Week 14

Gas World: "German Government backs Namibia’s $10bn Hyphen green hydrogen project.. The Hyphen Hydrogen Energy project is a joint venture between Namibian-registered company Nicholas Holdings and German energy giant Enertrag"

Deaton, Economics in America: "[ACA's] tragedy was that all the providers and insurers had to be bought off, and so it did nothing to control the outrageous costs that are crippling the American economy.. Also not discussed was the scheme developed by Vic Fuchs, America’s most prominent health economist. The plan involved giving people vouchers that could be spent on care, something that would have broken the stranglehold of employer-provided care and provided incentives for cost control. And although proposals to end tax breaks for employer-provided healthcare have been debated, they had little chance of implementation in a reform designed by politicians, whose constituents believe that employer- provided healthcare is a free good, even in the face of evidence that healthcare costs have been a major limitation on the growth in median wages...

Still, nearly 9 percent of Americans had no insurance at any point in 2020, including during the pandemic.. even before the pandemic, [healthcare was] eating nearly one dollar in five and depriving Americans of so much else that they need. Reform will have to battle America’s deep political and financial inequality, in which so many people count for so little while so few count for so much, and where, relative to the payoffs, amazingly few dollars from the industry can buy them so much influence in a Congress that is addicted to money"

I look for the day when everyone is so hopelessly stupified by parrot aid tools older programmers who can read docs, and code from scratch achieve cult status, in a real-life version of Idiocracy. "You mean you can think about a problem and type actual programs yourself into the compute-thingy? Woah, dude"

"@HauntedOwlbear@eldritch.cafe

@inthehands I've been seeing so much 'I asked ChatGPT and it said' in user support forums that I'm thinking of sticking a bit about why you probably shouldn't.. in an article I'm writing about machine learning"

"@inthehands@hachyderm.io

Yesterday a student came to me with project questions. She was trying to learn some ground-level tool basics [on a UI tool called React], and she was just hopelessly confused: the pieces were there, fragments of nascent understanding littered all around, but somehow it just wasn’t coming together for her.

She walked me through her fragments of non-working code, and as I was trying to figure out how she’d got so lost, she popped back to her documentation source: ChatGPT....

I had her type 'react usestate' into a search engine and showed her how to identify the React project’s actual documentation in the search results.

She looks at it. A long pause. Then: 'This is SO much better.'"

"@eclectech@things.uk

I have just realised that the one benefit to the amount of disinformation, lies & LLM rubbish that swirls around the internet these days is that April Fool's 'pranks' don't make a dent. No requirement to be extra vigilant, because that level of attention is required every sodding day"

Department of Energy: "Biden-Harris Administration Announces $6 Billion to Transform America's Industrial Sector, Strengthen Domestic Manufacturing, and Slash Planet-Warming Emissions"

That was from a book 10 years ago, I wonder how EC thinks now, probably same, multiplied by a million..

Ernest Chan, Algorithmic Trading: "[2013] My alarms always go off whenever I hear the term "neural net trading model", not to mention one that has 100 nodes. All you need to know about the nodes in a neural net is that the number of parameters to be fitted with in-sample training data is proportional to the number of nodes. With at least 100 parameters, we can certainly fit the model to any time series we want and obtain [fantastic results]. Needless to say, it will have little or no predictive power going forward due to data-snooping bias"

Food Delivery Apps #Oliver

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NY Magazine: "Inside Gaza’s Famine.. people spend hours searching for enough food to eat one meal a day."

"Stadler hydrogen trainset sets distance record.. [the train] destined for San Bernardino travels 1,741 miles on single tank of fuel"

Canary Media: US pledges up to $1B for two pioneering ‘green steel’ projects.. Steelmakers Cleveland-Cliffs and SSAB could get up to 500M dollar each to build novel facilities that can make iron for steelmaking using hydrogen.

"@HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social

The idea of human beings as rational utility-maximizing particles with insatiable hedonic desires is very much the product of an ideological project to justify capitalism as 'natural' and has virtually no relationship to how actual human beings live but a lot of people have genuinely internalized it.

Trying to derive 'human nature' by observing people under capitalist modernity is like looking at a bored, depressed wolf obsessively pacing a circle in a tiny zoo enclosure and concluding that this is 'wolf nature'"

Too Old to Die Young - Brother Dege #music

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Saladino: "Plants package their highly defended 'babies' within sweet and colorful packages in hopes that animals and humans will eat the fruit but not the seeds (hopefully spread in poop fertilizer later), which makes fruit a notably safe option. Eating excess amounts of fruit probably isn’t a good thing for a variety of reasons, but moderate amounts of seasonal fruit were certainly consumed by our ancestors. I’ve included both sweet and unsweet fruit in the recipes with this in mind. They add some color and variety of taste to many of [our] recipes. Foods like squash, avocado, and olives are fruit... Unsweet fruit like these are featured throughout the recipes"

Saladino, The Carnivore Diet: "Seeds are key to plant reproduction, and a whole lot of energy goes into making these 'plant babies.' Yet they are incredibly fragile and vulnerable to damage by animal consumption. If the seed is eaten or damaged by an animal bite, it can’t grow into a new plant. In contrast, if the plant’s leaves or stem is eaten, it’s not as catastrophic to the life cycle of the plan.

In other words, some parts of the plant are more important to protect than others. This is why there’s a clear hierarchy of toxicity in different plant parts, based on how vulnerable any part is to predation. Seeds are the most highly defended, followed by stems and leaves and many roots. It’s also important to note that we encounter many foods on a daily basis that are really plant seeds, but we don’t think of them in that way. Technically, nuts, grains, and legumes are also plant seeds and are all similarly endowed with many defense chemicals and digestive enzyme inhibitors for protection"

Carnivore Diet people have a point, if seeds of plants are there to reproduce they would be defended by toxic elements against being eaten. So when we eat spices made out of seeds, such as turmeric, we are eating the most toxic part of a plant.

Soo.. coffee is bad for you

Bruce Ames: "Roasted coffee is known to contain 826 volatile chemicals; 21 have been tested chronically and 16 are rodent carcinogens; caffeic acid, a nonvolatile rodent carcinogen, is also present. A typical cup of coffee contains at least 10 mg (40 ppm) of rodent carcinogens (mostly caffeic acid, catechol, furfural, hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide)"

Frontline #RU #UA 03/21 - 03/29

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PT includes non-market forces, "the spirit of times" into his formula via slick strategies.. One is via minimum wage level, if mw is not raised that can signal certain approach to labor/biz relations of that year. Another is looking at the frequency of words in all published work, such as on Google Books, counting terms like "greed". This count also indicates certain fashion in society and it helps the prediction. I can confirm, tested out addition / removal of the variables in the replication, all contribute to the success of the formula.

Attempted to replicate the approach from Age of Discord, Peter Turchin's method to predict wages. Pretty close.. PT's regression result, $R^2$ is at 98% (very good). Guess what, the availability of labor has direct effect on wages - if available labor increases via excessive immigration citizens will pay the price.

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Programmer: "Spoke to a Microsoft engineer on the GPT-6 training cluster project. He kvetched about the pain they're having provisioning infiniband-class links between GPUs in different regions.

Me: 'why not just colocate the cluster in one region?'

Him: 'Oh yeah we tried that first. We can't put more than 100K H100s in a single state without bringing down the power grid' 🤯"

"@fuck_cars_bot@botsin.space

'Revitalization of the port area of Rio de Janeiro'"

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