>interchange w28y24
Curiosities for 08 → 14 July 2024
'It Makes Sense to Someone, Somewhere'
France Issues Scratch-and-Sniff Baguette Postage Stamps.
Anything to distract in the second round of voting.
Top 5
01. How DeviantArt died: A.I. and greed turned a once-thriving community into a ghost town.
“Some people I know that use Etsy have basically seen their income dry up entirely over the past 18 months,” Southen said. “Which is really disturbing to see, because what’s happening is they get buried, and then 50 A.I. people all making $300 a month are effectively making it so someone else can’t pay their bills.”
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02. As China’s Internet Disappears, ‘We Lose Parts of Our Collective Memory’
I got no results when I searched for Ma Yun, which is Jack Ma’s name in Chinese. I found three entries for Ma Huateng, which is Pony Ma’s name. A search for Liu Chuanzhi turned up seven entries.
There were zero results for Mr. Xi.
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03. How Will Nanomachines Change the World?
Historically, medicine has acted through increasingly sophisticated forms of chemistry: aspirin blocks a pro-inflammatory enzyme; Lipitor inhibits the synthesis of cholesterol. Contera sees Tour and Santos’s molecular machines as part of a scientific movement to manipulate the building blocks of life mechanically, rather than chemically. “We’re now at a place where we can influence the physics of the cell.”.
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04. No physics? No problem. AI weather forecasting is already making huge strides.
That's because there's a secret weapon: an extremely rich data set. The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, the premiere organization in the world for numerical weather prediction, maintains a set of data about atmospheric, land, and oceanic weather data for every day, at points around the world, every few hours, going back to 1940.
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05. Three Algorithms in a Room.
Each algorithmic scheme has its own distinct features, but they all share the same underlying philosophy: Competing on price in an open market is a race to the bottom, so why not instead coordinate together to grow industry’s profits? In other words, it’s another version of the notorious Peter Thiel adage that “competition is for losers.”
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Tangents
Quote
Contrary to general belief, I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who got there first.
Peter Ustinov (1921 - 2004), Dear Me (1977)
Best for the week ahead!
-Tim
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