Favorites July 29 2021
It's almost as if teaching people is more important than screening people for ability...
...nah, that can't be true, can it?
Jordan Weissmann 🗽 @JHWeissmann
Not an angle I had ever considered before!
Reinforcement learning typically trains & tests agents on the same game. New work shows how our team trains generally capable agents on huge game spaces, resulting in agents that generalise to held-out test games, & learn behaviours like experimentation dpmd.ai/open-ended-blog 1/
It's sorta like, they trained an AI to play Portal and Overwatch, then found that if you throw it into Counter-Strike, it does reasonably well. Clearly we can't pretend that this is an Artificial General Intelligence, but it seems like we're moving in that direction surprisingly fast.
Hats Off: This NYTIMES visualization comparing American Jobs Plan and the Portman-Sinema Deal is a graphics masterwork
The animation is nice too. At least it's got the pollution part still.
By my estimates, Covid case rates among fully vaccinated individuals are currently ~4-7x lower than those that aren't fully vaccinated.
This is based on weekly data out of LA County. Unfortunately, our federal government has no real-time data on this.
Youyang Gu @youyanggu
So the back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the vaccine is ~80-85% effective against the Delta variant, which aligns with the latest research. Still very high!
And of course, if you're fully vaccinated, hospitalizations and death rates are even lower.
This seems like the consensus view on Vaccines and Delta.
It hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention as provisions stopping voter suppression but ban on partisan gerrymandering most important part of For the People Act, says @davidshor
“This one part of the bill is probably five times more important than the rest of the bill combined”
I almost want to not highlight this in the hope that it can sneak past quietly.
See, this doesn't seem *that* important until you realize the extent to which fascism in the US is supported by this one pillow company.
The graph for renewables looks *better* when you remove hydro.
