Favorites March 29th 2023

Toronto, March 2022

Christoph Rehage @crehage

So Chinese Uber rival Didi apparently listens to conversations of passengers and drivers and warns them not to talk about "sensitive topics"? Sounds unbelievable at first. But it's Xi Jinping's China Dream. And other users are sharing similar experiences.

老雷 🐈 @deguoziganwu

美丽的新世界： https://t.co/qfCzYJ0WFo

That sounds bad, here's a first-hand description of an encounter with this in english

Ian Leslie @mrianleslie

An investigation into whether a New Yorker reader used Bing to win the cartoon caption contest

ironicsans.substack.comDid A.I. write this New Yorker cartoon caption contest finalist?I make the case that it did.

It seems quite plausible that one of the winning entries came out of GPT-4/Bing, but if it makes you feel better, it's only a finalist, not the winner.

constans @constans

Disney’s previous governing board granted Disney unlimited control over its land and stripped the new Desantis-appointed board of its powers, and then slipped this “time limit” on the contractual grant https://t.co/szk1hNS4c6

No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen @NoLieWithBTC

It looks like Disney just checkmated Ron DeSantis. The board DeSantis appointed to “oversee” Disney is now complaining that the company used a loophole to strip them of their power until 2053. https://t.co/xCaxdn4QE4

Apparently it's something about avoiding the 'law of perpetuities'?

Ethan Mollick @emollick

Fascinating case of how ChatGPT’s capabilities advance I ask it for random numbers, and it uses Wolfram to do it. I for another method & it shows me a Python program. The third try & it makes some up. I ask it to analyze those numbers and it makes a math argument they are random

In a follow-up he shows what happens when an API call fails.

Robotbeat🗽 ➐ @Robotbeat

People just don't have any sense of relative scale. They're LITERALLY Avatar-ing entire forests and villages (this village on the 3rd image, for instance) in Germany to get low grade coal.

Michael Thomas @curious_founder

Clean energy critics often argue that addressing climate change will require too much mining. So I looked into the data. I found that our current fossil fuel economy requires 535x more mining than a 100% clean energy economy would. 🧵

Any time someone worries about how much lithium we would need to mine to make all cars battery powered, remind them of these photos of coal mining. We mined 100k metric tons of lithium in 2021, and that's projected to grow 10x over the next decade. On the other hand, we mined 7 billion metric tons of coal in 2019.

Matt Ford @fordm

ANTIQUES ROADSHOW GUEST: Well my great-grandfather worked in the Foreign Office and may have spent some time in India APPRAISER: [sitting in a bathtub carved from a single ruby] Uh huh

Threads

• Thread of interesting takeaways from an article in Wired about TSMC. TL;DR: they're pretty intense about continuing to make progress on lithography at TSMC.