[BOS] I'm hosting free introductory workshops on running sound for contra dances and other small folk events. I'll be going through the same material on 3/19, 3/23, and 4/10; let me know if you'd like to come to one of them?
We present WoFBench, a novel test that compares the knowledge of Wings of Fire superfans to frontier AI models. The benchmark unfortunately proved to be saturated on creation. We note that saturation joins human extinction on the list of reasons for concern about the pace of AI progress.
Six years ago, 80 workers moved into a plastics factory, and stayed there for a month. In those 28 days they produced 40M pounds of polypropylene, enough for maybe 500M N95s. Ordinary people, looking at their situation, and thinking creatively about how to do their part.
I think more people should be storing a substantial amount of food. It's not likely you'll need it, but as with reusable masks the cost is low enough I think it's usually worth it.
I learned a few weeks ago that I'm a Canadian citizen. This was pretty surprising to me, since I was born in the US to American parents, but with Bill C-3 anyone with any Canadian ancestry is now Canadian. Perhaps you are too?
This week I'll be playing contras up and down the mid-Atlantic coast with Cecilia Vacanti (Kingfisher); Alex Deis-Lauby calling:
* Wed 2/18: Princeton
* Thr 2/19: Philly
* Fri 2/20: DC
* Sat 2/21: Lancaster
* Sun 2/21: Brooklyn
Come dance, and/or let me know if you want to try to meet up!
As the kids say funny things Julia and I put them in a FB group because it's a convenient way to share them. But I don't trust FB to keep things around long term, and I don't want these to be limited to people with FB access, so with my 11:30pm flight delayed to (so far) 2:15am I've run an export.
Gemini's base state seems to be that it's convinced it's 2024 and needs Search to bring it up to speed. If you look into its Thinking it often seems to put a lot of effort into keeping track of everything recent as a giant hypothetical.
Reserving a parking space because you shoveled it is rude, illegal, and inefficient, but if you're the only person who doesn't you'll come back to nowhere to park. The mayor asking us all to move space savers would break the link from "car in spot" to "they moved my chair" to "tire-slashing time".
I recently got an infrared camera attachment for my phone. Getting a room pitch black but still being able to 'see' with the phone was fun, but the real fun was in exploring to observe all these thermal properties we'd never thought about.
Far-UVC is also much more effective with large rooms with long sight lines, so the dance hall I pictured is a great case for it.
I like those a lot! My impression is they're still much louder per CFM (or equivalent CFM) than far-UVC, though. But the real question is, if you need a given amount of air cleaning in a given situation, is the house level within what you can accept.
Box fan-based air purifiers are usually more cost effective than far-UVC if you're using them in a situation where noise is not an issue and you can run them on "high". But noise is often a big issue, and people respond by running fan-based purifiers on "low" or even turning them off.
People at different stages of development enjoy different things in movies. Totoro and Frozen are good examples of children's movies that are able to make things scary or intense for the adults without being too much for little kids.
[BOS] Alex Cumming, Stephen Thomforde, and I (Whirlwind) are playing BIDA on Sunday, with Tommy Linden calling. Apparently some people will be wearing overalls.
7:30-10:30, Cambridge Masonic Hall
Very few people have been on a plane performing a barrel roll, but we could fix this. Commercial aircraft could roll in revenue service, and if you had your window shade down you wouldn't even notice it.
This is a pretty good overview of the near future of AI, and the major challenges, very close to how I see it: www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-ad...
(Written by Dario Amodei, Anthropic co-founder)
Do I know anyone who wants a far-UVC lamp? Some friends of mine are giving away a bunch, if you'd actually use it: aerodrop.org
[BOS] Sledding again today at President's Lawn, ~4:30pm if anyone wants to join (happy to lend sleds!)
Wouldn't have been a terrible place to be, but home is better. Looking forward to playing with the kids in more snow than we've had in their memories!
Back in Boston from SF after a red eye. Flight was delayed 11:30pm to 1am because of a missing engine panel, but I'm super grateful they were able to resolve it. Alternative worlds where the flight was cancelled I would have been stuck in SF for days due to incoming Boston snow.
[BOS] We're planning on going sledding around 5pm on President's Lawn at Tufts if anyone wants to join us.
Kids are smart, and if you want to limit behavior the combination of the gains from rule-breaking and penalty from punishment need to put the kid in a worse position than if they'd never broken the rule.
As someone who has both played for and organized dance weekends, I thought it might be helpful to try and write down what I think of as typical if an event is bringing in a band or caller from out of town.
Contra dances insist on live music even though in many ways recorded music would be better. In a sense, people on stage playing for dancing has been obsolete for decades, but we keep doing it because that's the culture we want.
As AI progressively outpaces humans, I like this as a model to follow.
I want someone to make an 8-passenger car by stretching a hatchback.
No, wages have grown faster than inflation, and rent is declining as a fraction of median income.
