DIPPING THE STACKS

20 most recent links from my Raindrop bookmarks!
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  • Initial measurements showed children in London had significantly smaller lungs compared with those in Luton. But after Ulez came into force, the size and health of the London children’s lungs improved until they were comparable with those of the children in Luton. The children’s lung function improvements correlated strongly with air quality improvements.
  • By reducing wafer-to-wafer interconnect latency to 2 microseconds, CS-4 delivers more than 1,000 tokens per second on models exceeding 10 trillion parameters, preserving interactive decode performance at unprecedented scale.
  • We collected historical time series for algorithmic efficiency across seven problems (CIFAR-10, Hutter compression, Gurobi mixed-integer programming, MIPLIB, nanoGPT, Stockfish, and the matrix-multiplication exponent), which have relatively dense histories of discoveries. Two of these series — nanoGPT and CIFAR-10 — include LLM-driven contributions to the plotted records, but none show a clear change in slope comparable to the changes in vulnerability or mathematical discovery. Thus the public record of overall algorithmic optimization does not yet show an appreciable acceleration.
  • Those gains haven’t shown up as time saved, though. Time spent on existing tasks in Linear held while AI usage appeared as a new layer of work, meaning the overall time spent on product development is going up rather than down. As far as we can observe, teams are working more, not less, suggesting AI has a Jevons paradox quality beyond token consumption.
  • It is what is odd about you that is interesting. If you work hard, you will be able to write like everyone else in your genre, but the result will never be rich as the texture of your own personality. So, don’t think too much about how you are supposed to write, how others do it, or what the conventions demand. Just try to amuse yourself.
  • Before any moral or political commitment, that's their ultimate law, that they can't admit fault, can't suggest failure, can't introduce the possibility that they've ever been weak or vulnerable.
  • It sounds like a joke, but you are literally downloading more memory for your graphics card.
  • The growing interest in these substances comes as young adults are increasingly moving away from alcohol, earning Gen Z the nickname of the 'sober generation'.
  • We've built this reverse panopticon where the gaze of a hundred million people converges on a single point, and it turns out all those concentrated eyeballs have the force of a ten-kilowatt laser, they start stripping off the skin, they peel a man like an orange.
  • 🌿 Join the free Leave Curious email list: https://joinleavecurious.com/I'm building something to help people become part of restoring nature. Join the list …
  • My original Instagram post was popular, with over 600 likes, but people on Pinterest seem to find it even more interesting, as it's gotten over 227,000 views and over 1600 re-pins– and that's just in the past 6 months, which is the limit of the Pinterest stats.
  • Imagine a story where the events in our lives that happen online are never depicted or mentioned. A day would seem twelve hours long and the protagonists would spend two thirds of that time asleep. This may go some way to explaining a) why the contemporary literatures that try to capture and reflect the lives of the massively online don't seem to get a great deal of traction: those twelve hours of screentime are effectively impossible to narrate.
  • The rewrite cost a whopping $165,000 with API pricing. With Fable's API prices, the rewrite consumed 5.9 billion uncached input tokens, 690 million output tokens, and 72 billion cached input token reads. It's a large amount: the equivalent of the annual base salary for a software engineer at a mid-tier company in the US!
  • Gut microbes need something to eat, and when fiber is limited, they may begin consuming proteins from the mucus lining that protects the gut. Researchers found that fiber can suppress this process, while indigestible plant proteins help microbes produce more beneficial compounds.
  • So in some sense intuitively attention will what attention will do which I didn't show you yet is that you try to um for processing each of the vectors you try to figure out which are the relevant vectors that has relevant information and and then you pay actual attention to those vectors and and then you compute the output depends on depending on those special vectors to some degree.
  • Action to prevent the development of mirror life must occur before the first mirror organism exists because the first successful experiment might also mark the point at which containment and defense become impossible.
  • To get started, simply download the application and install it using the very same installation dance you're trying to avoid. (Ironic, sure, but hopefully this is the last time.)
  • We study the emergence of urban self-governance in the late medieval period. We focus on England after the Norman Conquest of 1066, building a novel comprehensive dataset of 554 medieval towns. During the Commercial Revolution (twelfth to thirteenth centuries), many merchant towns obtained Farm Grants: the right of self-governed tax collection and law enforcement. Self-governance, in turn, was a stepping stone for parliamentary representation: Farm Grant towns were much more likely to be summoned directly to the medieval English Parliament than otherwise similar towns.
  • Declaude routes your text through other models and checks the result before it comes back. Facts and length are kept by instruction and verified in our eval harness, but read the diff before you use the text anywhere that matters.
  • The sound stage was little more than a corner of the office hung with white sheets. A small camera followed Thomas as she scrambled in a chase scene, then the AI did the rest. It superimposed her movement in real time on to a field of swaying grass generated by a Chinese AI model, Seedance 2.5, released this month, which looks set to dramatically slash production times.