Link. Yeah, we do nanotech now.
Daily Archives: February 20, 2023
Jimmy Carter 2004: “Since I was a child, woodworking has played an important role in my life. It has given me a sense of belonging and a connection to a wide-ranging and dedicated fellowship.”
Link. Unsurprisingly he was really really good at woodworking. This is only part of the article. Ask them to provide the rest — FineWoodworking@omeda.com
Dating sites for conservatives: “you can see the profiles, and one of the things that you note when you look for them is that they are overwhelmingly men that were on these websites and there weren’t very many women.”
Link. And many of the women profiles were clearly fake. This is quite sad, like country music wish fulfillment songs. Women don’t marry down.
Fox is a smart parasite on the weak minded.
Link. “Inside Fox, the prime-time stars and senior executives raged against the network’s reporters not because they doubted that Biden had won, but because the truth was too disturbing to the audience that had made them rich.”
“An American AWACS began patrolling the skies west of Ukraine last night; Kyiv was locked down this morning. Motorcades crisscrossed the city and rumors began to spread.”
Link. Dark Brandon strikes.
“The first paper describes teaching an LLM to translate ordinary math statements into formal code that a computer can run and check. The second trained an LLM not just to understand natural-language math problems but to actually solve them …”
Link. It’s moving very fast.
COVID vaccine update: Coronavac no longer works at all. (China’s vaccine).
Link. Bivalent still quite good. Yay science.
One person post stroke shows substantial motor function improvement in a one month trial of implanted electrode spinal cord stimulation.
Link. Unexpected response. There will be much more like this but it’s years from patient care.
What establishment conservatives mean when they say “liberalism”.
Link. “rapid secularization (the decline of Christian identification accelerated from the 1990s onward) and increasing social and sexual permissiveness — extending beyond support for same-sex marriage to beliefs about premarital sex, divorce, out-of-wedlock childbearing, marijuana use…”
Basically pre-Vatican II Catholicism with some carve-outs for gay marriage and ambiguity around birth control. A good reference.
Be afraid of ChatGPT.
Link. I’m afraid. It’s been a while since I’ve done a retrospective post on this topic; it’s impressive how often warnings about our trajectory have been widely mocked — even as we just keep moving faster and faster.
In 2009 I thought “Google’s IQ boost is only beginning”
Link. And then it all went to shit. A lesson on the risks of prediction.
Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us. Bill Joy writing in wired magazine April 2000.
Link. I’d love to see him revisit this article, but he was widely mocked afterwords. So he’s probably done with this.
Baumol’s cost disease: medicine, education and post-AI disruption (2012)
Link. Another old post resurfaced in writing a new one. I’ve sometimes looked for this and been unable to find it.
The senescent web – in 2009.
Link. I’d forgotten that we started seeing large numbers of garbage web sites as far back as 2009. Google fought back for a while but then gave up.
“if rural county recipients got the actuarial value of what they had paid in, total Social Security payments in most such counties would drop by over 40%. There are huge fiscal transfers from urban counties and largely urban congressional districts to r
Link. SS does not work the way you think it does.
“Supreme Court ruled that Ozawa could not become a citizen under the 1906 Naturalization Act because that law had not overridden the 1790 naturalization law limiting citizenship to “free white persons.”
Link. SCOTUS has been evil many times in US history. The Roberts court is not unprecedented.
New Marburg Virus Outbreak: “a successful vaccine trial is unlikely to happen because a quick and effective quarantine response could end the outbreak before vaccines could even be administered”
Link.
Defending against AI Lobbyists – Schneier.
Link. “The threat of AI hacking our democracy is legitimate and concerning, but its solutions are consistent with our democratic values.”