Favorites July 2nd 2024
That's a lot of new solar! Very exciting! And look how much they've outperformed predictions year after year after year.
And to try to win back voters, the conservatives are proposing a tax break for landlords.
A lot of UK content today. And to be clear, there is flavorful British food, like chicken
Longer Reads
• Great thread explaining how a paper ticket nfc chip works and what it looks like. TL;DR: the chip itself is the size of a grain of salt (src)
• Chris Elmendorf goes into detail on AB 1893, the bill that has divided YIMBY groups in California. It needs some fixes, for sure, but it does have some good points. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Zipf's Law, which I had not read about before, would predict that the largest US cities would be significantly larger than they are. (src)(cached)
– A recent study about diets in processed vs unprocessed foods included photos of the equivalent meals. (src)
– Nobody spends less of their income on groceries than Americans (src)(cached)
– Now that Finland joined NATO, Russia moved their troops away from their border. (src)(cached)
– Bangladesh has a larger population than Russia (src)(cached)
– From an old clip of NFL highlights, almost everything in it would be a penalty now. (src)
– The best LLMs still can't answer basic questions about physical structures. Hilariously basic questions. I'm really happy Tim Lee keeps running this kind of experiment as new models come out. (src)(cached)
– A clear explanation for why Apple feels that the EU's DMA regulation means that they can't bring new features to their platforms. (src)
– People often say they think India has trouble raining living standards because their economy is focused on services, but maybe that's not actually true, there's a strange quirk in how they measure prices (src)(cached)
– Don't let anyone tell you that it takes a ton of energy for Netflix to serve video. They can now serve like twelve thousand 4k streams from a single machine using 100 watts. And they made a bunch of improvements to FreeBSD to make this possible. (src)
– California needs to upzone the coast, it's a great place to live, we shouldn't be limiting construction there. (src)(cached)
– Waymo is really starting to scale, they had driven 10 million miles driverless as of January 2024, they've now reached 20 million driverless miles. A million miles every two weeks. (src)(cached)