Friday threads

• How school rankings work. I have so much suspicion of school rankings. First, I am skeptical that they actually measure the effectiveness of schools. Second, I suspect that they direct billions if not trillions of dollars of spending every year when parents go to shop for a home and check school ratings 8 and above.
• Snowball earth! Everytime I run into an article or youtube video like this I falll for it. Just go through wikipedia and then dramatize it a little bit for me.
• “Surely nothing could “survive,” whatever that means exactly, for 100 million years. But when brought back to the lab and offered nutrients, the microbes began to grow and multiply.” How deep does life go?
• The Founder Effect. The closer you are to the original source, the more variation you’ll find.
• Albert Hirschman on decision making as the scarce factor in economic development. One of my main observations from working at YouTube was the company was decision constrained, not resource constrained.
• Are LLMs reaching diminishing returns? On some level, I find this comforting — I feel confident that I’ll be able to work in a way that compliments the LLM and there will still be room for humans in the loop.
• “Alex died suddenly, when he was still relatively young. The evening before he died, Alex said to Pepperberg, “You be good. I love you.” The Great Silence by Ted Chiang.

2024-04-19