Links
3 stars
The Scammer Next Door | The Dial
18-minute read
I’m not the first person to interrupt a scam artist mid-spiel to inform them that they’re wasting their time. However, while most people might hang up, block the number or even report it to the authorities, I had something else I needed to do.
So, when Rana Pratap told me I had won the lottery, I felt I really had. I finally had an opportunity to explore the empire of scams as one of its foot soldiers.
Inside the Data Centers That Train A.I. and Drain the Electrical Grid | New Yorker
13-minute read
Drive in almost any direction from almost any American city, and soon enough you’ll arrive at a data center—a giant white box rising from graded earth, flanked by generators and fenced like a prison yard. Data centers for artificial intelligence are the new American factory. Packed with computing equipment, they absorb information and emit A.I. Since the launch of ChatGPT, in 2022, they have begun to multiply at an astonishing rate. “I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time,” Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, recently said.
[...]
Energy executives such as Hanson have been bombarded by requests for more power. Data centers “are perhaps bigger, by an order of magnitude, than anything we’ve connected to the grid before,” he said. “If you think about the city of Philadelphia, its load is about one gigawatt. Now imagine adding one-gigawatt-sized data centers to the grid, and not just one, but multiples of them.”
Original link | Archive.is link
2 stars
I Tried to Toughen Up My Son. Things Didn’t Go as Planned. | New York Times
14-minute read
Our Theodore Roosevelt-themed road trip started out just the way Teddy would have wanted it: terribly.
First of all, my 8-year-old son and I nearly got sucked into the sky, because I didn’t think to check the weather before setting out from the airport and hadn’t seen that there was a tornado alert for the area. Then, after panic-driving through an insane storm at 100 miles an hour, we finally reached our destination, a hotel named for Roosevelt, which looked OK in the thumbnail on the internet but turned out to be the moldiest, stinkiest hotel I’ve ever stayed in. Early the next morning, we hit another snag, when we stopped for gas on our way to Theodore Roosevelt National Park. I let my son, Saul, take a turn pumping, and he got confused and somehow ended up absolutely dousing both of us with fuel. And so, instead of watching the rays of dawn slowly paint the Badlands gold, we spent the next three hours under the halogen flicker of the laundromat-slash-CBD-shop near our hotel, trying to get the stench off Saul’s prized Junior Ranger vest.
After two rounds of power-washing the vest with an industrial strength powder, Saul demanded a third, because the faint, lingering whiff of petroleum was driving him crazy. When I refused, he was devastated. I tried my best to be a good sport about all of this — to act like I was relishing the setbacks. The idea of embracing discomfort, after all, was a big part of why I wanted to bring Saul to the Badlands in the first place.
Original link | Archive.is link
The Movies Got Small, and So Did We | The Atlantic
9-minute read
Caitlin Flanagan:
I saw Jaws with my father in the summer of 1975, the year it came out. When we walked out of the Oaks movie theater in Berkeley, California, we were giddy, punch-drunk. It’s a perfect movie—a big, exciting American movie. From its opening minutes you live inside of it, your regular life suspended somewhere behind you. Waiting for my mother to pick us up, we noticed that we were both vaguely on guard against shark attacks, even though we were standing on Solano Avenue, where the only dangerous sea creatures were down the street in the King Tsin lobster tank. The tagline of the marketing campaign was “You’ll never go in the water again,” and my only non-Jaws thought during the movie was I am never going to the beach again.
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BRIEFLY NOTED: Further Arguments Against Jared Diamond | Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf
12-minute read
I was one-shotted in my teens by the way Guns, Germs, and Steel ✨explained everything✨ and I’ve been chasing that dragon ever since. At this point honestly half the books I’ve reviewed could probably be described as arguments against Jared Diamond. But that’s okay. I can stop any time. Just one more sweeping transdisciplinary exploration of global history. Just let me see a map of British coalfields next to a chart of GDP per capita and I promise I’ll go back to that book about esoteric writing. C’mon, bro, I won’t ever talk about the Hajnal Line again, I swear. Just let me have one more study of an under-appreciated causal factor for the differing trajectories of human societies and I’m done. I have this under control.
