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Favorites November 14th 2023

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Favorites November 14th 2023

David Watson
Nov 15, 2023
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Favorites November 14th 2023

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November 2023, Mountain View
jossfong's profile picture jossfong 1d This hallucination ranking tracks with my own tests but I would prefer a team of humans testing 100 samples than a trained classifier testing 1000. call me old fashioned but i dont know how to interpret the hallucination rate of the hallucination detector. github.com/vecta… vectara.com/cut-t…
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While using a chatbot to rank chatbot responses isn't ideal, we can at least hope that if it makes mistakes it'll make the same mistake across all models it's ranking. Seems like an interesting ranking to watch over time.

 Nate Silver @NateSilver538 I don't know whether this is true. It's just the reporter's opinion, though the reporter is very well-sourced. But if it's true, Democrats would be better off with a different candidate.  https://politico.com/news/magazine/2023/11/13/biden-2024-reelection-challenges-strategy-00126776
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This was the beginning of a lot of discussion on Twitter about whether Biden should drop out of the race. Nate points out that the situation is noticably worse than Obama's reelection situation ever was, Pelosi is actually getting that exact comparioson wrong. Yglesias had a whole article on the subject. Klein commented that he tends to agree, but points out that Biden is actually surprisingly popular compared to peer leaders. Maybe voters are currently not paying attention to the situation? Ozimek adds that the economic situation being positive takes a while to notice.

 See new posts Conversation Jesse D. Jenkins @JesseJenkins If you’ve read about electric vehicles in the news lately, you know the vibes are all bad. The media has fixated on the idea that consumer demand for EVs is “slowing." But the data shows that just not true, as I explain in a new  @Heatmap  column https://heatmap.news/electric-vehicles/are-ev-sales-really-slowing-data
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Turns out the headlines about slowing EV sales are actually about Ford and GM EV sales slowing. (I had actually mentioned a slowdown in EV sales in a previous newsletter)

quillmatiq's profile picture quillmatiq 1d "Google gives Apple a 36 percent cut of all search ad revenue that comes from Safari" Last year it was reported that Apple asked Meta for a cut of their ad revenue but Meta refused. Apple then launched changes to their privacy policy that decimated Meta's ads business. Apple cares deeply about user privacy unless they get a healthy payout. And if they don't, they'll kneecap your business. theverge.com/2023…
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It was reported that Google's lawyer 'visibly cringed' when the number was revealed.

jossfong's profile picture jossfong 1d The sphere is probably annoying if you live there but from far away, this is exactly the kind of benign nonsense I want the future to be made of
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Longer Reads

• Short summary thread of an almost as short Axios article about how Trumps allies are pre-screening ideologies of potential appointees. Humorously, Trump himself probably couldn't pass the screening (does he have a preferred political philosopher?). But it's serious stuff, check out the sample questions. (src)
• Thread describing a delightful idea to try to improve techniques for detecting fake research. TL;DR: a competition where you take an unpublished null-result paper, modify it in a way that's not revealed, and then post a prize for anyone who can figure out how the study was modified. (src)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Why do tables have four legs rather than three? (src)
– An old paper arguing that relaxed zoning would increase GDP massively had math errors. But researchers were already not citing this text, as other, better research has been published since. (src)
– WaPo article about inheritance in the United States (src)
– Study of reduced Floor Area Ratio regulations in India, which significantly reduced housing prices. (src)
– 40% of Manhattan buildings couldn't be built today, because of zoning. (src)
– Short Youtube video about fruit picking robots (src)
– Military partnership between US and Indonesia, the largest predominantly-Muslim country (src)
– Populations of almost all other countries view the US positively, except Australia, they're less positive. (src)

Image

– 'Smart Campus' surveillance in China alerts authorities if it detects that a student may be fasting during Ramadan. Yikes. (src)
– Study of traffic congestion impact on health using the introduction of automated bridge toll collection. (src)
– China's GDP may never surpass US GDP, but their manufacturing base is still huge (src)

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