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William Cho The standard narrative on COVID and the climate is: People worked from home, cancelled travel plans, cut down overall consumption, and greenhouse gas emissions fell drastically. It’s great for the environment! Let’s keep it up! With apologies to H. L. Mencken, I believe that narrative is neat, plausible, and wrong. To be fair, […]
over a year ago

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More from essay – snarfed.org

Interactive navigation in embedding space

tdjgordon, Pixabay Discussed a fascinating idea for a foundation model tool at lunch today: interactive navigation in embedding space. Right now, you prompt most generative models with human language. That works, but it’s imprecise and coarse. If you’re generating an image of an outside scene, and you want the sunlight ever so slightly brighter, you […]

5 months ago 66 votes
Tech pace layers

I’ve been a fan of Stewart Brand‘s Pace Layering for decades now. Really great framework for thinking about how different ecosystems and emergent forces interact. I’ve been thinking about a tech version of it for the better part of a year, and I finally took advantage of the holiday break to bang out a rough […]

6 months ago 81 votes
Possible futures for Bridgy Fed

Tomorrowland / Walt Disney People regularly ask me whether Bridgy Fed is ready to scale and support more users. It’s a technical question, but their underlying motivation is usually broader: they believe in the social web, and the fediverse(s), and they want them to connect everyone who’s willing, across instances and networks and protocols. Right […]

8 months ago 68 votes
Sleep is so weird

Ian Dyball Our bodies are designed such that we need to lose consciousness, entirely, for a full third of every day. This is evidently necessary for some kind of regular brain maintenance, maybe forming long term memories, who knows what else. If we don’t sleep, we quickly become groggy and non-functional. Really? Evolutionarily, this is […]

a year ago 51 votes
Moderate people, not code

Dixit / Marie Cardouat The scope of the fediverse has been hotly debated recently. Are we a big fedi? Or a small fedi? Are instances just nodes? Or networked communities? Which Camp of Mastodon are we in? How far should our replies travel? How about our blog posts and Bluesky skeets? Should we welcome Threads? […]

a year ago 50 votes

More in startups

Brazil wants to be a sustainable data center hub. Environmentalists are skeptical

The country recently announced its national data center policy, despite worries that new investments will wreak havoc on the land.

18 hours ago 2 votes
We can't afford to keep cutting taxes for the rich

Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" is an advanced stage of a disease that took hold long ago.

2 days ago 3 votes
Why Investors Don’t Care About Your Business

Founders with great businesses are often frustrated that they can’t raise money. Here’s why. I’ve been having coffee with lots of frustrated founders (my students and others) bemoaning most VCs won’t even meet with them unless they have AI in their fundraising pitch. And the AI startups they see are getting valuations that appear nonsensical. […]

3 days ago 7 votes
The hidden labor that makes AI work

Alex Hanna and Emily M. Bender examine the hype behind artificial intelligence in their new book, The AI Con. Below is an excerpt on the invisible labor behind some AI tools.

3 days ago 3 votes
Jewish Americans are feeling unsettled

Increasingly squeezed between the new leftism and the new rightism.

3 days ago 3 votes