Ricco
@riccoja
Tax policy researcher
With the appropriate cavaets, nuance, etc: the magical thing about economics is that it allows you, to a first approximation, to abstract away from totally intractable questions like "is ChatGPT using too much water?" and instead replace it with "is water underpriced?"
the decline of third places is almost entirely fake in explaining why people hang out less. it's the phone and always available video entertainment. one thing this does is pulverize people with media telling them that there are structural causes for everything bad in their life
re: grok waifu (and, well, everything else), in the next few years we'll get a sizable social movement that you might call The Benedict Option But For Secular Libs. It will make the Haidt reading groups in Park Slope, the concern over "screen time", etc look like child's play
It is notable that this is exactly the kind of land use control -- directly favoring an industry that then gets juicy profits - you'd think anti-trust types would be extremely critical of. But they aren't, as far as I can tell...
NYC is a great to visit, if you can afford it. Because of a law limiting the construction of new hotels, the average occupancy rate is 82%, 20 points higher than the national rate. Revenue per room is $238.93, is well above the national average of $99.94. wsj.com/real-estate/co…
I like this. LLMs need more out-of-sample validation. Not just the little math puzzles, like ARC or whatever, but testing for wholesale scientific discoveries. Like if this model can invent literary modernism then I'll take the sci-fi AGI stuff more seriously
This is interesting. One dev is training an AI from scratch on books from 1800s London. It's called TimeCapsuleLLM, not a fine-tuned modern model, but one trained entirely on historical data. No modern language or context. Built on nanoGPT by @karpathy. github.com/haykgrigo3/Tim…
Must suck for the people who live here in the Rockaways but it is incredibly cool when one of those comically large Emirates double-decker Airbuses flies right over the beach
Something must be done about the bubble tea situation in Cobble Hill. Every new storefront is some kind of $15 treat-beverage enterprise designed to siphon off the allowances of middle school girls. Enough!!
Kids today don't appreciate just how much of the standard-issue Online Technocratic Center-Left Consensus is due to Stephen Smith posting his ass off every day for 15 years
single stair reform chi osse 🤝 @rcobooth 🤝 ilana glazer
The latest from @The_Budget_Lab on reconciliation: distributional analysis of the Senate bill (including Scott FMAP proposal) vs. House. Key takeaways:
Re: the Thiel/Douthat exchange, one hopes we are witnessing a growing awareness of the whole dealth cult thing going on over there in SF
actual risks aside, I find it strange that it's not a bigger cultural/political issue. A couple thousand nerds, whose social preferences are...different...than most's, are racing to replace human life as we know it within a few years, and there's no discernable social backlash??
I need someone who's not an epidemiologist or a journalist (sorry) to look into this and tell me if this is real
The devices, popular among teens, emit lead, nickel and antimony at concentrations that may exceed cancer and neurological risk thresholds. sfchronicle.com/health/article…
Recent developments with Sonnet 4: 1) syncophancy dial cranked way up 2) conspicuous replacement of emdashes with hyphens
