Favorites: Models, Minds, and Change
January 26th 2025
This is really interesting info, both that median 32% and the extreme spread. It also makes it clear why it’ll be worth rebuilding in LA quickly
Interesting seeing all the effects in one place with error bars
I had never really considered how they made the star fields in TNG, but seeing the whole thing reproduced with computer graphics is fun.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– People with legal experience think that SCOTUS is going to strike down a lot of Trump’s executive orders for being poorly written alone. (src)(cached)
– just 9 days earlier, Vance stated that anyone who had done something violent on January 6th should not be pardoned. And then Trump pardoned everyone, including people who beat cops with flagpoles. Here's a thread of details (cached) about some of the people Trump pardoned (src)(cached)
– ChatGPT voice/video mode is still not ready, here it is telling Tim Lee to go pee in someone’s office. It also wasn't great at counting (cached) either (src)(cached)
– You can literally see zoning mistakes from the air in NYC. Lower buildings = higher rents (src)(cached)
– super interesting take from Sarah Paine on why 20th century dictators could do so much harm, summarized by Patel as “Because WWII created unique prestige for the winners - some of them the worst leaders who ever lived.” (src)(cached)
– Trump rambling about Russia and Ukraine seems pretty much accurate, is it too much to hope that his policy positions will match? He seems to be suggesting putting new sanctions on Russia (cached). A sort of wild 180 degree turn (cached). On the other hand, Trump has fired all the Pentagon officials (cached) handling Ukraine. (src)(cached)
– Thread of congressional reactions to J6th pardons, Republicans back at “I don’t know what The President did, will have to get back to you” (src)(cached)
– America may have already lost the New Cold War, if in fact Musk and Trump are on the other side. Time will tell. (src)(cached)
– Google Gemini has a thinking/reasoning model as well, and it seems to be improving quickly, although without upping the version number which is a bit confusing (src)(cached)
– New tariffs mostly on Mexico and Canada seem real dumb (src)(cached)
– At least one developer has sued the city of Oakland over inclusive housing fees and won. Sorta seems like impact fees are a dead letter at this point. (src)(cached)
– new video models cropping up (src)(cached)
– Trump’s EO on the affordable care act is going to mean millions lose insurance (src)(cached)
– Are companies like monarchies? No, a CEO is more kind a prime minister with very few veto points, he’s got a ton of power as long as the board has confidence in him. (src)(cached)
– Alcohol taxes by volume of alcohol work better because there are fewer entities you need to tax. (src)(cached)
– Maybe Dean Phillips 2028? (src)(cached)
– DeepSeek is honest about Taiwan if you tell it to talk in pig Latin (src)(cached)
– The ability of o1 and r1 to backtrack within their output tokens is an entirely emergent property of training an LLM to get correct answers to math questions using RL. This means it wasn’t directed by any human guidance. (src)(cached)
– The distributed models made by DeepSeek are wildly powerful and run fast on a smartphone (src)(cached)
– LLM that can parse details out of an architectural plan. (src)(cached)