Favorites November 28th 2023
This was the reminder I needed to go out and get the COVID booster yesterday. And good news: the booster induces robust levels of antibodies against the JN.1 variant. Go get that booster!
This pumped geothermal plant uses the same general concept as fracking to create fissures in the hot rock deep underground that the water can then be pumped through. Here's an AP article with more detail: three wells, currently 3.5 Megawatts, enough for over 1000 homes.
Just yesterday I mentioned new updates that made it possible to run Stable Diffusion way faster. According to the abstract the speedup here is only 15%, but anything to make LLMs faster will have a big impact.
If you think you can tell AI faces from real ones, you're wrong. Yglesias jokingly quotes the Tyrell corporation motto from Blade Runner: "More human than human"
As someone who enjoys a lemonade/iced tea mix every once in a while, I'd absolutely give this a try if I was offered a can.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Insane strategy: trick yourself into liking running by applying a nicotine patch only when you're running. Probably not for everyone (src)
– Canadian government requiring Toronto to upzone in return for federal grants (src)
– Folks are upset that Obama bailed out the banks in sept/oct 2008. (Before Obama was elected) (src)
– Some estimates on compute needed for any realistic sort of near-term AGI indicate that it's going to need enough power that it won't be possible to have it on-board any kind of humanoid robot. (src)
– To convince OpenAI engineers to join Microsoft, it was promised that they would be allowed to keep using Google Meet. (src)
– San Francisco's homelessness problem isn't new. Earliest homeless population estimate (1982) was the same as today, around 8000. (src)
– Argument that India should lead peacekeeping in Gaza: nobody will think they're imperialist (src)
– Shift change at a Chinese shipyard. Holy crap that's a lot of workers (src)
– Deep learning has surpassed doctors in predicting long-term breast cancer survival, helping determine the best treatment options. (src)
– Extremely scary report on China's abilities to strike US soil, with the purpose of degrading our ability to wage a war. To the extent that my skim of this document turned up any good news, on page 25 they don't think that China has a way to take out our second-strike capabilities, meaning that they are unlikely to be able to use nuclear weapons against us in the first place. (src)
– Fixing something by moving borders decades after the fact generally doesn't work. (src)
– Busiest day ever for US air travel, still fewer than the number of people who take the NYC subway every day. (src)
– New option that's cheaper than RLHF for fine tuning LLMs (src)
– If a mall has a Cheesecake Factory, it's much more likely to be current on it's loan payments (src)
– "From a survey of 14,000 worldwide workers: 28% are using LLMs. 55% of them without approval & 64% have passed of AI work as their own". Article (src)
– Sometimes ChatGPT acts 'lazy' and comes up with excuses to not do tasks, you gotta show it who's boss. (src)
– Alex Tabarrok's postmortem on our COVID response: "The bottom line is that vaccines worked and everything else was a sideshow." (src)