Official BBO Hijacked Thread Thread

[y66]

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/magazine/butter-bean-salad-recipe.html?campaign_id=58&emc=edit_ck_20220411&instance_id=58187&nl=cooking&regi_id=59211987&segment_id=88127&te=1&user_id=2d8b72dd84a9ff194896ed87b2d9c72a

 

I will start my first column on the pages of this magazine with an uncomfortable confession: I eat everything. I am greedy. I love to eat, so yes, I eat everything. Not literally. I won’t consume any food, obviously not; but there isn’t a kind of dish that I don’t like by definition. I eat the high end and the low end and anything in between. My saving grace, I suppose, is that at least within each category of foods, I can tell a fine example from a not-so-good one. A drawer in my home kitchen, unashamedly packed full of my top brands of instant noodles, is proof.

 

I got this ability to be discerning but not snobbish from my father, who once famously confessed to me that he actually liked hospital food. “Just as long as it is well prepared,” he qualified, as he greedily stuck a spoon into a bowl of fluorescent green jelly rejected by my mother, who was recovering in the hospital from a knee operation. There was a little bit of irony there and some cheeky taunting of my mother, which he loved doing, but there was also a universal truth: Even food that’s designed to be bland, inoffensive and easy to digest and to mass-produce can be good, or bad, depending on how much thought and consideration goes into its making.

 

Having clearly inherited my father’s gluttonous acceptance of all types of food, I often have to resort to others’ strong opinions for some robust arguments. On the emotive subject of white foods, for example, I quote two close friends who sit on opposite sides of the dispute. One wouldn’t touch anything that’s pale, runny and smooth. Mashed potatoes, white sauce, anything custardy — all are off the table. My other friend would, if he could, live on a diet of neat mayonnaise and pouring cream. I would happily share a meal with either.

 

Then there’s the question of temperature. Here I often think of my late mother-​in-law, who had unyielding culinary views. She wouldn’t serve anything that wasn’t magma-level hot. “It’s no good if it’s not piping hot,” she would say, before pouring her smoldering soup into equally scorching bowls. I never listened to her and always burned my mouth. How could anything be so hot? As I am someone who makes a living by selling cold food in my London delis, it’s a miracle that she and I were even on speaking terms.

 

More seriously, though, the issue of hot versus cold does seem to be a dividing line between what is perceived as serious and complex cooking, on the one hand, and quick-and-easy meals on the other. Just hearing the word “salad” — the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of cold food — sends you down the path of a picnic or a simple side dish, something thrown together without much consideration or fuss. Think potato salad, coleslaw or a bowl of dressed leaves.

 

The layering of flavors, textures and colors is what our chefs do every day to create their salads.

Yet this couldn’t be further from the truth. For me, a truly marvelous dish can come at any temperature. In my London delis, we have food on display throughout the day. Most of it is vegetables and legumes cooked and dressed in a multitude of ways; all are affectionately referred to as salads. There’s a real art to making these dishes stay fresh and seductive and tasting like a million dollars even after a couple of hours.

 

The yogurty butter beans here, spread out on a plate like an artist’s canvas, dotted with feta and a vibrant range of green hues — peas spiked with herbs and a sprinkle of pistachio dukkah, the spice mix made with seeds and nuts — are a vivid illustration of the power of one of these salads. With zero technical skills required and very little effort, this dish can be prepared in advance and put together when you need it. It could also sit around for a few hours and stay delicious and fresh. And it’s no less complex or enticing or satisfying than any warm dish.

 

The layering of flavors, textures and colors using an arsenal of delicious condiments — seed and spice mixes, pickles and flavored oil, crunchy-nutty sprinkly things, confit garlic, dried tomatoes, preserved lemon and many more — is what our chefs do every day to create their salads.

 

The way in which these condiments and dishes come about is something I am particularly proud of, because recipe creation in our company is pretty democratic. Many people have a go at it, and everyone is welcome to comment. A great example of this happens four times a year, for every change of season, when the deli chefs get together in our test kitchen to discuss the new menu and try some ideas. In these meetings, I observe with joy, and a bit of fatherly pride, how they all bring out their jars of condiments, dressings and sauces and build their beautiful salads in big bowls and on platters. Once the dishes are patiently put together, we all taste and comment. The knowledge and skills that go into making those dishes have all the trappings of serious restaurant dishes but none of the fuss and last-minute cooking angst.

