Favorites March 4th 2023

Santa Cruz Boardwalk, February 2023

Swann Marcus @SwannMarcus89

I love how the opinions of people online are always like 8 years out of date. How long will it take people to internalize that incomes for the bottom 25% have been growing faster than the top 25% for half a decade?

Surya Kanegaonkar @suryakane

@bariweiss @IsaacGrafstein As inequality rises in America, many of the country’s blue collar conservatives will focus more on domestic economic and social issues over foreign ones. Wealthier “liberals” are more likely to back foreign intervention. It’s a symptom of the overextension of the American empire.

Note this is inflation adjusted, it's nice to see that all the lines are going up too.

Rob Henderson @robkhenderson

They eliminated standardized testing before they eliminated legacy admissions. Tells you all you need to know.

New York Post @nypost

Columbia becomes first Ivy League school to permanently drop SAT/ACT testing requirement https://t.co/rZACBlCLO2 https://t.co/Pfk4TW8kDf

I think I've said it previously, but while testing is not ideal, it's worse than all the other options. People respond that the rich can hire tutors to help with test scores, but they can do the same thing for GPA. The difference is that expensive SAT test prep doesn't do that much.

Alec Stapp @AlecStapp

The high speed rail project connecting Los Angeles & San Francisco was supposed to cost $33 billion & be completed by 2020. Now, just the segment between Bakersfield & Merced costs $35 billion (!) and it’s obvious the whole route between LA & SF is never going to be completed.

Yikes. One of the California officials responsible for the project says that building the train line is secondary to creating jobs. Not great!

Ethan Mollick @emollick

This AI experiment was pretty amazing, I asked Bing to look up Tamarian, a made-up Star Trek language that works entirely by metaphors to Tamarian history and myth. Then I asked it to do the same for English using American history. It gave remarkably subtle & interesting results

A little dark that all of it's analogies for love involve someone dying.

Helen Toner @hlntnr

If you spend much time on AI twitter, you might have seen this tentacle monster hanging around. But what is it, and what does it have to do with ChatGPT? It's kind of a long story. But it's worth it! It even ends with cake 🍰 THREAD:

I first saw this tentacle monster picture in the Ben Thompson article, the explanation in the thread is really useful on the difference between RLHF and Fine Tuning.

Carter Murphy 💰8️⃣ @cartermurphy218

This is gonna be a year people talk about for a long time

Threads

• Thread about the current state of the AI industry