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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 […]

2 months ago 48 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 […]

3 months ago 64 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 […]

5 months ago 46 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 39 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 37 votes

More in startups

The U.S. Led the World in Science and Technology and Just Gave It Up

Prior to WWII the U.S was a distant second in science and engineering. By the time the war was over, U.S. science and engineering had blown past the British, and led the world for 85 years. With the cutbacks of U.S. government support and the Chinese investing heavily for the last three decades to surpass […]

2 hours ago 2 votes
Tariffs: Another American act of intentional self-harm

As Adam Smith said, "there is a great deal of ruin in a nation."

8 hours ago 1 votes
After U.S. failure, Vietnam’s EV leader turns to markets dominated by Tesla and BYD

VinFast follows its Vietnam playbook in Asia and targets the luxury market in the Gulf.

yesterday 2 votes
If you're in Tokyo, come join my hanami this Saturday!

Not an actual blog post, just an invitation.

2 days ago 2 votes
This is how China skirts U.S. chip bans

Chinese tech companies use smugglers, loopholes, and innovation to work around U.S. chip restrictions

2 days ago 3 votes