Favorites July 29th 2024
Seems bad, like... not a good sign. I want to try to stay optimistic, but I don’t want anyone to be surprised if China starts a massive war some time soon.
Sorta hopeful, it would be amazing if even just one or two more uses for GLP-1 panned out. One commenter came in with the theory that diseases that gave gained prevalance in the last 50 years all have a common cause that's being addressed by GLP-1 medications. But my understanding has always been that the 'new' diseases are really just diseases we're getting because we're living longer. I heard someone say jokingly that they're an 'inflammation truther', believing that many modern maladies are caused by inflammation. That seems a bit out there, but what do I know.
Bringing work in house is super important, a big part of state capacity. Consultants cost way more. One of the key ways to make this work is that we need to be willing to pay people enough so that they don't immediately leave to become consultants themselves.
Longer Reads
• Thread about what we can learn about when humans are surprised about LLM's failure on certain questions. (src)(cached)
• DeepMind created a new AI that scored well on an International Math Olympiad test. TL;DR It's a big advancement over previous models, but it still is missing the ability to directly understand the questions as written, it needed human help transcribing the questions into a custom language. Plus it was suuper slow. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Post detailing the importance of Meta's Llama release, which now appears to be on par with GPT4 (src)(cached)
– The Perplexity search engine has added prediction markets to their search results (src)(cached)
– Areas where voters prefer Harris to Biden: Inflation, Immigration, Abortion, and a few more. Yglesias says lean into it, throw Biden under the bus on immigration explicitly (src)(cached)
– JD Vance is the least liked VP Nominee who wasn't an incumbent. Although, surprisingly, no one has tried "pick a popular statewide politician from a swing state you're targeting" for decades. (src)(cached)
– US Maritime manufacturing ad was very heartwarming (src)(cached)
– Some of Twitter's controversial seeming actions may really just be that their infrastructure is massively understaffed (src)
– Vance actually wrote a promo for a book by the head of Project 2025, which they're now trying to distance themselves from. (src)(cached)
– Everyone says they approve of Biden dropping out, 90% of Democrats, 88% of Independants, 85% of Republicans. The idea that it's some sort of coup is silly. (src)(cached)
– Tim Lee argues that Waymo should be more open about how often remote takeover happens. (src)(cached)
– Top 5 cities for homes built per capita vs bottom 5 are very much red vs blue cities. (src)(cached)
– I enjoyed this browser game, "what beats rock" very silly, but quite fun. (src)
– Bari Weiss' The Free Press article that's somehow surprised that the Republicans are acting insane. (src)(cached)
– For the first time, we have discovered an exoplanet from pictures of the planet directly. One thing I didn't know is that we've actually been able to see exoplanets for so long that we actually have video of their orbits around their star. (src)