4 stars
The Time I Built an ROV to Solve Missing Person Cases | The Anttidote
A remarkable story (from Finland):
I didn’t know it back then but it all started while I was reading Hacker News in February 2019 and stumbled upon a story called “The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans”. The real life events behind the story are unbelievably tragic but how the case was solved was remarkable. How the perseverance of a single guy led to him solving the case and by doing so, he was able to bring much relief to the families of the victims. Reading the story got me thinking how I could do this kind of thing myself.
I read the story a couple of times and sent it to my brother. I knew that he would be interested in the story as he is into these kinds of things as much as what I am. After reading the article, we talked for quite a long time about various missing person cases and how to solve them.
By the autumn of 2020 the story had faded from my mind until my brother called me with an interesting missing person case. That phone call was the starting point of the most interesting adventure I’ve ever had, and it lead to us solving two missing person cold cases, which had been unsolved for 9 and 15 years.
3 stars
The West Coast’s Fanciest Stolen Bikes Are Getting Trafficked by One Mastermind in Jalisco, Mexico | Wired
“We have people stealing all over the world.” A digital sleuth named Bryan Hance has spent the past four years obsessively uncovering a bicycle-theft pipeline of astonishing scale.
How the Fridge Changed Flavor | New Yorker
The opportunity to consume frosty drinks and desserts opened up an entirely new vocabulary of sensation. Some found the cold shocking at first. “Lord! How I have seen the people splutter when they’ve tasted them for the first time,” a London ice-cream vender recalled in 1851. One customer—“a young Irish fellow”—took a spoonful, stood statue still, and then “roared out, ‘Jasus! I am kilt. The coald shivers is on to me.’ ” The earliest recorded description of brain freeze seems to have been published by Patrick Brydone, a Scotsman travelling in Sicily in the seventeen-seventies. The victim was a British naval officer who took a big bite of ice cream at a formal dinner. “At first he only looked grave, and blew up his cheeks to give it more room,” Brydone wrote. “The violence of the cold soon getting the better of his patience, he began to tumble it about from side to side in his mouth, his eyes rushing out of water.” Shortly thereafter, he spat it out “with a horrid oath” and, in his outrage, had to be restrained from beating the nearest servant.
Fast Crimes at Lambda School | Sandofsky
Two days after his company's downfall, Austen Allred wrote:
I wish people could see how ugly it is to be envious, and how obvious it is to those around you when that's what's happening.
There's not much uglier than trying to tear someone down because they achieved what you wish you had.Austen co-founded Lambda School, one of the largest educational startups of all time. It promised to teach you to code in a matter of months, a common claim in 2017, a time when code bootcamps were commodities you could find in any strip mall. But you don't score $120 million in funding from the biggest names in venture capital by building a better boot camp. He took on college.
An underdog with a story as fascinating as his company, Austen went from Mormon missionary to college dropout— at one point homeless and living out of his Honda Civic— to the founder of the hottest startup in the valley.
What set his boot camp apart from the others were "Income Share Agreements." Instead of paying up-front for tuition, students agreed to pay a portion of future income. If you don't get a job, you pay nothing. It was an idea so clever it became a breakout hit of Y Combinator, the same tech incubator that birthed Stripe, AirBnb, and countless other unicorns.
2 stars
The Cousin I Never Knew | Esquire
When I inherited a box of papers about a mysterious relative, I went in search of his life—and discovered a courageous man who found his purpose fighting the disease that killed him.
Apple Intelligence is Right On Time | Stratechery
The irony of the leak being so huge is that nothing is particularly surprising: Apple is announcing and incorporating generative AI features throughout its operating systems and making them available to developers. Finally, the commentariat exclaims! Apple is in danger of falling dangerously behind! The fact they are partnering with OpenAI is evidence of how desperate they are! In fact, I would argue the opposite: Apple is not too late, they are taking the correct approach up and down the stack, and are well-positioned to be one of AI’s big winners.
How the Square Root of 2 Became a Number | Quanta
Mathematicians continued to live with that ambiguity. Then, in the mid-1800s, Richard Dedekind, among others, realized that calculus — which had been developed 200 years earlier by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz — stood on a shaky foundation. A reserved but gifted mathematician who worked slowly and published relatively little, Dedekind was preparing to teach his students about continuous functions when he realized that he couldn’t give a satisfactory explanation of what it meant for a function to be continuous.
He hadn’t even seen functions properly defined. And that, he argued, required a good understanding of how numbers worked — something mathematicians seemed to have taken for granted. How, he asked, could you know for sure that √2 multiplied by √3 equals √6? He wanted to provide some answers.
Centuries of Childhood | Res Obscura
This shot from Four Families might come as a surprise to some contemporary advocates of co-sleeping. Although it’s sometimes claimed online that “individualistic” western societies are the only ones in which mothers and babies don’t typically sleep in the same bed, that isn’t what the history or anthropology of childhood actually shows us.
