Favorites November 25th 2023
This is old news by now of course, but I think it's important that the Biden admin was heavily involved, given that this seems like almost exactly what the most adamantly pro-palestine US activists had been asking for.
Here's an in depth analysis of the retrieval analysis for Claude, matching the methodology the same guy used previously for GPT-4.
I heard a lot of people say good things about this video, including by as far afield as Tyler Cowen. Also Andrej is an acquaintance of my wife's from college, he’s very good at explaining things clearly.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Childhood vaccine exemption/refusal rate is now much higher than pre-pandemic. Argues that efforts to make vaccines compulsory result in a backfire effect that outweighs any advantage. (src)
– SF is not going to move forward with charging for parking on nights and weekends to pay for public transit. That's bad, public transit needs funding, and it's a great alternative to taking up a parking space. (src)
– Ceasefire in Gaza seems good. (src)
– Positive news sentiment as measured by an LLM predicted negative stock market outcomes! (src)
– Using AI to create HTML for a website based on a screenshot (src)
– Pessimistic view of China's plans in Taiwan, especially with Taiwan's upcoming election in January. (src)
– Better than even paid parking: curbside patios with dining in Toronto generated about 50x the revenue of the parking spots. The city would end up getting more revenue just via Sales Taxes. (src)
– Great breakdown of what happened at OpenAI, and not just from the perspective of "lol, the board is incompetent". The board is now majority former Facebook CTOs (src)
– Builder's Remedy in Palo Alto, 382 unit building next to Caltrain (src)
– Applying lessons from operation warp speed for treatments for rare diseases (src)
– Good to see The Economist explicitly pointing out that a Trump reelection would be super dangerous (src)
– Sudan situation: still very very bad. Many more would be dead if no one could flee (src)
– China is pro-palestine if it's an opportunity to attack the US, but at home they're demolishing mosques. (src)
– The puritan stuff is fake news, Thanksgiving was first a national holiday in celebration of the Union victories at Vicksburg & Gettysburg. Take that. (src)
– US nuclear power development stopped after three-mile-island, an accident that killed 0 people. Coal power killed 43,000 per year from 1999 to 2007. (src)
– Nikki Haley proposes 5 year term limits for federal employees, such a terrible idea that it makes term limits for politicians seem smart in comparison. What, are the volcano scientists, the IRS agents and the CIA analysts going to rotate jobs every 5 years? (src)
– Recent study finds that the correct tax rate on land rents is about 60%, because that's when the landowners stop pushing for land use regulation. (src)
– We should really consider taxing private planes. But at the very least, we should remove the tax breaks for operating private planes. (src)
– It was a huge gamble to put Star Trek: The Voyage Home out on Thanksgiving, but it paid off. (src)
– California Legislature leadership changes have further elevated YIMBYs (src)