CIVIL WAR (Garland 2024) - Like all Alex Garland movies, this was super interesting, mostly about small group dynamics, curiously old-fashioned, and ... ultimately more interesting than actually good, but still recommended.

I am extremely unqualified to judge this, but it sure sounds cool and impressive

Come work with us!

Our World in Data is looking for a writer who can write global issues for a wide audience. You could focus on poverty, inequality, health, demography, or any of the many other topics we cover (or don't yet)! (And the team is awesome.)
ourworldindata.org/writer-q2-2024

TIL the web has officially been enshittifying (or, at least, has been formally described as such) for more than a decade. I think I even vaguely remember this AV Club redesign.

Key news & highlights from the week in climate tech & energy:

• New analysis by Ember suggests that German coal mines emit 184x (!) more methane than what Germany has previously reported to the United Nations.

• For a brief moment this week, batteries were the largest single

'Somehow surprisingly, it is possible to adapt a pre-trained text-to-image model to output videos without any training 🤯.' lilianweng.github.io/posts/2024-04-…

People who are afraid to learn assembly think it’s some mysterious weirdo magic but it’s the opposite: it’s a bunch of very basic granular operations that you string together to accomplish larger tasks, like Legos.

This is why everyone [who programs] should learn it, because it

“Often, for reasons they would believe to be virtuous, they’re prepared to suppress kinds of speech with which they don’t sympathise. It’s a slippery slope. And look out, because the person slipping down that slope could be you.” theguardian.com/books/2024/apr…

I spent a few days trekking across the Dogon Escarpment lo these many years ago. Really some of the nicest people on earth. Also, really taught me to appreciate cold Coca-Cola when you can find it.

Honestly did not realize Signal/Whatsapp/Telegram were in the China version of Apple App store. Sad to see them removed because personal/commercial ties between people of all nations is economically, culturally, and peace maximizing.

Matt Freed

In Scarborough Town Centre for (surprisingly) the first time ever, and struck by how strategically brilliant it was for Canada to become a nexus for & mosaic of upper-middle-class bourgeoisie from every nation/culture on Earth. (Some tactics, esp. around housing, need work tho.)

RIP. His views on consciousness as firmly materialist were incredibly insightful to young me, a great mind who will be missed. I am glad he got to see the large language model era sparking a whole new conversation on the same topic he spent his life on.

Poe's Law has a bank!

'The Air Force acknowledged that the first flights of the X-62 controlled by AI agents were performed in December 2022.' theaviationist.com/2024/04/18/ai-…

Love this theory by official that the reason ChatGPT uses words like 'delve' a lot is that OpenAI outsource a lot of their RLHF annotation to workers in Nigeria, and Nigerian formal English has a slightly different vocabulary theguardian.com/technology/202…

we have lost so much

'Our largest models are over 400B parameters and, while these models are still training, our team is excited about how they’re trending. Over the coming months, we’ll release multiple models with new capabilities' ai.meta.com/blog/meta-llam…

The remarkable thing about this is that Norway's population is only 5.5 million, meaning this is a quarterly profit of $20,000 _per person_ across an entire nation. cnbc.com/2024/04/18/wor…

NYCpix: downtown canyon; weeping angel; park central; square times