And as for the books about the virtues of “French parenting”? To me, the most striking thing in Four Families is the glimpse into French family life in a rural area circa 1960. To anyone who’s lived in Mediterranean Europe, it would not be surprising that a French family (then or now) would give a small glass of wine at dinner to their children.
But I have to admit to being surprised when the entire family in this film — including the baby! — begin drinking alcoholic cider for breakfast.
Ilya Sutskever Has a New Plan for Safe Superintelligence | Bloomberg
Now Sutskever is introducing that project, a venture called Safe Superintelligence Inc. aiming to create a safe, powerful artificial intelligence system within a pure research organization that has no near-term intention of selling AI products or services. In other words, he’s attempting to continue his work without many of the distractions that rivals such as OpenAI, Google and Anthropic face. “This company is special in that its first product will be the safe superintelligence, and it will not do anything else up until then,” Sutskever says in an exclusive interview about his plans. “It will be fully insulated from the outside pressures of having to deal with a large and complicated product and having to be stuck in a competitive rat race.”
Neighborhoods that Nurture: Why The Play-Based Childhood Requires More Than Just Putting Down the Phone | After Babel
It's easier to create “play-based childhoods” if we can simultaneously create vibrant “community-based childhoods” to support them.
Melancholia | The Money Illusion
Scott Sumner:
During my recent trip to the Bay Area, I met lots of people who are involved in the field of AI. My general impression is that this region has more smart people than anywhere else, at least per capita. And not just fairly smart, I’m talking about extremely high IQ individuals. I don’t claim to have met a representative cross section of AI people, however, so take the following with a grain of salt.
If you spend a fair bit of time surrounded by people in this sector, you begin to think that San Francisco is the only city that matters; everywhere else is just a backwater. There’s a sense that the world we live in today will soon come to an end, replaced by either a better world or human extinction. It’s the Bay Area’s world, we just live in it. […]
I’m probably giving you the idea that the Bay Area tech people are a bunch of weirdos. Nothing could be further from the truth. In general, I found them to be smarter, more rational, and even nicer than the average human being. If everyone in the world were like these people, even communism might have worked.
There’s a weird disconnect between the AI world and the normal world. If the AI people are correct, then I don’t think the public has any idea what’s about to hit them.
‘The big story of the 21st century’: is this the most shocking documentary of the year? | The Guardian
For Nate Halverson, a journalist with the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) out of Emeryville, California, the Smithfield deal was the first point in a much wider and concerning pattern – though the company’s CEO, Larry Pope, assured Congress that the Chinese government was not behind WH Group’s purchase, Halverson found evidence to the contrary on a reporting trip to the company’s headquarters: a secret document, marked not for distribution in the United States, detailing every dollar of the deal, and the state-run Bank of China’s “social responsibility” in backing it for “national strategy”.
A similar national security motivation undergirded Saudi-backed land purchases in such disparate regions as Arizona and Zambia, or Russia’s import of American cowboys to manage its state-incentivized cattle herds. These seemingly unrelated developments form The Grab, a riveting new documentary which outlines, with startling clarity, the move by national governments, financial investors and private security forces to snap up food and water resources. “At some point you’re like, ‘Oh my God, how is this not the story?’” Halverson said. “We’re just seeing the early stages of what’s going to be the big story of the 21st century.”
Up All Night? You May Have Actually Been Asleep | Scientific American
You say you haven’t slept all night. Brain scans say you have. New science says both inferences may be right
Ancient Genomes Reveal Which Children the Maya Selected for Sacrifice | New York Times
The team first used DNA to determine the sex of the children as part of routine sequencing. The skeletons of people under a certain age do not offer much information about biological sex, so this aspect of the children was a mystery.
It took a year for those first results to come in, and when they did: “Wow,” Dr. Barquera said.
All 64 of the skulls belonged to boys. “We kept rerunning the tests because we couldn’t believe that all of them were male,” he said. “It was just so amazing.”
Early archaeologists studying the Maya had proposed that the culture was preoccupied with sacrificing young virgin women. That theory has been challenged in recent decades with the discovery that most people sacrificed in the sacred cenote — a natural sinkhole at Chichén Itzá — were children.
“That obviously flew in the face of the argument that it was mostly young virgin women being thrown into the cenote,” said Jaime Awe, an archaeologist at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff who was not involved in the study. The obsession with virgins in archaeological circles most likely arose from a combination of colonial ideas and limited data, he said.
How Does Our Sense of Humor Change With Age? A Statistical Analysis | Stat Significant
Senses of humor—both individually and generationally—are complex and ever-shifting. Throughout our lives, we laugh a little less and gravitate toward humor that is "appropriate," self-enhancing, and marked by incongruity resolution; in the process, we forsake other comedic stylings. But what propels this shift in taste—what causes this core part of our personality to change? Is evolving comedic preference the product of nature or nurture?
