Links for June 21, 2023
Today's post
A vegan tries vat-grown lard: our planet's salvation or an unnatural abomination?
Assorted Internet/data gripes
- LLMs are good at playing you. (lcamtuf's thing / Substack)
The bottom line is that the models don't have a robust model of truth; they have an RLHF-imposed model of who to parrot and who to ignore. You and I are in that latter bin, which makes the bots sound smart when we're trying to bait them with outright lies.
The US Is Openly Stockpiling Dirt on All Its Citizens: A newly declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence reveals that the federal government is buying troves of data about Americans. (Dell Cameron / Wired)
Reddit's decline as the end of the useful internet (Alex Pareene / Defector)
A storefront for robots: The SEO arms race has left Google and the web drowning in garbage text, with customers and businesses flailing to find each other. (Mia Sato / The Verge)
Cities are for people, not cars
Carmageddon does a no show, again (why the collapse of I-95 in Philly actually reduced traffic) (Joe Cortright / CityCommentary)
The Dumbest Excuse for Bad Cities (The excuse being "but the US is too big!!") (Not Just Bikes / YouTube)
This is Some Preliminary Thoughts, Bennett McIntosh's blog. You can sign up for email updates here, or unsubscribe here.