This author comes in hot: “It’s a well-documented fact that a small number of repeat-offending criminals are responsible for a large share of all crime. The primary reason why prisons effectively reduce crime is exactly because they prevent the crimes […]
A lesson in never giving up! Also a reminder that computers don’t do random very well. ~ learn more
“A deep dive into the booming desalination industry.” This article updated some of my prior beliefs about the current/future costs of desalination (making freshwater from seawater). The promise is better than ever! ~ learn more
“The bottleneck lies in the very architecture of how value is transferred from one customer to another — as messages flowing between trusted intermediaries. Supplanting it with a superior design will be less like replacing carrier pigeons with telegrams, and […]
This video features Casey Handmer of Terraform Industries (disclosure: I’m invested!), who showcases the technology he developed for making natural gas from thin air. I never get tired of sharing content about this! ~ learn more
“Counterfactual simulations show that exposing low-income households to the same products and prices available to high-income households reduces nutritional inequality by only about 10%, while the remaining 90% is driven by differences in demand.” ~ learn more
“In this article, we show that despite the nominal endorsement of a maximum false-positive rate of 5% (i.e., p ≤ .05), current standards for disclosing details of data collection and analyses make false positives vastly more likely. In fact, it […]
This feels related to the idea of using a secret identity or alter-ego to enhance your performance. “Your personality, skills, likes, and dislikes change over time — but that change isn’t out of your control. What can you do to […]
This research makes the claim that using “Chain of Thought” prompting for LLMs does not generalize. I consider this evidence of LLM limitations (at least for now?). “This spotlights drawbacks of chain of thought, especially because of the sharp tradeoff […]