2023-10-01

etc

Horrendous Mess Of Wires
Every single Onewheel is being recalled after four deaths
- HN comments
Ontario man eats 50 Carolina Reaper peppers in record time
LK-99 Research Continues, Paper Says Superconductivity Could Be Possible
5 dead, hundreds evacuated after semi-truck carrying ammonia overturns on Illinois highway - ABC News
Threat modelling case study: bicycles

If the tyres are inflated, my own commuter bicycle is probably worth £30 to the right buyer. My bicycle is so low-end that cycling snobs refer to it as a mere "bicycle shaped object". Rather selfishly I am glad that such snobs exist as having a lot of more valuable bicycles around provides me with good ambient security. No thief is going to bother cutting my locks when there is a Campagnolo on the next rack.

One father I know had his primary-school-age daughter "decorate" his commuting bicycle with girly stickers and pink glitter. If anyone examines his bicycle closely he looks like a complete loon but I think his motivation is right: it's going to be much less appealing to steal when it's covered in Miffy stickers.

The Ingenious Cardboard Bed
- HN thread
To a New Generation of Classic Cars

Let’s celebrate old automobiles to suit our more sober, constrained America.
Kia and Hyundai Blame TikTok and Instagram for Their Cars Getting Stolen
After just 20 minutes with Mistral model, I am shocked how unsafe it is

You will have no trouble getting the model to give you advice on how to commit suicide, assault someone, or eradicate minorities. I will not post examples verbatim,
- HN comments
'Nazi raccoons' on the rampage as European population explodes

Raccoons, indigenous to North America, were first brought to Germany in the 1920s and bred in captivity for their fur. Everything went well for a few years but then, in the 1930s, a few of them escaped from a farm near Berlin. Rumour has it that around the same time, Hermann Goering, the founder of the Gestapo and head of Adolf Hitler's air force as well as being Nazi Germany's most senior forestry official, ordered two pairs to be released into the wild near the Edersee Dam in western Germany so that they could be hunted. However, no evidence has been found to back up that particular claim, but a number of British newspapers have taken to referring to the animals as "Nazi raccoons" as a result. There is no question that they are invasive.
San Francisco's laundry crisis: the rising cost of clean clothes
Cats Can't Taste Sweetness, Study Finds

Fact Checkers Take Stock of Their Efforts: ‘It’s Not Getting Better’
The next frontier for LLMs: hall monitors

What I ultimately fear is a profound chilling effect on online speech. It’s not that the LLMs will necessarily enforce standards any higher than what we abide by today; we will probably train them to let some things slide. It’s that the unclear boundaries and the high cost of mistakes, coupled with the utter inability to fly under the radar, will have us constantly biting our tongues.

Fine, I'll run a regression analysis. But it won't make you happy.

If you don’t know my history with COVID policy (I’ve taken a lot of shit from the left over the years for arguing that these measures failed a cost-benefit test) and just think of me as Some Nerd Who Thinks The Vaccines Were Good, you’re probably expecting me to make fun of the GBD, which has been the subject of a lot of critical commentary. But actually, I mostly agree with it. I think its claims about focused protection and herd immunity were too optimistic. But I think it was directionally right — that by October 2020, the evidence was on the side of the costs of these measures outweighing the benefits. I also think efforts to suppress discussion of the GBD and to label it as “misinformation” were bullshit.

Betteridge Falls: How overly-convenient Obama-era psychological research continues to unravel, to the point that it endangers the entire field.
I’m so sorry for psychology’s loss, whatever it is

This whole debacle matters a lot socially: careers ruined, reputations in tatters, lawsuits flying. But strangely, it doesn't seem to matter much scientifically. That is, our understanding of psychology remains unchanged. If you think of psychology as a forest, we haven't felled a tree or even broken a branch. We've lost a few apples.

That might sound like a dunk on Gino and Ariely, or like a claim about how experimental psychology is wonderfully robust. It is, unfortunately, neither. It is actually a terrifying fact that you can reveal whole swaths of a scientific field to be fraudulent and it doesn't make a difference. It's also a chance to see exactly what's gone wrong in psychology, and maybe how we can put it right.