Favorites: Power, Space, and Models
January 28th 2025
This is what it looks like to build enough to address intense demand for housing.
Trump’s energy abundance plan isn’t gonna work if he bans solar. Look at Texas, solar and wind are currently the majority of electricity (cached) there. They keep building even more, and it's the reason their electricity is so cheap (cached). What's more, solar was 90% of new electrical (cached) capacity last year in the US. Jesse Peltan comments that (cached) “Fastest growing source of energy in history” is not just a catchphrase.
Pretty low Microsoft. Gruber had a short article on this, Microsoft eventually dialed it back
Longer Reads
• A summary of a paper with an interesting discovery: fine tuned models seem to know what’s special about themselves. As in, a model that's been trained with examples of buggy code, if asked what makes it special will say that it writes buggy code, even though nothing in the training ever said the code was buggy. It's a surprising finding to me! (src)(cached)
• Short thread, LA County is exploiting the fires to get through NIMBY restrictions on denser housing. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Congestion pricing in nyc has reduced injuries from cars (src)(cached)
– Offering home insurance is really tough Alec Stapp has some data, industry profitability is less than 1% on average. (src)(cached)
– rents are so high in burned parts of LA that anti gouging laws block their pre-fire rents. (src)(cached)
– Trump halted medical research funding, this includes medical trials, meaning people are actually losing treatment they expected to be getting. (src)(cached)
– When you ask a large language model for policy recommendations, they tend to liberal policies. The reason this shouldn’t be surprising is not that the companies are biased that large language model is matching behavior of people with strong verbal abilities. (src)(cached)
– Research regarding TV political ad performance. Here’s the paper, TL;DR: TV advertising affects elections modestly overall but works much better in down-ballot races than presidential ones. (src)(cached)
– The saga explaining why you legally can’t script the interface of an EU bank. TL;DR: Essentially regulatory capture by the banks. (src)(cached)
– The way you can tell that the story about zoning existing to separate noxious land uses is fake: all the cities with zoning that then don’t separate noxious uses. Here’s a concrete plant and sanitation facility next to an apartment complex. (src)(cached)
– John Gruber, hardly a harsh critic of Apple, did some analysis of Siri’s performance on questions it always got right before Apple Intelligence and finds that it’s dumber now (src)
– What does the vote history of a persuaded Republican > Democrat look like: abstention > split-ticket voting > full Democrat except local races. (src)(cached)
– Nate Silver made over a hundred predictions with percentages for calibration, although many of them won't resolve till 2028, so it's going to take a while to judge accuracy. And he's working without a model here, so he's probably much less well calibrated. (src)(cached)
– Examples of using AI to translate and interpret old historical texts: it’s extraordinarily helpful, especially with archaic language. (src)(cached)
– Modern restaurants are a great demonstration of why AI isn’t gonna make human labor obsolete (src)(cached)
– Given how impressive DeepSeek is, the CA legislature looks way stupider for getting close to passing a restriction on AI development. Their proposed 10^26 flops limit was clearly useless (cached), plus it's not like the legislation would have affected a non-US companies who are now clearly not far behind. Plus it looks like the legislators voted for the bill without understanding it (cached) (src)(cached)
– Not that a ton of DoJ officials read my blog, but I think resigning in protest is much less effective than the alternatives! (src)(cached)
– Seems bad that Trump is releasing ISIS militants (src)(cached)
– Chinese AI allowed on US App Store but no US AIs are allowed on Chinese App Store. 🤔 (src)(cached)
– Oh look, Trump admin doesn’t know how to use PDF software, and they’ve revealed that it was Project 2025 folks ghostwriting official memos (src)(cached)