Links


AI and the American Smile

medium.com

This confrontation with the culture clash of smiling for an Eastern European immigrant in America hits close to home. Which is why seeing the relentless parade of toothy, ahistorical, quintessentially American, “cheese” smiles plastered on the faces of every civilization in the world across time and space was immediately jarring. It was as if the AI had cast 21st century Americans to put on different costumes and play the various cultures of the world. Which, of course, it had.

Collections: On ChatGPT

acoup.blog

ChatGPT does not sit atop a great library it can peer through at will; it has read every book in the library once and distilled the statistical relationships between the words in that library and then burned the library.

Supersaturated Solutions - Working with Sodium Acetate

youtube.com

In this video, Mr. Krug shows how to make a supersaturated solution of sodium acetate and what these interesting solutions can do.

Jessica acquired an interesting heating pack based on this process. You flex a small steel disc, which is enough stress on the fluid to knock molecules out of suspension, beginning a chain reaction.

Competition

macwright.com

There are answers to those questions, but does it matter? The reality is that most people don’t have the time or need to understand the differences between different companies and products. If the first thing they try works, then great - even if it isn’t the perfect, most efficient way to do it. This is, after all, what advertising is: a way of telling people that some product is the thing that they need.

Americans Have Mostly Forgotten the Iraq War. I Haven’t.

nytimes.com

I spent almost a decade covering Iraq, first arriving in 2002 when the country was still under Mr. Hussein. It has now been 20 years since the start of the war, with all of its shock and awe. But on this anniversary, instead of thinking about how the war began, I’ve been contemplating whether wars end for the people who lived through them.

Something I wrote at the time (February 2003):

I think that peace should be given more of a chance, and that a multi-lateral inspections process, like the one we have, should be allowed some more time. It’s like watching impatient kids who just want to jump on the war bandwagon. Yes, we may have probably given Iraq more time than they deserved already (11+ years or what have you), but that doesn’t mean that Step 2 is to annihilate the country since inspections “haven’t worked yet”. I think all this pressure on Iraq is good, however I think it has moved past the point of military pressure to have become military preparation.