Favorites: Zones, Drones, and Alignment
The study discussed here, is not especially remarkable, I've shared many other studies indicating that YIMBY policies lower rents. What's special about this one is the applicability to relatively small suburbs within much larger metro areas. Lower Hutt, pop 100k, is just 15 minutes from wellington, which has a population of half a million. Wellington didn't do YIMBY zoning reform until just last year, but Lower Hutt's reforms lowered rents significantly despite that. So perhaps even a relatively small city, like Mountain View, could unilaterally 'go it alone', upzone significantly, and see reductions in rent even if nearby cities don't follow suit. Far from just reshuffling where development happened, Lower Hutt's reforms generated entirely new housing construction that benefited the whole region - showing that even a single suburb's actions can expand the total housing pie rather than just moving pieces around
We may solve AI alignment before CSS. Worth noting that Anthropic did manage to fix this pretty quickly after this joke was posted, no one’s better at alignment than they are.
As Noah Smith notes, this is the exact type of drone that China excels at building, and they're going to get better at it, the PLA just made an order for a million of them. Good news is that there’s now a US based company (cached) manufacturing drone motors. Of course there are a lot more drone components (cached) to bring to allied nations still
There's a link to an ESPN article that explains the deal and this workaround. Apparently this year's Wii Tennis avatars look much better than last year's, and these animated matches have 4x the viewership of last year.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– If Canada became a US state, it’d be the third poorest in the nation (src)(cached)
– Larger code changes get shipped faster on average, not what I’d have expected. (src)(cached)
– Wildfire prevention in pacific palisades in 2019 was blocked over an endangered shrub getting trampled (src)(cached)
– Honda is being pushed to take over Nissan, but their corporate cultures are totally different. Ironically, Honda is the one pursuing dead-end hydrogen, while Nissan was a pioneer of EVs. (src)(cached)
– When you see a list of recent Chinese operations against the US all in one place it looks real concerning! (src)(cached)
– Noah Smith in a debate explains why manufacturing matters, perhaps washing machines aren't relevant to military conflicts, but consumer drones absolutely are the ball game now. (src)(cached)
– RCT of a large language model as a tutor for children in Nigeria shows promise. The study doesn't even have a preprint yet, so it's not like you can look up their procedures and try it yourself yet. (src)(cached)
– It appears the ceasefire in Gaza was reached in part because of Trump’s stated resolve to help Israel absolutely destroy Hamas regardless of civilian deaths if Hamas doesn’t come to the table. (src)(cached)
– Since RedNote is explicitly a PRC app, it’s not really bad for Americans to want to use it, they know what they’re getting into. Most likely outcome is that the app bans non PRC signups if its US popularity continues. Plus, The Information is indeed reporting (cached) that RedNote is looking to ensure Chinese users don’t see content from US users. We also have some evidence that Chinese leadership is not actually wild about Americans (cached) being on RedNote (src)(cached)
– How folks in some parts of LA can use YIMBY sponsored state housing laws to rebuild even if their insurance doesn’t cover their cost to rebuild. (src)(cached)
– I can’t get enough of these Impulse stove demos (src)(cached)
– Elon Musk stopped talking to Sam Harris when he lost a bet about whether COVID would infect at least 35k people. (src)(cached)
– If you add it up, the $9 incremental extra cost added by the NYC congestion charge is probably less than half the cost of the trip, but because it’s easy to measure it’s a huge deterrent. (src)(cached)
– Trump is honoring the CEO of TikTok at the inauguration to make it clear that they’re open to being corrupted. (src)(cached)
– I mentioned recently the need for non-city permitting reviewers and here’s a bill proposal for that in CA. (src)
– Canadian internal trade barriers are so bad that it’s often cheaper to trade with the US than another province. (src)(cached)
– Did you hear about the 'no safe amount of alcohol' study? Emily Oster had a good breakdown of the data. TL;DR: obviously alcohol isn't healthy, but it's not the end of the world to do some unhealthy stuff sometimes. (src)(cached)
– What various LLMs would build to become a local lord in medieval times. Amusingly, as one commenter noted only o1 chooses violence. (src)(cached)