 

In the coming months, I would like to explore and share some ideas that started off in one of our kitchens and can easily migrate to yours. Regardless of their temperature, or their color, or whether you would want to serve them at your next fancy dinner party or a last-minute, low-key picnic, they all hold good, practical lessons for making food delicious — unapologetically so.

[y66]

DALL-E, the Metaverse, and Zero Marginal Content

 

Last week OpenAI released DALL-E 2, which produces (or edits) images based on textual prompts; this Twitter thread from @BecomingCritter has a whole host of example output, including Teddy bears working on new AI research on the moon in the 1980s.

 

OpenAI has a video describing DALL-E on its website.

 

... The Internet has had two effects: the first is to bring the marginal cost of consumption down to zero. Even with the printing press you still needed to print a physical object and distribute it, and that costs money; meanwhile it costs effectively nothing to send this post to anyone in the world who is interested. This has completely upended the publishing industry and destroyed the power of gatekeepers.

 

The other impact, though, has been on the production side; I wrote about TikTok in Mistakes and Memes:

 

That phrase, “Facebook is compelling for the content it surfaces, regardless of who surfaces it”, is oh-so-close to describing TikTok; the error is that the latter is compelling for the content it surfaces, regardless of who creates it…To put it another way, I was too focused on demand — the key to Aggregation Theory — and didn’t think deeply enough about the evolution of supply. User-generated content didn’t have to be simply pictures of pets and political rants from people in one’s network; it could be the foundation of a new kind of network, where the payoff from Metcalfe’s Law is not the number of connections available to any one node, but rather the number of inputs into a customized feed.

 

Machine learning generated content is just the next step beyond TikTok: instead of pulling content from anywhere on the network, GPT and DALL-E and other similar models generate new content from content, at zero marginal cost. This is how the economics of the metaverse will ultimately make sense: virtual worlds needs virtual content created at virtually zero cost, fully customizable to the individual.

 

Of course there are many other issues raised by DALL-E, many of them philosophical in nature; there has already been a lot of discussion of that over the last week, and there should be a lot more. Still, the economic implications matter as well, and after last week’s announcement the future of the Internet is closer, and weirder, than ever.

[y66]

Q: What do trolls eat?

 

A: There is no definitive answer to this question, as trolls are fictional creatures with no set diet. However, some popular interpretations of trolls depict them as eating rocks or dirt, while others show them as eating small animals or even humans.

 

https://beta.openai.com/docs/guides/answers

Q: What is an internet troll?

 

A: An internet troll is someone who deliberately posts inflammatory, offensive, or provocative comments in an online community for the purpose of provoking an emotional reaction or disrupting normal on-topic discussion.

Q: What do internet trolls eat?

 

A: Internet trolls eat other internet trolls.

[y66]

From Tyler Cowen's April 20, 2022 conversation with Thomas Piketty:

 

COWEN: If I look at France in the early 1960s, as you know, the rate of finishing or even starting higher education is extremely low, but France basically is doing fine. Do you view that as evidence for the view that it’s really the continuity of cultural capital that matters and not so much policy?

 

PIKETTY: No, because there’s been a huge educational expansion since then. Between 1950 and 1990 and until today, educational expansion in France — and throughout Europe and in most of the world — has been considerable. It is true, in the 1950s, France — but to a large extent, Western Europe — is lagging behind the US in terms of educational achievement. To me, it’s clear that the key reason why the US has been an economic leader at the world level for most of the 20th century is because it was an educational leader.

 

In the 1950s, as you know very well, you have 90 percent of a generation going to high school in the US, whereas in France or in Germany, it’s 20 percent to 30 percent of a generation. You need to wait until the 1980s or ’90s to reach the same kind of 90 percent of growth going to high school and to have universal access to it.

