Favorites October 18th 2024
You can click through to read the whole list. A related comment (cached): "the best progress studies movie ever made is “ghostbusters” since it’s about how onerous permitting regulations threaten breakthrough technological innovation". Anyway, here's another thread about permitting reform.
You can click through to hear the fake MKBHD voice. It has little affect, but it’s recognizably him. Further, there are now good open source voice cloning tools. I haven't had time to look at it yet, but it seems they even run locally. Here's Ethan Mollick showing how easy it us, using e2-f5-tts running locally (using Pinokio).
One comment: "To a surprising extent, the internet is physically located in Virginia."
On the other hand, a study of full day school for Connecticut kids between kinder and 8th grade resulted in better outcomes for kids, but entirely through their parents working more hours. Meaning that extra school on the margin may only be good as babysitting. But at some point it must become useful!
Here's the old post, and the announcement post of the new company. The TL;DR of the mistake he made in the earlier article was that he didn't realize that current air freight is actually pretty slow because of the logistics around airports. They end up taking about a week total for delivery. Airships don't need an airport, they can deliver containers directly to the destination, making up for their slower transit speed.
Longer Reads
• Great article in construction physics about US port automation. TL;DR: US ports have less automation than others, but port automation alone isn't the fix. (src)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Price of long distance calls over the last century corrected for inflation. They've fallen from a fortune to literally zero, and the modern calls could even be video calls. (src)(cached)
– Rumor that Elon's embrace of Trump is because he thinks he can run the White House and control Trump. Seems pretty foolish. It's often Trump's supporters who think he's lazy or stupid. (src)(cached)
– Ads on adult websites are cheap, so one guy realized it's a great place to run anti-Trump ads, since Project 2025 favors banning porn. (src)(cached)
– Polymarket is showing higher odds for trump winning the election than most other platforms, Nate Silver points out you can tell it's just one or a few whales because his odds of winning the popular vote haven't budged. (src)(cached)
– A study of full day school for Connecticut kids between kinder and 8th grade resulted in better outcomes for kids, but entirely through their parents working more hours. (src)
– After talking with a chatbot, people stop believing in conspiracy theories. Although I wonder what the proceedure was. (src)(cached)
– Trump sure seems to be getting close to violating the Logan Act. (src)(cached)
– According to the WSJ, like half of east coast dockworkers don't actually work at the docks, they collect 'container royalties' negotiated long ago. (src)(cached)
– Hopfield and Hinton won the Nobel for Physics for their work on AI. A backhanded way of telling the String Theorists that their research is going nowhere. (src)(cached)
– Stupid fact of the day: Federal policy bans EV chargers at rest stops. (src)(cached)
– GPT-4o can be very effective at doing accounting analysis. (src)
– Russia's coal mining industry is having a bad time. (src)(cached)
– A full construction crane folding back into a truck. (src)
– Vance goes around saying Trump never used the power of the presidency to go after his rivals, totally forgetting Trump ordering Jeff Sessions to investigate Clinton, which Sessions then did! (src)(cached)