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Favorites March 18th 2023

Middle East Intrigue, Image Generators, and Bitcoin Fanatics

David Watson
Mar 19, 2023
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Favorites March 18th 2023

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June 2022, San Diego
Twitter avatar for @emollick
Ethan Mollick @emollick
I can't get over how many details Midjourney adds to images. Here are "sea otters reading a book" & "river otters reading a book." Not only does it get the species differences and environments & reflections right, but look how the sea otter is holding the book with its foot!
Image
Image
3:45 AM ∙ Mar 18, 2023
441Likes49Retweets

Oh, and apparently in Midjourney v5 they've mostly fixed the weird fingers problem.

Twitter avatar for @mgsiegler
M.G. Siegler @mgsiegler
The sound of inevitability…
Twitter avatar for @mgsiegler
M.G. Siegler @mgsiegler
Let’s be honest, this was always going to end with Trump, alone in his room, watching Fox News as they cut live to footage of Trump, alone in his room, getting arrested while watching Fox News.
2:49 PM ∙ Mar 18, 2023
32Likes6Retweets

When I first saw this post by Siegler, I thought he was crazy. Recent episode of Serious Trouble indicated that it was unlikely they were actually going to charge Trump over the case in question. But today Trump is stating that he expects to be arrested Tuesday.

Twitter avatar for @nycsouthpaw
southpaw @nycsouthpaw
NYT has the story of how surrogates for Reagan conspired to keep the American hostages in Tehran from being freed as an election stratagem.
nytimes.comA Four-Decade Secret: One Man’s Story of Sabotaging Carter’s Re-electionA prominent Texas politician said he unwittingly took part in a 1980 tour of the Middle East with a clandestine agenda.
8:23 PM ∙ Mar 18, 2023
4,495Likes1,693Retweets

Kai Ryssdal points out this is similar to Nixon undermining LBJ. Another commenter goes further, "every republican president since eisenhower has been elected either with the explicit support of a foreign adversary or with a minority of the vote"

Twitter avatar for @ne0liberal
Neoliberal 🌐🇺🇦 @ne0liberal
Occupational licensing is bad.
Image
1:42 AM ∙ Mar 18, 2023
409Likes55Retweets

Threads

• There was some drama about how Balaji, a wealthy crypto fanatic, bet an economist that one bitcoin would be worth over a million dollars within 90 days. This belief is a bit ridiculous to say the least. Amusingly, Matt Levine explains that if he really believes this, he's making the wrong bet, it's more likely he's trying to manipulate the bitcoin market.

• Short thread about how the massive progress in AI is likely to hit a wall because some industries have barely adopted computers. The possible fixes would be pretty weird.

• 20 years after the invasion of Iraq, a thread speculating as to why Bush chose to invade. TL;DR: to demonstrate to other countries, especially Iran, that the US was powerful and willing to use force.

• Thread with details on the experiment where GPT-4 pretended to be blind and used TaskRabbit to defeat a CAPTCHA. It's not that it was impossibly smart, just way more capable of operating towards a goal autonomously than the researchers expected.

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