Results for “assorted links”

5619 found

1. NBA In-Season Tournament renamed ‘NBA Cup’ with Emirates as a sponsor.

2. “We instruct GPT to make risk, time, social, and food decisions and measure how rational these decisions are. We show that GPT’s decisions are mostly rational and even score higher than human decisions.”  Link here.

3. My old post on Putin as a reader of history.  And my 2014 post on modeling Putin.

4. You can’t understand contemporary culture without pondering the notion of mental illness (I’m on Larry David’s side here).

5. California’s attempt to strangle AI.

6. “After adjusting for publication selection bias, the median probability of the presence of an effect decreased from 99.9% to 29.7% in economics.” Link here.

7. Liberalismo a la madrileña, a new book.

8. “Anchovy sex is a force of nature.”  And is there an “orgasm gap” (with humans)?  And which groups does it favor?

9. Seiji Ozawa, RIP (NYT).

1. “Conservatives share a terrible epistemological ecosystem, where false claims go viral much more often.”

2. How to model the Putin interview.

3. What really happened with the Hugo Awards?

4. In this one study, wage subsidies have a pass-through rate of about 28%.

5. When it comes to Ontario, the world is waking up.

6. Bard is now Gemini.  And a quick overview here.  And here is Zvi on Gemini.  And Ethan Mollick.

1. “That work suggested it was not how many times a word was repeated that predicted whether Roy’s son learned it early, but whether it was uttered in an unusual spot in the house, a surprising time or in a distinctive linguistic context.”  Link here.

2. Neruda update (New Yorker).  The poor Tamil maid.

3. Positive rather than adverse selection into life insurance.

4. Deutsche Bahn is still using Windows 3.11 (auf deutsch).

5. The Norwegian Century is indeed upon us (in Norwegian).

6. Matt Yglesias “Tourism is good, actually” ($$).

7. Krugman, Wells, and the economics of Taylor Swift.

1. “…we demonstrate that when an organism needs to adapt to a multitude of environmental variables, division of labor emerges as the only viable evolutionary strategy.”

2. How is AI helping ornithology?

3. Vesuvius Challenge Prize awarded, we can read the first scroll.  And a background Bloomberg piece.

4. Seafood as a resilient food solution after a nuclear war.

5. Nabeel Qureshi on whether there is a Moore’s Law for intelligence: “The shocking implication of what we have seen in this piece so far is that there may be no great, transformative breakthroughs needed to get to the critical inflection point. We already have the ingredients. As Ilya Sutskever likes to say, “the machine just wants to learn” – data, compute, and the right algorithms result in intelligence of a particular kind, and more of those inputs results in more intelligence as an output!”

6. What is Jordan Peterson doing in his new shows?

7. Enceladus questions.

1. Clock speed.

2. Marlon Brando (short Twitter video) names his actor GOAT.

3. A Woke take on the cultural boom from Ireland.

4. German beer consumption is declining steadily.

5. Should sexual assault in VR be a criminal act?

6. The evolution of trust, the evolution of Star Trek.

1. The pessimistic view on Ethiopia.

2. Inside the NBA’s chess club.

3. Brian Goff on education and the cost disease.

4. Genes and depression and bad luck is endogenous.

5. TC on internet writing.  And TC on Bill Laimbeer on passive-aggressive economists.

6. How should state and local governments respond to illegal retail cannabis?

7. Diaper spa for adults, and a licensing issue too.

8. The Karpathy review of Apple Vision Pro.  I likely will try it once there is a small army of people who have figured out the ins and outs and who can serve as tutors, including for setting the thing up.  One reason I am not “first in line” with this device is that it strikes me as a “technology of greater vividness” (a bit like some drugs? or downhill skiing?), and not so much a “technology to understand people and cultures more deeply.”  I think the latter interests me more, and I also do better with the latter.  But perhaps I am wrong!  To be clear, I am not arguing that “technologies of greater vividness” are objectively or intrinsically worse, if anything more people seem to prefer them.

1. Hans Niemann okie-dokie.  And a response.

2. Should more British homes be built using straw?

3. Base models of LLMs do not seem to skew so much politically.  Substack version here.

4. Cameroon starts first malaria vaccine rollout.

5. What economists thought in the 1980s.

6. Does the solar shield idea have potential? (NYT)

7. NYT profile of Coleman Hughes, a highly intelligent and reasonable man.  Again, here is Coleman’s new book The End of Race Politics.  I will be doing a CWT with him.

