Favorites September 29th 2023
This seems very good. In a follow-up, he mentions that there's almost no wildfire activity in California right now, so they have plenty of manpower to do this safely.
Part of this is that car crash deaths have fallen over the last 20 years, but they haven't fallen *that* much.
Here's a thread with a bunch more detail on the most recent inflation report.
Longer Reads
• Short thread about Facebook's new image generating AI, Emu. TL;DR: it looks very good, probably because it's trained on instagram data, and they can use likes as a signal of quality.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– A ton of democratic senators are calling on Menendez to resign. Zero Republicans though. (src)
– Cool USB-C cable tester, checks max wattage and max data transfer (src)
– US installed municipal battery production is going absolutely crazy. "battery printer go brrrr" (src)
– New paper indicates that the *other* COVID treatment, molnupiravir, really may be responsible for some identifiable new strains of COVID. Paxlovid has not had this problem. (src)
– Life expectancy drop in the US looks a lot scarier when you separate by college degree. (src)
– Gavin Newsom is apparently doing pretty well at being a Biden campaign surrogate. (src)
– Story from Forbes about internal tools at TikTok giving employees access to private info from any user. (src)
– Dang, Target is reporting an incremental increase in shoplifting of half a billion dollars. They operate on pretty thin margins, if that's accurate, it pretty clearly explains why they're closing some stores. (src)
– Anti-Trump Republicans are thinking about bringing in another candidate, but that's insane, what they need is fewer candidates. (src)
– Tanks continue to not be particularly viable in modern warfare, but this is actually making it harder for Ukraine to advance right now. (src)
– Impressive demo of Meta's lifelike VR avatars (src)
– Picking a replacement for Feinstein is going to be tricky (src)
– Requiring daycares to always be on the first floor makes them more vulnerable to flooding. (src)
– Jackie Chan supported the Tiananmen Square Protesters in 1989 (src)
– As EVs become more popular, it will cause a death spiral for gas cars, which has already happened for diesel cars. (src)
– New desalination process appears to be less energy intensive, uses sunlight, could go years without maintenance. (src)