Four Things I Learned from Jane Goodall | Motherhood Until Yesterday
8-minute read
Jane got a lot of criticism for working with Conoco oil in the Congo to establish what is now the Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Centre. She was looking for a way to rehabilitate the dozens of chimpanzees who were taken from the wild and sold as pets, or thrown into the terrible Brazzaville zoo, where they were basically left to starve. Jane looked at the suffering animals, and she thought about the opportunity Conoco was offering, and she decided to go for it, because nobody was going to win if she played the moral purist. Of course, she got heaps of criticism for using “dirty money” and for helping Conoco “greenwash” its bad reputation. But she also saved what is now upwards of 70 suffering chimpanzees and rehabituated them to a semi-wild environment where they can live “naturally,” as they were meant to, until the end of their lives.
Keira Knightley: ‘I went mad. I just managed to hide it’ | The Times
9-minute read
She was already a huge Hollywood star at the age of 18. Keira Knightley tells Caitlin Moran how she struggled to cope with the intense scrutiny — and why she walked away from it all in her early twenties.
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Believe in Markets, Not Men (or Women) | Richard Hanania’s Newsletter
7-minute read
I agree with Andrews that “female modes of interaction” are not optimal for the pursuit of truth. What she misses is that male modes of interaction are also non-optimal and might even be worse.
This is what I think rubbed people, including me, the wrong way about the essay. Andrews took a human problem and made it into a woman problem. And as I pointed out, in the era of Trump, Putin, and Rogan, we’re living in yet another point of history when the problems with male modes of communication and thinking are on full display.
Is there anything more to be said here? There’s one more point I’d like to add, which is that questions like “what are the best ways to pursue truth” should in the main be settled not through punditry, but by markets.
Hey, Lefties! Trump Has Stolen Your Game. | New York Times
4-minute read
David Brooks:
If you want a one-sentence description of where politics is right now, here’s my nominee: We now have a group of revolutionary rightists who have no constructive ideology confronting a group of progressives who let their movement be captured by a revolutionary left-wing ideology that failed.
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The Kid Is All Right: In Defense of Picky Eating | Serious Eats
8-minute read
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a person who has never raised a picky eater knows exactly how to make other people’s children eat. Theirs is a special kind of wisdom, firm in its untested conviction, unsullied by something so banal as experience. Parents today are too accommodating, they will tell you, spoiling children by becoming their short-order cooks. Kids have too much access to junk food, anyway; give them a diet of roasted spelt and kombucha for a few weeks, and they will learn to appreciate real flavor. If children aren’t hungry enough: starve them. If they won’t try new foods: force them. After all, French children will politely eat everything served, including kidneys and bunny rabbits. If your kids don’t appreciate what you put on the table, it must be due to some moral failing on your part.
Economic ideas for Takaichi Sanae | Noahpinion
9-minute read
Fortunately, Japan is in an OK macroeconomic situation right now. Government debt, the country’s thorniest problem, is actually falling as a percent of GDP, thanks in part to higher inflation and in part to rising corporate profits and tax revenues: The deflation problem that bedeviled Japan for decades has finally been defeated. And at the same time, unemployment in Japan remains very low: This means that Takaichi and her cabinet don’t need to focus as much energy and attention on macroeconomics, as Abe did. There is no need for further stimulus, monetary or fiscal. Instead, Takaichi is free to concentrate on improving Japan’s underlying economic model, in order to promote productivity and growth.
So here are a few things I think the Takaichi Cabinet should try to tackle while they’re in power.
Bring the big leagues to Mexico City | Silver Bulletin
6-minute read
Enter Mexico City. It might be out of mind to most of us U.S. Americans, but it’s about as close to the East Coast as Phoenix or Salt Lake City. And there’s undeniable upside there. Mexico City is both the most populous city proper and metro area in North America. No, it doesn’t have U.S. standards of wealth, although you wouldn’t know it when strolling through wealthier neighborhoods like Polanco, where you could squint and tell yourself that you were in Miami or a more walkable version of Los Angeles. Per-capita GDP in the Valley of Mexico was about $13,000 in 2021, though it’s closer to $18,000 today given healthy GDP growth. However, the huge population makes up for it. Do the math, and Mexico City is the 15th-largest metro area in North America by GDP, in the same vicinity as Phoenix and Toronto. But Phoenix and Toronto have three “Big 4” teams each, when Mexico City has none.
