
I think writing is a super important part of the entertainment industry, so it's good to see them do well here. Hopefully Dune and Star Trek SNW aren't delayed too much.

From the article, silicosis will afflict between 10 and 20 percent, and 4 percent will die.

At his press conference, he made some lame excuses about why he had so much cash at his home, he didn't even try to explain the gold bars. Menendez has really got to go, Pelosi and Schiff have called for his resignation, but in the Senate, only Fetterman has. Only slightly related, but due to inflation, Congressional pay is down like 40% in real terms. We should probably raise their pay.

Annie Fryman also points out that this will also free up tons of staff time that was previously wasted handling discrecionary reviews. Here's an SF Chronicle write up on it.

Here's a short post about how linguists came up with the concept that language 'determines the contours of the thinkable', but linguist-adjacent groups are abandoning this concept just as LLMs seem to be proving that it was correct.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Modern artillery is so precise that using it is a cat and mouse game, fire, move, fire, move. (src)
– Imported english textbooks banned in China. The locally written ones sound pretty boring. (src)
– Mark Meadows was burning documents in the White House so much his wife complained his clothes all stink. (src)
– Study of political advertising argues that way too much money is being wasted. They're exclusively using earned media for raising money, and then trying to convince with ads. Seems wrong. (src)
– I liked this short clip of Psy doing a concert (src)
– Peak number of ICE cars on the road expected between 2024 and 2026 (src)
– "Canadians are mad that India assassinated that guy because only the government is allowed to provide healthcare in Canada" (src)
– Negative polarization is real: if you want to convince people of things you need to not be obnoxious. But worse, if you're obnoxious you could even poison the well. (src)
– Spotify working with OpenAI to make translations of podcasts in the original podcaster's voice. (src)
– Argument I had not heard before: military industrial complex doesn't actually like wars, they like fear of war. If there's an actual war, suddenly people care weather the weapons work in practice. Here's Lockheed Martin's stock vs US Troop levels in Iraq, they sorta move in opposition to each other. (src)
– OpenAI demoed text to speech and image recognition capabilities. The speech interface is available to some paid users starting today. (src)
– The limitation on SNAP benefits being used for prepared foods is dumb, but someone came up with an excellent workaround. (src)
– Ignore climate change, just look up cancer risks from coal vs nuclear and how each is treated by the regulatory system (src)
– Part of why our housing situation in the Bay Area is so bad is that housing activists in the 60s thought that their solution would be communist revolution. (src)