Best of Twitter - Week of August 16, 2021 [1/2]

Ben Kuhn @benskuhn

Top things I did in college, ranked by ex-post usefulness: 1. Revive an effective altruism student group 2. Start a blog 3. Intern at GiveWell 4. Build a course catalog website 5. Contra dance a lot 6. Fail abjectly at starting a startup ... ~50. Classes

Wojciech Zaremba @woj_zaremba

We are releasing an API to turn English into code. Make a computer game from scratch in a few minutes. youtube.com/watch?v=SGUCcj… btw: some people suspect that I am an AI in this video.

youtube.comOpenAI Codex Live DemoLearn more: https://openai.com/blog/openai-codex

Alexander Kruel @XiXiDu

Some links to research on how to hack air-gapped systems and more. A superhuman AI will break your security, no matter what

axisofordinary.substack.comA superhuman AI will break your security, no matter whatDo you think you can box a superhuman AI? Think again: Turning a computer into a cellphone by moving data between RAM and CPU: “GSMem: Data Exfiltration from Air-Gapped Computers over GSM Frequencies”, Guri et al 2015 https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity15/sec15-paper-guri.pdf

Basil Halperin @BasilHalperin

Related to this @tylercowen column, a graph that (frankly) shocked me when I first saw it: Teen suicide rates drop by 15-20% in summer months when school is out – whereas for older groups, suicides rise then (A drop in December during winter break, too) basilhalperin.com/essays/school-…

tylercowen @tylercowen

Without Covid, how many kids die going to school *anyway*?: https://t.co/97UmEpNVOI

^ thread

ma$ 🛥 @mqsvn

school is just a 9-5 that doesn’t pay you

dragoncowman @dragoncowman1

How good is the West’s model of Chinese tech/politics? I was intrigued by this thread that circulated through tech Twitter a few months back. It suggested that China’s unicorn birth rate had fallen to 3 in 2021, relative to 132 YTD in the US.

Rui Ma 马睿 @ruima

I knew the US unicorn birth rate is really insane this year, but nothing beats graphing it out! I plotted it vs China. Total US unicorns: 372 China: 137 Source: @CBinsights https://t.co/kA0mXeHQyp

dragoncowman @dragoncowman1

This graphic was boosted by many POIs in the western tech sphere (Balaji, P Collison, etc-Rui Ma herself is a China tech reporter/investor which gave cred)

Balaji Srinivasan @balajis

Incredible graph. We've heard about Jack Ma (Alibaba) and Zhang Yiming (ByteDance/TikTok), but many far less prominent CEOs are also having problems with CCP. Is this driving the best Chinese founders abroad, or stopping them from starting unicorns in the first place? https://t.co/scsgom1LYQ

dragoncowman @dragoncowman1

But within a few days it was shown by Chinese sources that the actual Chinese YTD number was ~38!

Rui Ma 马睿 @ruima

1/ OK guys, let's not freak out. The number of Chinese unicorns birthed so far this year per @cbinsights is only 3 (vs 132 for US). But according to Chinese data sources, that number should be 38. h/t @hideonw, source ITJuzi https://t.co/6OTJPgMiyZ

^ thread; (I also totally believed the first number of just 3 unicorns…..)

Matt @tiredgenerally

Do you ever walk into a Whole Foods and just marvel at the amount of insane pseudoscience rich people buy into?

Ian Coldwater 📦💥 @IanColdwater

@tiredgenerally When I worked at Whole Foods as a teen our big seller was shark cartilage supplements, fueled by a book called "Sharks Don't Get Cancer" that posited that sharks don't get cancer so if you take shark cartilage supplements you won't get cancer either. That's it. That's the science

unrelated tweet:

Richard Bibeault @Duderichy

The fact that Tim Ferriss stopped taking all supplements besides magnesium should tell you everything you need to know.

The New Yorker @NewYorker

The F.D.A. approved the first Lyme vaccine in 1998. Then, in a rare occurrence in modern medicine, it disappeared.

nyer.cmWhy It Took So Long to Develop a New Vaccine for Lyme DiseaseSue Halpern writes about LYMErix, a vaccine developed by GlaxoSmithKline that effectively prevented Lyme disease, and the economic and litigious factors that led to the vaccine’s removal from the market.

Quarantined section

Kornelius Jansen @JansenKornelius

Peter Daszak's letter that started this whole "lab leak is a conspiracy" campaign is very instructive on how elite consensus is formed. There is no ominous conspiracy in dimly lit rooms. Just a sleazy sociopath smooth talking his gullible colleagues into saving his ass.

Stephen Kinsella @stephenkinsella

Check the time stamp. Have a read. Recall what everyone was saying at the time.

Balaji Srinivasan @balajis

Going viral What if this coronavirus is the pandemic that public health people have been warning about for years? It would accelerate many pre-existing trends. - border closures - nationalism - social isolation - preppers - remote work - face masks - distrust in governments

^ Balaji’s tweet is from January 30, 2020