[...]
Mexico City has shown a great deal of enthusiasm for the U.S. major leagues whenever it has had the opportunity to experience them. The largest crowd for an NFL game in history was in Mexico City, when 112,376 fans watched a preseason game between the Cowboys and Houston Oilers at Azteca Stadium in 1994. More recently, the NBA sold more than 20,000 tickets to its annual Mexico City game on Saturday night, while charging typically expensive prices.
The giant basket case countries | Noahpinion
6-minute read
More and more of humanity is going to live in a few big countries that can’t manage themselves.
1 star
The Midnight Shift | Urban Omnibus
2-minute read
Part of the NYC Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), this team of eleven civil servants specializes in listening for water sounds that might indicate malfunction. The goal is to identify leaks when they are still small and easy to fix. To auscultate water pipes, the team uses cutting-edge technology: a contact microphone called a Lmic that functions similarly to a physician’s stethoscope. You attach it to valves, manholes, or the asphalt to hear what is not visible on the surface.
If there is a leak, the sound captured is undoubtedly that of water flowing: a slow, rhythmic, whoosh resembling a creek. Listening through headphones, one might describe it as an endless toilet flush. The device also amplifies other urban tunes, such as a train crossing underground, the mechanical clangs of HVAC systems, and even the songs playing in a car parked nearby. Using the Lmic on Broadway to hear a combination of natural wooshes and industrial horns feels like attending a Björk-themed silent disco while the city is asleep.
When a water main breaks, the water doesn’t whisper, it gushes; causing hours-long service disruptions — as was the case in Inwood this past September and in Times Square in 2023. The city’s underground is messy; an endless layer of “spaghetti” (as the team refers to it) made up of water mains, telecommunications tubes, and utility tunnels. It is through this nearly century-old system that one billion gallons of water arrive daily in the homes of New Yorkers.
Diseased Baby Ants Ask Their Nestmates to Poison Them With Acid to Protect the Colony, Study Finds | Gizmodo
2-minute read
In a study published today in the journal Nature Communications, researchers revealed that ant pupae—what a larva grows into before becoming an adult—of the Lasius neglectus ant species actively produce a chemical signal that causes other colony members to destroy them. The findings further solidify the view of an ant colony as a “superorganism” behaving as a single entity rather than a community of many individuals.
“I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” | Internal Tech Emails
3-minute read
I am not sure how the company lost sight of what matters to our customers (both business and home) the most, but in my view we lost our way. I think our teams lost sight of what bug-free means, what resilience means, what full scenarios mean, what security means, what performance means, how important current applications are, and really understanding what the most important problems are customers face are. I see lots of random features and some great vision, but that doesn’t translate into great products.
I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft. If you run the equivalent of VPC on a MAC you get access to basically all Windows application software (although not the hardware). Apple did not lose their way. You must watch this new video below. I know this doesn’t show anything for businesses, but my point is about the philosophy that Apple uses. They think scenario. They think simple. They think fast. I know there is nothing hugely deep in this.
Why Are These Sea Urchins Sporting Cowboy and Viking Hats? | Newsweek
3-minute read
Souza was initially prompted to craft urchin hats by scientific curiosity, after observing behavior that pointed to a possible explanation for why his urchins kept picking up objects to cover parts of their spiny bodies.
“I noticed at night they would let go of some of the stuff they carried during the day,” Souza told Newsweek. “I started wondering if it has anything to do with the full spectrum lights that we use for corals. I shared it with my wife Sylvia, who said, ‘Well, if they are trying to protect themselves from the UV rays, then why don’t you design and 3D print some hats for the poor little things?’”