Does Egalitarianism enable more Gender Equality? | The Great Gender Divergence
Hierarchy and patriarchy are two kinds of status inequality. One mandates respect for authorities, the other concerns men having more status than women. Before now, they have always been considered separately. But this is a serious omission. Both are fundamentally about status: who is owed reverence and deference? Global heterogeneity in hierarchy is a hugely important aspect of “The Great Gender Divergence”.
Latent Expertise: Everyone is in R&D | One Useful Thing
And to understand the value of AI, they need to do R&D. Since AI doesn't work like traditional software, but more like a person (even though it isn't one), there is no reason to suspect that the IT department has the best AI prompters, nor that it has any particular insight into the best uses of AI inside an organization. IT certainly plays a role, but the actual use cases will come from workers and managers who find opportunities to use AI to help them with their job. In fact, for large companies, the source of any real advantage in AI will come from the expertise of their employees, which is needed to unlock the expertise latent in AI.
Accelerating India’s Development | Marginal Revolution
There are many “big think” books on growth–Landes’ Wealth and Poverty of Nations, Acemoglu and Robinson’s The Narrow Corridor, Koyama and Rubin’s How the World Became Rich–but these books are primarily historical and descriptive. The big think books don’t tell you how to develop. Create institutions to strike “a delicate and precarious balance between state and society” isn’t much of a guide to development. Accelerating India’s Development is different.
1 star
Fake Tradition Is Traditional | Astral Codex Ten
I’m not recommending that people lie and invent fake genealogies for what they were going to do anyway. I just get angry when people make blanket objections to looking backwards fondly at some idealized past as a guide to future institutions. And doubly angry when people say “your past heroes didn’t look back at an idealized past, they just did things”. Of course past heroes looked back at an idealized even-further-past when doing their heroic deeds! That’s the standard human method for getting anything done! If we get mad at people who try the same strategy today, we’ll do less than our forebears, idealized or not.
Early ants may have had complex social lives, fossil data suggests | ScienceNews
Ants have used specialized antenna bristles to communicate for 100 million years
Denmark recalls Korean ramen for being too spicy | BBC News
Denmark has recalled several spicy ramen noodle products by South Korean company Samyang, claiming that the capsaicin levels in them could poison consumers.
Three fiery flavours of the Samyang instant ramen line are being withdrawn: Buldak 3x Spicy & Hot Chicken, 2x Spicy & Hot Chicken and Hot Chicken Stew.
Denmark's food agency issued the recall and warning on Tuesday, urging consumers to abandon the product.
But the maker Samyang says there's no problem with the quality of the food.
"We understand that the Danish food authority recalled the products, not because of a problem in their quality but because they were too spicy," the firm said in a statement to the BBC.
"The products are being exported globally. But this is the first time they have been recalled for the above reason."
Intel is trucking a 916,000-pound 'Super Load' across Ohio to its new fab, spawning road closures over nine days | Tom’s Hardware
Ohio is seeing the effects of Intel's growth, but maybe not in the way state officials had hoped. Intel will put a 916,000-pound "super load" on the road in Ohio on Wednesday, for a trip that will cover approximately 150 miles in nine days and snarl traffic for over a week. The price of progress!
Intel's new campus coming to New Albany, OH, is in heavy construction, and around 20 super loads are being ferried across Ohio's roads by the Ohio Department of Transportation after arriving at a port of the Ohio River via barge. Four of these loads, including the one hitting the road now, weigh around 900,000 pounds — that's 400 metric tons, or 76 elephants. The super loads were first planned for February but were delayed due to the immense planning workload. Large crowds are estimated to accumulate on the route, potentially slowing it even further.
Intel's 916,000-pound shipment is a "cold box," a self-standing air-processor structure that facilitates the cryogenic technology needed to fabricate semiconductors. The box is 23 feet tall, 20 feet wide, and 280 feet long, nearly the length of a football field. The immense scale of the cold box necessitates a transit process that moves at a "parade pace" of 5-10 miles per hour.
Elephants Have Names for Each Other, Study Finds | Yale Environment
For the study, researchers analyzed hundreds of elephant calls recorded over more than a year in Kenya. Using machine learning, they identified the specific sounds that elephants made when calling each other. Researchers then played recorded calls, finding that elephants responded to the sound of their friends or family saying their name — they called back, or moved toward the speaker. Elephants responded less enthusiastically to the sound of other names.
What Is the Best Way to Cut an Onion? | New York Times
The cookbook author Kenji López-Alt dives deep into a question of his own, with computer models and all.
A virtual rodent predicts the structure of neural activity across behaviors | Marginal Revolution
These results demonstrate how physical simulation of biomechanically realistic virtual animals can help interpret the structure of neural activity across behavior and relate it to theoretical principles of motor control.
US Olympic and other teams will bring their own AC units to Paris, undercutting environmental plan | AP
According to the International Energy Agency, fewer than 1 in 10 households in Europe has air conditioning, and the numbers in Paris are lower than that. The study said that of the 1.6 billion AC units in use across the globe in 2016, more than half were in China (570 million) and the United States (375 million). The entire European Union had around 100 million.