Author: Gregor J. Rothfuss

Vinyl PC

Booting a PC from vinyl for a warmer, richer OS

To pull off the trick, Jozef leverages the rarely used and little known cassette tape interface that PCs had back in the early days. This required building a new bootloader and burning it to ROM to make the PC listen to audio signals with its 8255 programmable peripheral interface chip.

Automated bestsellers

What is Barack Obama Book? It’s not a book, exactly. It’s an SEO ploy by a shadowy company that has scores of $2.99 knockoffs ready to be downloaded. But it’s also not not a book, in the sense that it is words on pages, bound by covers or delivered to your Kindle. I don’t think Barack Obama Book was written by a human being, but I do think the A.I. that excreted it made some decent points about Barack Obama. University Press has churned out 55 books since February 2019, and I like to imagine the hardworking A.I. behind these titles holed up in a hotel room somewhere, chain-smoking, downing coffee, and furiously digesting every single extant fact about, say, Queen Elizabeth. Then the A.I. compacts all that information into a small, dense slab of readable prose and sends it out into the world. “To knowledge!” University Press toasts at night, watching the royalties flood in. Sometimes it invites over friends like Birthday Song, who performs 100s of versions of the birthday song personalized for individual names on Spotify, or Videogyan, who creates iterative animations of babies doing ordinary tasks and has nearly 10M YouTube subscribers. Perhaps a bit sloshed, University Press lectures its friends long into the evening: “Ultimately,” it intones, “Barack Obama is just a human being with considerable charisma and charm who used his abilities to help him become President of the United States.” Its friends raise their glasses. “Happy Birthday Barack,” sings Birthday Song.

PDE AI

researchers at Caltech have introduced a new deep-learning technique for solving PDEs that is dramatically more accurate than deep-learning methods developed previously. It’s also much more generalizable, capable of solving entire families of PDEs—such as the Navier-Stokes equation for any type of fluid—without needing retraining. Finally, it is 1000x faster than traditional mathematical formulas. Now here’s the crux of the paper. Neural networks are usually trained to approximate functions between inputs and outputs defined in Euclidean space, your classic graph with x, y, and z axes. But this time, the researchers decided to define the inputs and outputs in Fourier space. Because it’s far easier to approximate a Fourier function in Fourier space than to wrangle with PDEs in Euclidean space, which greatly simplifies the neural network’s job. Cue major accuracy and efficiency gains: in addition to its huge speed advantage over traditional methods, their technique achieves a 30% lower error rate when solving Navier-Stokes than previous deep-learning methods.

ML bank interconnect

Stripe uses ML to improve transaction success rates by 10%

Over time, that model will learn in specificity, for a particular bank in middle America vis their UK-homed customers who have typed in lower cased zip codes, that the bank strongly prefers upper casing zip codes. So we just do that for them, for transactions across our network

Did NIMBYs Save Cities?

When the city is surrounded by suburbs that make new development even harder, that can make those undertakings more attractive.

Once investment is forced back into the city, NIMBYism continues to serve a useful purpose, keeping property values high, providing the city with higher tax revenues that can be invested into schools and improvements. One problem cities like St. Louis or Akron have is that their homes aren’t valuable enough for banks to lend money to the owners and produce very little in tax revenue. Detroit has one of the highest tax rates in the country.

Makes the strange argument that NIMBYism in the suburbs should lead to YIMBYism in the cities, creating a “green belt” around cities. Interesting theory, but I see no evidence that there’s really a YIMBY trend in cities.
2022-06-01: And YIMBYs are extremely ineffective because they pretend.

The notion that resistance to development is driven by rich white people is absurd on its face. It’s a joke, a farce. It’s just not true. YIMBYs have to decide if they want to be an authentic political force, which means accepting complexity and the inevitability of moderation and compromise, or if they’d rather just keep flinging shit on the internet. The latter is certainly more fun. But we desperately need a mature, goal-oriented YIMBY movement. We’re in a housing crisis, and while “just build!” has always been an inadequate philosophy, we must build and build a lot to get out of this housing hell. To do that YIMBYs have to be willing to look working-class Black and brown NIMBYs in the eye and, when appropriate, say “your objection to this project is misguided and wrong.” That’s less fun than dunking on Twitter. But it’s a necessary next stage of their project, if it’s to succeed.

Queens street vendors

With little recourse, many immigrants from Latin America — who already were among the hardest hit by the virus — have resorted to what they did back home: working as ambulantes — street vendors. But for decades, New York has capped the number of citywide street vending permits — it is currently limited to 2900 for food and 853 for vendors of general merchandise — creating a black market and making vendors vulnerable to high fines. Ambulantes are frustrated and feel that a respected way of making a living in other parts of the world is criminalized here.

it is way past time to stop this permits nonsense.