 

It was the same also in the 19th century. The US reached 90 percent primary school attendance rate almost a century before Europe, or at least half a century or two-thirds of a century before Europe. I think that was a key explanation why also economic productivity was so much higher in the United States.

 

I think policy may be a bit different. Especially after World War II, there was an enormous educational push, not only in France and Germany but also, of course, in Japan. Then other countries in Asia also followed this push, and this has completely transformed the economic geography and the geography of productivity. And the huge advantage the US had in the middle of the 20th century, to a large extent, has disappeared today. I think policies, institutions played a major role in these dynamics with specific political and social history in the different countries.

 

Of course, politics is also the product of the belief system and the perceptions that families have about education, about the culture of education. So all these different dimensions have to be studied together, obviously.

COWEN: If I visit every major country in Europe, what I observe is the highest living standard is arguably in Switzerland — Norway and Luxembourg aside. Switzerland has one of the smallest governments, and they attempt relatively little redistribution. What is your understanding of Switzerland? What if someone said, “Well, Europe should try to be more like Switzerland. They’re doing great.” Why is that wrong?

 

PIKETTY: Oh, Switzerland. It’s a very small country, so it’s about the size. . . . Actually, it’s smaller than Île-de-France, which is a Paris region. Now, if you were to make a separate country out of Île-de-France, GDP per capita, I think, would actually be higher than Switzerland. Of course, you can take a wealthy region in your country and say, “Okay, I don’t want to share anything with the rest of the country. I’m going to keep my tax revenue for me. I’m going to be a tax haven based on bank secrecy.” That’s going to make you 10 percent or 20 percent richer.

COWEN: If I look at nominal income data for the US or, for that matter, Switzerland, those two countries measure as being wealthier than either France or Germany. Do you think citizens in US and Switzerland are happier than the French and Germans?

 

PIKETTY: If you’re interested in welfare, you need to look at productivity. That’s the first thing. You need to look at GDP per hours of work or income per hours of work. You probably know very well, if you look at OECD data or Bureau of Labor Statistics series in the US — which are almost similar for Eurostat series — everywhere you go to, you will see the GDP per hours of work is virtually the same in US, Germany, France. It’s a few percent different. I’m sure you know these things.

 

COWEN: Sure. Of course.

 

PIKETTY: In terms of welfare, of course, as economists, you know what matters is productivity, not income per se because if you have a higher income just because you work longer hours, the effect on welfare is ambiguous. It depends how you value leisure versus work, et cetera. Presumably, European countries decided to have more vacation and a bigger reduction of working times than the US in the 20th century.

 

It was not the case a century ago. In the early 20th century, working hours were actually shorter in the US than Europe, partly because productivity was higher, so you can afford working less. Anyway, today and in the past century, the decline in working hours has been bigger in Germany and France. Presumably, this was a choice. This was a complicated political process, but nobody in Germany or France today is proposing to divide by two the number of weeks of vacation and go to the US federal law in that respect.

 

In terms of welfare, my own view, as you can imagine, is that when you multiply your productivity by 10 over the past century, it actually makes sense to take some of this increase in productivity to have more vacation, to spend more time with your children and family, to spend more time traveling around the world.

 

For me, like for many Europeans, the idea of taking only two weeks’ vacation over the summer when you are so rich looks like one of the most stupid things you can do in life. But look, different people can make different choices, of course, about this.

COWEN: If the relationship between wealth and happiness is so diffuse, and I would agree it may be — so I’m happier than some billionaires I know — why worry so much about wealth inequality? Why not focus on inequality of well-being, which could be something quite different?

 

PIKETTY: Oh, yes. Ultimately, what I care about is access to fundamental goods like education, health, participation in the political life, participation in economic life. Ultimately, this is what I care about. Income and wealth per se are just a mechanism and tools and ways to go in this direction. But in the end, what’s really important for me is to have the highest possible opportunities and rights to access fundamental goods for everybody. This is all that matters.

[y66]

From Building games and apps entirely through natural language using OpenAI’s code-davinci model by Andrew Mayne

 

Will this replace programming?