8. “Richest five families in Florence 🇮🇹 from 1427 are still the richest today (archival data). Not only the top shows persistence. Any family who was in the (1427) top third is almost certain to still be there today.”  Link here.

9. Ross Douthat on Dan Wang on where the future dynamism lies (NYT).

1. “Europe regulates its way to last place” (WSJ).

2. “Throughout the twentieth century…graduate-educated women married poorer spouses than college-educated women.”  With smaller family sizes, this no longer seems to be true.

3. “The Poem/1 clock dreams up a new poem every minute to tell you the time.”

4. Vanity Fair on Apple Vision Pro.

5. On Eurasianism.

6. Northern Virginia is set to boom.

1. “The Spanish judge investigating Russian interference in the Catalonian independence process has extended the probe for another six months after receiving an anonymous letter containing an article that identifies the Russian who offered Catalonian separatists US$500 billion and a small army if they break away from Madrid.”  Link here.

2. “We’ve streamlined our recruiting process for new officers. It now takes a quarter of the time it took two years ago to move from application to final offer and security clearance. These improvements have contributed to a surge of interest in the CIA.”  Link here.

3. “Interestingly, we also find that same-sex couples default significantly more (53.9%) than similar different-sex couples, which suggests an unobserved characteristic that causes same-sex couples to default more, and could explain a part of observed disparities in mortgage approval, undermining results in previous research.”  Link here.

4. Those new service sector jobs: helping people plan their Disney trips.

5. A resource guide to understand the ARPA model, from Institute for Progress.

6. Smoke Sauna Sisterhood is a good Estonian movie, original too.

1. The Frick Museum will reopen with 14 (!) evening bars.

2. Sebastian Barry in conversation with Roy Foster.

3. On ideological gender disparities in Korea.

4. Those new service sector jobs, What is Intervenor Compensation?, and “robot wranglers” (WSJ).

5. Is Petro stifled in Colombia?

6. Further fresh Vitalik.  Includes coverage of his childhood, more personal than about mechanism design.

7. Is there really a “National Hug an Economist Day”?

8. Other than this tweet, I know nothing about the new Catholic Institute of Technology.

1. Puffins are excellent swimmers.

2. How good are top Chinese LLMs?

3. Multicellularity older than we had thought?

4. “Online, she goes by the name Ballerina Farm, and millions of people watch her almost daily videos depicting her life in the countryside 30 miles from Salt Lake City.” (NYT, interesting throughout).

5. Video from the Yemeni Navy.

1. Mexican investment is doing just great.

2. In praise of double majors.

3. How to do things if you don’t have talent (does this mean you do have talent?).

4. The coming of numeracy to 17th century England.  And a new project Death by Numbers.

5. Those new service sector jobs: “After years shepherding children from one minute to the next, moms and dads hire $250-an-hour counselors to help them learn to live on their own.” (WSJ)

6. Okie-dokie: The Democrats’ new permitting-reform bill will spend $3 billion to help non-profits increase their participation in the environmental review process (Atlantic).  Excerpt here.

1. Glenn wants to ask it “why should I listen to my parents?”

2. What Soderbergh saw and read in 2023.

3. Hermit crabs are wearing our plastic.

4. The Giving Pledge.

5. Cowen’s Second Law: “Extreme metal guitar skills linked to intrasexual competition, but not mating success.”

6. Why strip malls are having a revival.

7. Hollywood movies losing favor in China (NYT).

8. The new economics of climate change (NYT).  A very good piece.  I thought one lesson was how much economists are so often slaves to politics — especially Democratic party politics — although I am not sure the author intended that messsage.

1. America’s wealthiest metropolitan areas in 1949.

2. Twins stolen at birth reunited by TikTok video.

3. Which immigrants to America end up most right-wing/left-wing?

4. “The [New Zealand] airport has since penguin-proofed its perimeters.”  A small blue penguin, of course.

5. Markets in everything those new service sector jobs the culture that is Japan all the servers at this restaurant have dementia, and NPR says it is true.

6. Benjamin Yeoh podcast with Hannah Ritchie on sustainability.

7. “We find that most empirical papers published in the AER are not robust, with no improvement over time.“

1. Who invented butter chicken?

2. What tech fashion looks like.

3. What top Finnish conductors earn.  Amazing that they even have a list of ten.

4. Arc is still underrated, but the world is waking up.

5. 1517 Fund has a new science support program.

6. Why might a public authority use the word “obtundity” on a sign?

7. The widening ideology gap between men and women (FT).  Key graphs are in this tweet.  Various hypotheses are in this long Twitter thread.