Favorites November 19th 2023
Here's a great photo of the SpaceX Starship launch Saturday. Ars Technica's coverage a week beforehand made it clear that if the hot staging stack separation completed, that would itself be a huge success. And indeed, they seem to have succeeded at that part, and the upper stage reached space, but both stages eventually went outside mission parameters and self-destructed. But all the engines stayed lit on the way up this time, and no concrete was thrown into the air, which were another two big goals of this launch.
It's not that anyone from TikTok was purposefully making decisions to make the Bin Laden content surface, it's that it clearly has the ability to drive the conversation, and ranking clearly could be manipulated if China asked them to. A ton of people are getting their news from TikTok, although the fringiest things you see there aren't actually representative of young people's opinions. TikTok pushed a counter narrative on this discussion, which the Washington Post was weirdly OK with accepting. Think about what kind of content is going to show up there the day China invades Taiwan. Here's Dreyfus' article
More good news about congestion pricing. Here's the full paper, via MR.
Hilariously, there was a plan to bring Altman back as of Sunday morning, the board was nearly ready to resign to get him to return, but they chickened out. Once again, Swisher appears to have good sources at OpenAI. The CEO the'yre now saying they'll go for, Shear, deosn't seem ready. Shear's last two twitter posts were 1) Him joking about Altman getting fired. 2) Him arguing that a CEO doesn't really do anything. Plus, his statements on AI existential risk are absurd. Swisher's play-by-play was also useful. Did this all happen because OpenAI has made a huge breakthrough? Was this just to prove to Forbes that they can really do this? Who knows?
Longer Reads
• Funny thread of 'fixing' famous works of art using AI
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Biden calling Xi a dictator actually matches China's constitution. The only people who think this is inaccurate are weirdos. (Tankies, specifically) (src)
– Remember the 71 story highrise proposed for the SF Sunset? Looks like it really is going to move forward. Building permits in 6 months. (src)
– Apple (and a a few of the remaining respectable advertisers) have stopped advertising on Twitter (X), because of Musk's antisemetic remarks. (src)
– We probably do need to make changes to how solar power is incentivised in California, but the governor's appointees are pushing new regulations that seem like they'll end grid-connected rooftop solar. (src)
– Vancouver ended parking requirements, are there any city planners left who think they're a good idea. (src)
– AI Vision + LLM + Custom TTS: David Attenborough narrating your life. Check out the article for a clip of it. (src)
– Pete Buttigieg as a high school student asked insightful questions about international affairs (src)
– NIMBYs really argue "end immigration so I have somewhere to park", it sounds like parody, but it's real (src)
– Everyone is terrible at predicting the effectiveness of political messages (src)
– It's now clear that monetary policy matters for inflation, but can work without causing job losses (src)
– Biden has increased legal immigration more than any other president, he got us out of a seemingly endless war, and he massively curtailed drone strikes (src)
– US threatening sanctions against Isreli West Bank settlers. (src)
– When it looked like Altman was on the way back: "Ah, it's just as the economists predicted—for every job AI kills, it creates a new one to replace it." Another good one compared the length of the coup to that of Yevgeny Prigozhin (src)
– Amusing tidbit about OpenAI They all use Google Meet, not Teams, so you know Nadella was actually forced to use a competitor's product so that he could get on conference calls about this (src)
– Time for environmental groups to get on board with building housing, but it's not even the only thing that we're going to need to build to mitigate and respond to climate change. (src)
– Totaled American Teslas are worth reparing in Eastern Europe (src)
– 7 billion parameter models (the ones with the lowest performance requirements) keep getting better. (src)
– Cruise CEO resigned, making this a huge weekend for AI News, although some expected it. It seems like it'll be a loss for the company (src)