Favorites March 5th 2024
This article was so cool! It goes into lots of detail, but the simplest explanation is that to get rid of the 'screen door' effect in the Vision Pro, they set the lenses in a way so that the entire screen would just be a tiny bit out of focus. This has obvious downsides.
Seems like very good performance, but of course third party testing is probably better. Interestingly, during needle in a haystack testing of the new Claude 3 model, the model pointed out that it's probably being tested. Best guess is that there's actually some info about haystack testing in the training data.
Elsewhere, real political advocates think the project2025 plan for a Trump admin backed by the Heritage foundation are all fake, a conspiracy theory on the level of qanon.
Longer Reads
• New CDC Guidance says isolate if you have COVID until the fever ends. This thread explains why, but TL;DR it's a cost/benefit analysis, most of the spread happens before you even have symptoms.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Using deepfakes to have celebrities explain calculus to you. (src)(cached)
– The N in FAANG is now Nvidia, sorry netflix (src)(cached)
– Speaker Johnson tries to claim he supports IVF, despite the fact he cosponsored a bill that effectively would have banned it a year ago. (src)(cached)
– "Advanced economy GDP grew 1.7% but emissions fell 4.5%", Advanced economies coal demand is down to the levels of 1900. (src)(cached)
– MLK jr was 5'7", but he knew how to make it work, unlike DeSantis, whose only trick was wearing lifts for months (src)
– Murder is down 20% so far in 2024, based on the available data. Pretty good! Pick your joke: "Murderers are quiet quitting" or "Even murderers can't find steady employment in Joe Biden's America" (src)
– Some interesting excerpts from an article in The Economist about how Costco works. TL;DR: they make the money on the membership fees, the products in store really are very low margin. (src)(cached)
– Great webapp that can show you the population-weighted density of various places. (src)(cached)
– Great live demo of SDXL, a text-to-image model that can generate pictures as fast as you can type (src)
– Russia is burning cash so fast right now that they could very well run out in 12 months, the number-one thing we should be doing right now is helping Ukraine defend itself! (src)(cached)
– SCOTUS ruled that Colorado can't remove Trump from the ballot, it was a pretty dumb opinion in a few ways. (src)
– Localities seem to not understand where their power comes from. (src)(cached)
– Really long detailed explanation of how a wing works (src)
– Thank goodness, that survey indicating that 20% of people think the Holocaust is a myth did not replicate. It's more like 3%. (src)(cached)