Favorites May 22nd 2023

May 24, 2023

Brian Gitt @BrianGitt US gov't actions promote mining in countries with weak environmental rules. One mine in Arizona could supply over 25% of US copper demand. But the US Forest Service pauses development of the mine after nearly 20 yrs & $2 billion spent on licensing. mining.com US Forest Service pauses timeline for Rio Tinto Arizona copper mine The USFS has told a federal court it is not sure when it could approve a land swap allowing Rio to develop the Resolution Copper mine. — src

NEPA is up there in terms of terrible federal laws, but as always, the Jones Act is giving it a run for its money. On a more positive note, modular nuclear reactors may be deployed as soon as 2025.

Ethan Mollick @emollick It is always strange to me that 600,000 emails from Enron, collected during the legal process after the company collapsed due to fraud, make up a noticeable part of the training data for AIs. There aren’t other large, free and open email corpuses, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_Corpus Quote Tweet Ian Johnson 💻🔥 @enjalot · May 21 Whats in The Pile dataset from @AiEleuther that's being used to train a lot of open LLMs? The following charts analyze the tokens in the Test set. There are 22 sets in the pile, from sources like Wikipedia, GitHub, ArXiv, Books3, etc. Here's how many tokens each contributes: — src

I guess these days nobody manages to get all the emails from a company during litigation anymore. Shame.

Seung Min Kim @seungminkim Per Moody's: "Even if the debt limit were breached for no more than week, the U.S. economy would weaken so much, so fast, as to wipe out roughly1.5 million jobs." apnews.com How damage from a US debt default could cascade across the global economy If the debt crisis roiling Washington were eventually to send the United States crashing into recession, America’s economy would hardly sink alone. The repercussions of a first-ever default on the... — src

The Debt Limit situation remains very worrying, there's a huge separation between DC Reporter's view of the situation (pessemistic) and the markets (optimistic). Nate Silver says both sides have very real problems about predicting this, but at least the markets are putting money on the line. We've come back around to finding a way for the executive branch to unilaterally get us out of this mess.

spencer 🐡 @Unpop_Science Incredible how long it’s taken major newsrooms to identify the industry killing the Colorado River (ranching), but it’s finally happening. The data visualization is both beautiful and horrifying. Quote Tweet The New York Times @nytimes · May 22 It's the water supply that 40 million Americans rely on, and a group of states has reached a temporary deal with the Biden administration on how to share it. What’s using all that water? Hint: It’s less about long showers and more about what’s for dinner. https://nyti.ms/3IwCBSS — src

He goes on to point out that this actually understates the scale, as 'livestock feed' only includes cattle feed. Some of the 'other crop irrigation' goes to feed for chicken and pigs.

fry @anniefryman Being a Yimby in SF is a firsthand exercise in "the years are long but the decades are short" (that's how the saying goes, right?) Mayor @LondonBreed & Sup. Melgar just announced legislation to REMOVE DENSITY LIMITS on most of our commercial corridors. sfchronicle.com These S.F. neighborhoods would see denser housing under new proposal by Mayor Breed Developers looking to build housing on commercial corridors in San Francisco’s west... — src

Removing density limits for housing in commercial corridors is a really big deal! We've come a long way in SF.

Threads

• A short post by a tech CEO explaining why his company is going back to fully in person, specifically in SF.

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