2023-10-16
United Airlines Holdings Inc. would save $80 million a year if the average passenger weight falls by 10 pounds, Sheila Kahyaoglu, a Jefferies Financial analyst, estimated in a report Friday.
From Matt Levine's newsletter last week.
2023-09-30
In 2022, I was finally stable enough to start an herb garden with my daughter. We started too late in the year to do anything ambitious and basically everything we planted died, except for a sage plant that bravely pushed through the winter.
In 2023, we were more organized. We did tomatoes, basil, oregano, rosemary, lavender, hyssop, and some wildflowers.
Our wildflowers did better than anything else. We actually spilled the seeds all in one spot then had a rain storm scatter them wildly and still they thrived more than anything else. Our front yard has been full of bumblebees and hummingbirds all year. Next year, we're going to forgo the lavender and hyssop, at least in the front patch where we don't get enough sun, and focus entirely on wildflowers.
The basil and tomato plant did well also. Our tomato plant would've probably produced 10-20 tomatoes except it took me too long to realize that the blackish spots I was seeing on it were a big deal. Next year, I'll be using neem oil on it from the beginning of the season.
The hardest thing about gardening is that it requires so much feel. I can't tell you how many times I looked up something happening with a plant to find that it could be a symptom of over watering or under watering... and then I had to try and deduce which is might be. Still, it gets easier with practice.
When I think ahead to next year, I think we'll most likely do: * One or two tomato plants in our raised garden * Basil in the pot I used for the tomato this year; potentially a second pot for basil * Lots more wildflowers in front of the house * I'll keep my trusty sage plant and the oregano, assuming they make it through the winter * I'll skip the rosemary (I don't use that much of it anyway), lavender and hyssop
2023-09-22
Okay here's a ridiculous (but true) take: word processing is bad.
— Christian Keil (@pronounced_kyle) September 22, 2023
Before it, document length was bounded by the human capacity to copy long-form text.
After word processing, the tax & legal codes grew without check. And became incomprehensible to anyone but career experts. pic.twitter.com/tZMEBlQb22
Speculative, but interesting. A form of the medium is the message.
2023-09-20
I did my best with this book, but I couldn't make it through.
A Slave's Cause by Manisha Sinha is a history of the abolition movement.
I picked it because I was interested in understanding how slavery came to be abolished.. I am still interested in this topic, but one of my goals for the year is to be more willing to put away books that aren't holding my interest, so that's what I'm doing for now. This says more about me as a reader than it does about the author and the book. I'm sure I was not her target reader!
The book is fantastically researched. It seems like the author found every single person in the historical record that opposed slavery and told their story. There are so many people who gave so much to the cause.
My biggest takeaways from the portion of the book I read are:
Perhaps I'll revisit this one in the future and if there is book written for more of a general audience that you know of, let me know as I'd happily start there.
2023-09-18
Ethan Mollick's fantastic One Useful Thing newsletter has an overview of a recent paper he did studying the impact of AI tools on BCG consultants.
One observation in particular stood out to me:
We also found something else interesting, an effect that is increasingly apparent in other studies of AI: it works as a skill leveler. The consultants who scored the worst when we assessed them at the start of the experiment had the biggest jump in their performance, 43%, when they got to use AI. The top consultants still got a boost, but less of one. Looking at these results, I do not think enough people are considering what it means when a technology raises all workers to the top tiers of performance. It may be like how it used to matter whether miners were good or bad at digging through rock… until the steam shovel was invented and now differences in digging ability do not matter anymore. AI is not quite at that level of change, but skill levelling is going to have a big impact.
This data is invaluable, but I think the framing of it (through no fault of the author's) obscures how individuals should be using LLMs. From the perspective of studying the impact of LLMs on a population of BCG consultants, there are low performing consultants and high performing consultants. But as individuals, we are a mix of low performers and high performers depending on the task.
Therefore the implication is that we should be much less afraid of our weaknesses, especially in areas that are complementary to our strengths. The quality (skill?) of being willing to learn by doing is going to be increasingly important, since the LLM will help cover the flaws. Then the way to maximize one's impact is to pick projects where you have a relative strength (beyond the jagged frontier of AI, in Ethan's framing) and pair it with tasks where the LLM can provide complementary, replacement level support.
I can't claim to have mastered this, but over the past 6 months, I've experienced this first hand across a number of domains: programming and in my day job, about material science, chemistry, and technical writing about cosmetics.
My friend Kenneth quipped recently: "What will you do with infinite junior software engineers?", but it's even broader than that. You have infinite access to baseline expertise in basically anything. What will you do with it?