Favorites March 11th 2023

Road Safety, Office-to-Housing Conversions, Color Preferences, and Large Language Models

March 2022, Toronto

Brent Toderian @BrentToderian

This video camera study showed that less than 5% of people on bikes break traffic laws while riding, yet 66% of people do so when driving. And if you REALLY want even MORE bike-riders to obey laws, build more protected bike infrastructure. Via @carltonreid

forbes.comCyclists Break Far Fewer Road Rules Than Motorists, Finds New Video StudyBusting the myth of the “scofflaw cyclist” Danish Road Directorate studies reveal that while 66% of motorists routinely break road traffic laws only 5% of cyclists do so. Law breaking by cyclists is higher where there is no cycle-specific infrastructure.

"Almost all road users broke the law, but while motorists mostly broke road rules to save time, the most common reason for people on bikes was personal safety." On the other hand it doesn’t seem that surprising that car violations are much more likely to put others at risk, given that a car is big and heavy and a bike isn’t.

Emily Badger @emilymbadger

So you want to turn an office building into housing? Let's dig into how that actually works, and why older buildings are much easier to convert. w/ the amazing @larrybuch

nytimes.comHere’s How to Solve a 25-Story Rubik’s CubeCities are eager to turn office buildings into housing amid rising remote work. But that’s harder than you might think.

This article was great, I really liked the visualisations of the floor plates. One commenter notes that these conversions would be easier if you were making dorms, which could have shared facilities in the middle. Or go further and legalize the "Munger Cube"

Paul Graham @paulg

Changes in the colors of objects since 1800, from pictures of 7000 objects in the collections of UK science museums.

At first I thought people are just less interested in colorful stuff today, but really, that whole middle section is wood colored, and we don't make much out of wood anymore. When people can pick, they want black or white, but also some blue.

Simon Willison @simonw

OK, I'm calling it: Large language models are having their Stable Diffusion moment right now

simonwillison.netLarge language models are having their Stable Diffusion momentThe open release of the Stable Diffusion image generation model back in August 2022 was a key moment. I wrote how Stable Diffusion is a really big deal at the …

Remember that Facebook LLaMA model that leaked a few days back? Well, now someone has build open source software to get it running on a Macbook. It looks totally feasable to have this on a phone in short order.

Halide @halidecamera

Reddit user ibreakphotos discovers that Samsung's 'Space Zoom' simply replaces user's moon photos with higher-res images of the moon through a clever testing process. reddit.com/r/Android/comm… This isn't computational photography — it's inserting imagery that simply isn't there.

"Computational Photography"

Threads

• Thread about why planting trees is not really a viable way to offset CO2 Emissions. TL;DR: While attractive on price at $5 to $10 per ton of CO2 offset, trees just don't hold on to carbon very long, you need geological storage, which costs more like $100 per ton.

• Graph heavy thread about the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. Main takeaway: SVB had an unusual number of uninsured deposits, and made some big bets on interest rates remaining low. Here's another thread with a wider view of what this says about interest rate risk.