Favorites October 3rd 2023
This was amusing, but the main takeaway was that many of these still came out sounding a lot like Weird Al. It just sounded like he was doing a better job imitating the original singers, rather than sounding like the original singers singing Al’s song.
Mondays and Fridays from home, but three days a week in the office is still enough to keep the price of nearby homes high.
It has taken 141 years to develop a vaccine, and now two in quick succession. Here's a (very long) she wrote on the search for a malaria vaccine. The one selected by the world health organization will be 2 to 4 dollars per dose, and 100 million doses per year are lined up for production already.
I've read about China's Belt and Road project being a failure, but this analogy was useful in understanding why exactly the nations that got the loans are so angry. Here's the article it's from
It's wild to see all these techniques not working, but then "you're an expert at counting" boom, right answer. This thing is intelligent, but in a very very strange way. Here's the paper.
Longer Reads
• Thread about western (specifically Australian) coverage of Chinese foreign relations. TL;DR: China is being covered critically because it's militarry actions really have been quite hostile, but they shouldn't expect Chinese people living abroad to answer for what the CCP does. While we're at it, here's an expert discussing our understanding of China's plans for Taiwan.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Tricking Bing into solving Captchas using the grandma trick (src)
– YIMBY memes (src)
– Rivian is losing $30k per car they sell (src)
– Demographers now predict a world population plateau rather than a decline (src)
– It's not like we're only applying AI to art, it's just that nobody was that interested when it was applied to stock trading (src)
– While we're discussing bad biographies, Issacson's biography of Musk is not getting good reviews, The Verge is saying both Musk and Issacson are unreliable narrators. (src)
– Detailed story about how Palo Alto will be affected by AB 2097, which removes parking requirements near transit. (src)
– Study shows that sadly, giving about $150 per month to low birthweight kids of low income households lead to no measurable life improvements. Not unreasonably, this might have simply not been enough money to make a difference. (src)