3%. Giving people money is good.
I must admit, I had trouble chosing, but I think I would have gone with Canada. Smith says Japan, and I buy his argument. But the scary part is how many americans don't know!
I’m a bit surprised so many said China?
I really think there's something to the idea that there was a meme going around among tech executives that they have tons of dead weight. Apple was the only big company to avoid this mistake.
It's wild that Large Language Models are useful for running full size robots. This definitely reminds me of the response I had to the stochastic parrot argument, although now that I think about it, this Ars Technica article from a few months demonstrates a similar ability, but they’re clearly getting better.
That's one in 40 people on earth in that one state in India.
Threads
• Long thread analyzing Taiwan's defense preparations. The upshot is that they don't seem that serious, the US spends more on Taiwan's defense than they do.
• The only viable solutions to climate change require large scale state action to build massive amounts of electrical generation. Small scale stuff is not really that important.