 

The current model can make programming a lot easier – but we’re not quite at the point where we need to throw out our programming books. If you look at these prompts you’ll see I’m often using programming conventions and talking about arrays and divs, etc. But if you stand back and look at the progress being made in AI code generation it’s obvious things are moving very quickly. However, I think you’re always going to want humans who understand code somewhere in the loop for quality control and making sure the output is aligned with our goals.

[y66]

The skill of surgeons varies tremendously, with bottom quartile surgeons having over 4x as many complications as the best surgeons in the same hospital. And surgeons are keenly aware of who is good & who is bad - their rankings of others are very accurate. https://nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1300625

[y66]

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/28/opinion/culture/children-parenting-good-decisions.html?campaign_id=39&emc=edit_ty_20220502&instance_id=60187&nl=opinion-today&regi_id=59211987&segment_id=91019&te=1&user_id=2d8b72dd84a9ff194896ed87b2d9c72a

 

In the middle of a recent Thursday dinner, my 13-year-old daughter, Sasha, had a question for my wife and me: Can I skip school tomorrow?

 

This seemed pretty understandable to me. Middle-schoolers in New York City — and elsewhere — have had it rough the last few years, caught between the pandemic, their fast-changing bodies and emotions, and their parents’ unchanging ambitions and expectations. As eighth grade ambles to a close, Sasha has handled those pressures well. I could see why she would want a break.

 

Still, obviously, the answer was no. You can’t skip school, my wife, Jean, and I told her. You just can’t. Not allowed. Nope!

 

But I offered Sasha a bit of unsolicited advice, too: Next time you want to skip school, don’t tell your parents. Just go. Browse vintage stores, eat your favorite snack (onigiri), lie on your back in Prospect Park and stare at the clouds. Isn’t that the point of skipping school, after all? To sneak around, to steal time and space back from the arbitrary system that enfolds you? To hell with permission! That’s being a teenager — carving out a private life for yourself under the noses of the authority figures who surround you.

[y66]

[y66]

Fun read: How Rivian’s CEO became the anti-Elon (pay walled except to first 3 readers)

[y66]

In a message to TerraUSD stablecoin owners:

 

I understand the last 72 hours have been extremely tough on all of you - know that I am resolved to work with every one of you to weather this crisis, and we will build our way out of this.

Everyone knows that these algorithmic stablecoins aren’t safe. They have these downside dynamics.

[kenberg]

Fun read: How Rivian's CEO became the anti-Elon (pay walled except to first 3 readers)

 

That is one terrific article/interview/story. I would have gobbled it up when I was 13 and I enjoyed it today. Which perhaps says something about my own need to mature, or maybe it speaks to what I think should be in school libraries, or maybe, my preference, it's just an excellent article.

[Winstonm]

No Hole in My Head

[y66]

Who is Élisabeth Borne?

[Cyberyeti]

No Hole in My Head

 

A phrase nobody in my family is currently using atm despite some of the obvious comic potential. My father is currently recovering from having a benign brain tumour removed.

[y66]

Missoula’s Most In-Demand Kitchen Is Run by Refugees

[y66]

From remote working to online shopping, Covid-19 has been a great accelerator of pre-existing trends. One phenomenon it has supercharged is our love-hate relationship with statistics, data and algorithms. The threat of the pandemic has made us crave data: millions pore over R numbers; the technicalities of vaccine trials and testing accuracy, once of interest only to biostatisticians, are front-page news.

 

But Covid-19 has also cranked up our latent data-phobia. Can we trust the statistics our governments are publishing about the virus? Might track-and-trace apps unacceptably compromise our privacy? Covid even gave the UK its first algorithmic political scandal, as the grades of school leavers unable to sit exams due to lockdown were downgraded by what the prime minister described as a “mutant algorithm”.

 

In How to Make the World Add Up, Tim Harford, the FT’s Undercover Economist, offers us 10 rules for how to think effectively about numbers and data in a world where statistics matter more than ever. His tips are refreshingly human, and grounded as much in common sense as quantitative wizardry.

