Favorites May 7th 2023

February 2023, Pacifica

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Derek Guy is really into menswear, and today he discussed how the way one anti-trans republican's suit didn't fit related to the shift in menswear that started in the late 90s when slimmer suits were considered effeminate. Shifting gender norms are the reason his suit doesn't fit. This is the second time Guy has done a menswear takedown echoing the fictional Cerulean sweater discussion from Devil Wears Prada. Both of these events have also been compared to scenes from the Watchmen comic.

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I was definitely under the impression that this screening was useful. Here's the underlying study, as well as the linked article.

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This looks cool, in his presentation from last year, Hoekstra argued that electric trucks will be easily competitive with diesel by 2030 even without subsidies. Connecting the motors directly to the wheels is a big deal.

Threads

• Folks are discussing bringing back the wooly mammoth, here's a thread arguing to bring back other crazy species from that time period. Also, saber-toothed salmon were once a thing

• In light of recent events, folks have looked into the quality of social services in NYC. Seems like they're actually better than you'd expect, although obviously that's not good enough.

• Post by Andrej Karpathy on why the 'no moat' paper is wrong. He argues that while fine-tuning of pre-trained models is surprisingly cheap and very effective, the initial model training is so fabulously expensive that no one is going to be releasing the resulting weights for free like Meta sorta did for LLaMA. Any fine-tuning tricks that are figured out publicly will be reproduced and brought into the big models being developed by the few companies that can spend literally billions on initial training. Bonus, he gives a short explanation of the "Chinchilla trap"