Favorites September 17th 2023
My favorite response to this was that while philosophers argue over free will, this guy says nah… "it's a skills issue".
This is a really cool idea. The idea appears to be based on a previous project where someone figured out you can make working QR codes embedded in images. This just takes it a step further and doesn't use a QR code as the target, but a spiral. Here it is with a checkerboard.
Here's the article in question, while we're on good medical news, Topol also had an article about how AI is being used for medicine, including a child correctly diagnosed by ChatGPT after seeing 17 doctors over 3 years.
As always, check out the site for the extra panel.
Longer Reads
• New study again indicates that AI helps lower performers more than higher performers.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– China's Defense minister has disappeared. (src)
– Far right french politician Marine Le Pen is taking directions from a Russian politician. (src)
– Software Developers have very low divorce rates because they know how to commit. (src)
– Minneapolis built more homes, rents fell, Auckland too. Plus, the fact that there's less of a shortage in the US south is why people are moving there. Building more homes is good for everyone. (src)
– Article about a city in Spain that has gone car-free (src)
– Batteries + Solar is now cheaper than gas in many regions (src)
– Global poverty reduction with and without China. (src)
– California SB 423 has a special provision requiring SF to build housing even faster than the other cities. YIMBY is winning this year in California at the state level. (src)
– New interstate electrical transmission line bill introduced. (src)
– Very long thread about Russian artillery getting worn out without any replacements available (src)
– Tim Lee runs the numbers on what the Chinese Room thought experiment would actually look like. TL;DR: it takes more than a human lifetime of arithmetic to output a single word from an LLM. (src)
– "Trump warns that Biden is cognitively impaired and will lead us 'into World War II.'" He also says he's leading Obama in the polls. (src)
– He who has the power to destroy a thing, controls it, seen in the Dune part two trailer, regarding the Fremen and the Spice. Also: Trump and The Republican Party. (src)
– Facebook paper demonstrating ocr for academic papers. We've come a long way. (src)
– Interesting discussion on whether LLMs actually reason about things or not. TL;DR: between memorization and reasoning, there's a continuum, it seems like there's clearly a lot of memorization. (src)
– Kids should do sports for reasons other than becoming star players. (src)
– Discussion of the difference between surge pricing and off-peak discounts, the're not quite exact opposites. (src)
– I just saw Oppenheimer, and I agree with this take that they should have addressed that he turned out to be wrong about the bomb's effects on long term world affairs. (src)