 

Rule One is “search your feelings” — because our emotional biases often get in the way of looking sensibly at situations, even if our maths are flawless. Rule Seven advises us to demand openness when dealing with algorithms, without which their limitations can often be hidden. Such advice would certainly have helped avoid the UK’s exam grading fiasco, which, as the Royal Statistical Society observed at the time, was less a case of a mutant algorithm and more to do with a lack of transparency.

 

Statistical integrity has an important role to play in the book, with an eloquent plea for governments to invest in honest statistics. This feels particularly urgent at a time when the US government is attempting to intervene in the running of the national census for transparently political motives.

 

But Harford is at pains to point out that responsible statistical practice is about more than keeping the dodgy numbers out. He explicitly contrasts his book with Darrell Huff’s classic How to Lie with Statistics — said to be the best-selling statistics book ever, published in 1954 and still in print. For Huff, statistics were a cute trick, mainly useful for politicians and advertisers to pull the wool over people’s eyes. Harford takes a more positive view: the right statistics can be a force for good, and we should delight in their usefulness.

 

The rules are wise and useful, and should be taken to heart by anyone who deals with numbers and data. But what makes this book such a delight are two other, more unexpected qualities.

 

Our emotional biases often get in the way of looking sensibly at situations, even if our maths are flawless

 

The first is Harford’s entertaining sense of mischief, which lends a twist to several of the stories in the book. We learn that Huff cashed in on his publishing fame with an inglorious second career as a tobacco lobbyist, turning his cool scepticism into a weapon to try to discredit the well-evidenced case that smoking causes cancer. During a fascinating discussion of the replication crisis in psychological research — a scandal in which many famous findings were found to be the result of random chance, combined with questionable research design — Harford gently notes that these findings form the backbone of more than a few non-fiction blockbusters (books that might well grace the reader’s own shelves).

 

The book’s other distinctive virtue is a beguiling sense of curiosity that manifests itself in the range of captivating anecdotes. We learn about everything from the psychology of passing off a fake Vermeer (lesson: it’s easiest to be fooled if you want to believe the lie) to the investment strategies of Irving Fisher and John Maynard Keynes (flexibility is good, and sometimes you learn this by being wrong).

 

Just as important is the book’s appreciation of curiosity for its own sake — in Orson Welles’s words, “once people are interested, they can understand anything in the world”.

 

As such, How to Make the World Add Up brings out an important paradox of statistics as a discipline. We tend to think of statistics as a practical subject, helping us analyse problems, from how to identify effective vaccines to how to contain viral outbreaks. Like mechanical engineering or software development, it has clear worldly benefits, and obvious economic returns. But Harford’s book also highlights the conceptual importance of statistics. It offers us a way of thinking seriously about uncertainty, providing a framework for how we understand the world, and training ourselves not to be deceived.

 

How to Make the World Add Up: Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers, by Tim Harford, The Bridge Street Press, RRP£20, 352 pages

[y66]

It's peak strawberry week here in Virginia. If you roast them and store them in the fridge, you can enjoy them for a month or two. Ha! I highly recommend this roasting technique: https://food52.com/recipes/76799-michelle-polzine-s-slow-roasted-strawberries. You can't beat fresh, sweet strawberries but this comes pretty close.

[y66]

Steph Curry on fire.

[y66]

Fun read: John McPhee interview

[y66]

We already have a town of stranded people, the last thing you want is a town of stranded people with no coffee in the morning,

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/us/yellowstone-rain-flooding.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20220615&instance_id=64091&nl=the-morning&regi_id=59211987&segment_id=95173&te=1&user_id=2d8b72dd84a9ff194896ed87b2d9c72a

[thepossum]

Ethan Buchman, a founder of Cosmos, a hub for blockchains said:

 

Everyone knows that these algorithmic stablecoins aren’t safe. They have these downside dynamics.

 

That's code for scams is it? I have limited sympathy though. My antisocial side is losing patience with people being scammed after years of warnings

[thepossum]

Stian Westlake, chief executive of the Royal Statistical Society, in October 2020 said:

<long review of a stats book>

 

Is everything here code?

