Tour de Eating: 6000 calories is hard to do.

https://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/racing/tour-de-france/this-is-what-you-have-to-eat-to-compete-in-the-tour-de-france-182775

“The amount of food needed is close to the body’s maximum capacity for digestion, so failure to keep up with the enormous calorie intake can spell disaster, because playing catch-up is near impossible.”

#jgshare

Misinformation Susceptibility Test: research profiling.

https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/misinformation-susceptibility-test

“Researchers encourage the public to test themselves: https://yourmist.streamlit.app.”

I figured I’d be good at this and I am (19/20 correct). I missed one because I thought exam was harder than it is.

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“being weird in America is kind of normal. It’s a very weird place. A lot of Americans belong to cults or odd religious sects, practice alternative medicine, participate in strange fandoms, wild fads, and peculiar enthusiasms”

https://johnganz.substack.com/p/everyone-in-america-is-totally-insane

This is a great article. All humans are weird but Americans are the weirdest.

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NotebookLM: “our endeavor to reimagine what notetaking software might look like if you designed it from scratch knowing that you would have a powerful language model at its core”

https://blog.google/technology/ai/notebooklm-google-ai/

Google so will be abandoned in 6m and killed in 3 years. Remember Charlie Brown.

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Climate change and insurance: "These events are no longer just short-term blips in a stable set of physical relationships, but rather are becoming a fundamental reordering of the variables. What was thought to be risk is emerging as uncertainty. Even the

https://www.twincities.com/2023/07/16/real-world-economics-changing-climate-pressures-insurers/

Core economics principal: risk can be insured, uncertainty cannot.

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Sci-Hub: breaking academic paywalls.

https://sci-hub.live/

The state of access to medical journals has broken me. I've added Sci-Hub to my core bookmarks.

#jgshare

Britain's NHS goes from bad to worse.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/16/world/europe/uk-nhs-crisis.html

The article describes neither cause nor fix; Canada and the US have less severe but similar issues. I think it's a combination of demographics, Baumol's Cost Disease, the complexity of modern medicine, and the failure of medical informatics to deliver on its promises.

#jgshare

Python data analysis with Code Interpreter

https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/what-ai-can-do-with-a-toolbox-getting

“It allows the AI to do math (very complex math) and do more accurate work with words (like actually counting words in a paragraph), since it can write Python code to address the natural weaknesses of Large Language Models in math and language.”

#jgshare

Fireflies

https://xkcd.com/2802/

XKCD really likes fireflies.

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How to Use AI to Do Useful Stuff

https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/how-to-use-ai-to-do-stuff-an-opinionated

“I have been putting together a Getting Started Guide to AI for my students (and interested readers) every few months, and each time, it requires major modifications. The last couple of months have been particularly insane.”

#jgshare

Pandemic: “22 percent increase in teenage girls who visited emergency rooms with a mental health emergency”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/12/health/teen-girls-depression-suicide.html

But 9% drop! in boys. Often suicidal ideation.

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Robert Reich on heightism - the prejudice against the short.

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/why-im-so-short

He has multiple epiphyseal dysplasia. Great essay.

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Claude.ai

https://claude.ai/

“Anthropic's new Claude 2 model is available to use online, and it has a 100k token context window and the ability to upload files to it”

#jgshare

Why Threads chose ActivityPub: “With ActivityPub, the server manages your identity and data”

https://thenewstack.io/threads-adopting-activitypub-makes-sense-but-wont-be-easy/

A great explainer.

#jgshare

Anthropic: “Some of us think that A.G.I. — in the sense of systems that are genuinely as capable as a college-educated person — are maybe five to 10 years away.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/11/technology/anthropic-ai-claude-chatbot.html

I used to think 2080. By which time I’d be long dead. I hope this turns out like autonomous vehicles or nuclear fusion; always 5y away.

Caveat: Anthropic has an effective altruism heritage.

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“A former Russian submarine commander, Stanislav Rzhitsky, who had been serving as the deputy director of the southern city of Krasnodar’s mobilization office, was found shot there early this week.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/12/world/europe/sergei-surovikin-russian-general-missing.html

Putin’s purge is underway.

#jgshare

Lost learning during COVID: “a trained tutor with one to four students, at least three times a week, for a full year — can produce gains equivalent to about four months of learning”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/11/us/reading-math-test-scores-education-nwea.html

Remote learning failed for many. Probably most.

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Erdogan’s Flips on Sweden and NATO. Biden wins another one.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/11/world/europe/erdogan-sweden-nato-allies.html

Maybe Biden is good at his job.

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COVID deer: “one-third had antibodies to the coronavirus and 12 percent were actively infected”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/11/health/coronavirus-deer-zoonotic.html

We were never going to contain COVID.

#jgshare

Scalzi ranks social media: Bluesky then Mastodon then Threads.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2023/07/10/thoughts-on-social-media-and-me-mid-july-2023/

Bluesky irritates me because I don’t rank enough to be invited. Like most of us he notes Mastodon’s culture and technology challenges.

#jgshare