Links

The word trauma is too loaded - they use the word “splitting” to describe the response of setting painful things aside, until you are ready to process them. But then instead of processing them, you just keep putting off dealing with them, or avoiding things that remind you of them.

macro predictions of major changes to markets

It seems to me that a significant portion of all the money investors made over this period resulted from the tailwind generated by the massive drop in interest rates. I consider it nearly impossible to overstate the influence of declining rates over the last four decades.

People who came into the business world after 2008 – or veteran investors with short memories – might think of today’s interest rates as elevated. But they’re not in the longer sweep of history, meaning there’s no obvious reason why they should be lower.

Treating houses as an investment is bad for people who want to live in them. Houses suffer wear and tear, but still just appreciate in value over time.

To make housing affordable, it needs to be cheap and widely available. Things that are cheap and widely available are not typically good investments.

Archived version

on scaling laws of language models. I still know too little about all of this to make much sense of it.

The risk of bots filling in critical knowledge/skill gaps, preventing experts in those areas.

A good lengthy rant of eventual downfalls of online socials

Four papers on ways to make people happier: express gratitude, give compliments, offer to help, reach out to people.

for whenever you next need to C

A four day Rust course developed by the Android team. Should set aside some days for this I guess.

Sam Altman and some YC people on startup essentials

Songs and lyrics by Tom Lehrer, freed into the public domain.

Within a week it was cloned and put up on a nice domain
with a different logo and the copycat was impersonating
me on social media and ranking quite well on Google.
It’s no longer open source.

CIA experiment of hiding surveilance equipment inside cats

Links to this Forbes piece, that 40% of global shipping is for fuel

The very bad image dataset bias issue

love this

a giant concrete structure that was dragged through the sea then suctioned to the ocean floor to extract gas

Estimate that ChatGPT will cost $150-$200 per month.

this was like reading css from a different person

Julius is a fully working open-source version of Caesar 3.

I like Small Kindnesses

Still a lot of unresolved ethical (and legal?) questions around generating art in the style of others, but open source data for these models seems an important place to start.

The feeling of being able to control something, to offset the lack of control in the activity or outcome.

interesting comments from some Alphabet employees - that cost of LLMs needs to come down by 10x-100x to be viable.

City layouts that cause cars to be favoured over alternative transportation