 

I try to avoid ad hominem attacks on arguments but I checked the WebSite of Nesta which is supposedly about social benefit but apppears to be more about tech sales. Could say the same about many "trusted" institutions (not naming names). Also scary when a mental health conference or pharmacology conference (I found) is all about apps and AI (just an interesting aside - to me at least)

 

I think being a consultant is much easier these days. (Sorry we can't help you but) We have an algorithm and app that can help

 

I do appreciate the sad reality of attracting the ignorant market with bells and whistles but it used to be intellectual pursuits, complex ideas and debates that attracted high quality people and money. We can't help you because of these complex issues to be discussed. Rather than we can help you with this box of tricks. (EDIT I know that claim is not strictly true - read the history books if anyone remembers history)

[y66]

From Tyler Cowen's conversation with Marc Andreessen:

 

COWEN: What’s the main problem that needs to be solved by tech for hybrid meetings or hybrid workplaces to really succeed over the longer run?

 

ANDREESSEN: Yes I’m not convinced . . . Look, in the long, long run . . . I’ll pick a new science fiction. The movie Kingsman, which is a funny spy movie spoof — they have the conference room scenes, where all the British agents are meeting around the conference table, and it turns out, they’re all virtual. They’re all wearing their augmented reality glasses, and so, they’re all seeing holograms of each other.

 

There are going to be technological approaches — virtual reality, augmented reality — in the future that give you basically the recreation of a physical meeting environment. They already exist. These things already exist. Our friend Balaji [srinivasan] is teaching courses right now in VR in a virtual classroom. These technologies do already exist. That will happen. I think that will be a big deal.

 

Having said that, I don’t think that’s necessarily the goal. I don’t think that a hybrid meeting is necessarily an equilibrium, or at least a primary equilibrium. I’m not sure if it’s something that you need to center in on. The reason I say that is because, one, it’s reductive, or it’s looking backwards, which is to say, we used to have in-person meetings, and now we have some people remote, so now we need hybrid meetings. It’s working backwards from that.

 

Well, there’s another way to think about that, which is, actually, maybe we shouldn’t try to have hybrid meetings. Maybe, in fact, hybrid meetings are the exact wrong idea. Maybe they’re the wrong idea because, maybe, instead of combining the best elements of being local and being remote, maybe they combine the worst elements of being local and being remote.

 

And maybe instead, what we want to do is shift more to the edges, and we want to have — number one, we want to have communication systems and management systems that are really built for remote work, first and primarily. And we have some of those, and some of those now work really well. Then maybe, when we get people together, we don’t want to have meetings. Maybe we want to have very immersive, very social, very human bonding — a much more intense level of actual human interaction and relationship building than you have in a meeting.

 

Take a step back on this. The office is an artifact of the technology of a time and place. I mentioned the Second Industrial Revolution. The office is a derivation of the factory. There was the factory and the idea of mass production, and then there was the idea of all the time-and-motion studies and all these guys who did that. And out of that, you go back, look at the history — you’ve got schools, you’ve got jails as you see them today, and then you’ve got offices. It’s this idea that you have to bring people together in this highly orchestrated, mechanistic, mass way.

 

Empires — fun historical fact: The Roman Empire was not run out of offices. They ran the world, yet there was no office. There was no office building. The Roman aristocrats worked out of their homes, and then they went to the Senate, and then [laughs] they went to their country house. There was no office building for administering the Roman Empire. I don’t know about the British Empire. I’m guessing they probably didn’t have a lot of offices. They maybe had a couple of offices in London, but they probably didn’t have a lot of offices either.

And he's a Deadwood fan!

[Winstonm]

It appears I have been wrong-the capitol of Texas is Moscow:

 

 

 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republicans in Texas formally rejected President Joe Biden's election in 2020 as illegitimate and voted in a state-wide convention that wrapped up this weekend on a party platform that calls homosexuality an "abnormal lifestyle choice."

 

The party's embrace of unfounded electoral fraud allegations in a bedrock Republican state came as a bipartisan congressional committee seeks to definitively and publicly debunk the false idea that Biden did not win the election.

 

Biden received 7 million more votes than rival Donald Trump. Biden also received 306 votes from the Electoral College, more than the 270 needed to win.

 

 

[y66]

Jeff Overs BBC