This one’s a bit weird, so prepare yourself. Bobby Fingers is my favorite tiny YouTube channel. He meticulously creates incredibly detailed dioramas of problematic celebrities in infamous moments, then buries those dioramas somewhere in the world for you to find. If that sounds bad, it’s better than it sounds. If that sounds awesome - well, it’s better than it sounds. There are only 3 so far, and I’d recommend starting at the beginning, with Mel Gibson.
Let’s make fetch happen: tools like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion aren’t AI, they’re SALAMI (“Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences”).
(You did not miss an issue - we just accidentally sent two #43s. We’re correcting the numbering here.)
Tony’s Pick
I’m loath to do free PR for billionaire vanity projects, but this announcement by Blue Origin is pretty stellar, pun intended. Solar panels made from only lunar regolith with no water and no carbon emissions (assuming carbon free electricity) is some pretty incredible sci-fi shit.
The tiny world of mastodon/fediverse clients on iOS is really quite rich. The official Mastodon app is good, Ivory from Tapbots is a clear favorite in my corner of the fediverse, and there are manymanyothers to check out. By far my favorite is IceCubes. I prefer the look and feel, it’s nicely customizable without being a too focused on configuration, and it’s open source!
I am not particularly interested in origami as such, but I kind of love Origami Simulator. It’s a very cool use of web technology that’s surprisingly fun to play with!
The Smithsonian has made 4 million digital items public domain with the CC0 license (no attribution required, no copyright, etc), and it’s easily searchable. An awesome resource and a fun opportunity. Check it out!
Here’s a fun project that includes an interesting exploration of generative art for blog post graphics and some automation of same. Pretty cool! (h/t to the dastardly Matt Swanson for the link)
This article about the Atari game Pitfall is interesting on 2 levels: first is the technical feat in the original game, second is that someone reverse engineered it 40 years later, for fun. I’m a little too young to have first hand experience with Atari’s consoles, so Pitfall wasn’t known to me, but it’s still a fun read!
We have a friend staying with us over the holidays and decided to play through a throwback 16-bit RPG called Chained Echoes. I saw it described somewhere as “the game you remember loving on the Super Nintendo,” in that it streamlines a lot of the tedium of classic RPGs that you’ve suppressed in your mind. Plus you get to fly around in “Sky Armor,” which is pretty sweet.
I recently bought my wife a Nespresso Vertuo Plus to replace her aging Keurig and was surprised to see that there were no third-party pods available. Nespresso machines have been around in some form since the 1980s, so it was surprising to me that a patent would not have expired by now.
Enter the design patent for a new capsule form. Apparently the Vertuo line was launched in the mid-2010s with a larger capsule design that (seemingly) serves two purposes:
This newsletter issue might look a bit different. We’ve (hastily) changed newsletter providers this week. Revue, our previous provider, is the latest victim in Elon Musk’s continued immolation of Twitter.
Does scientific peer review work? The answer seems to be no - or at least not enough to justify the cost of 15,000-reviewer-years of time each year to review papers where only a fraction of errors are caught and rejected papers can be shopped around.
His analysis around number of errors caught felt a little weak to me. Although only 25-30% of major errors were detected, the obviously flawed papers were recommended for rejection most of the time (about 60-70% according to the linked studies). I see some parallels to code review, where I might recommend changes on a Pull Request early if I notice glaring structural issues.
I liked his analysis of “weak-link” vs “strong-link” and why peer review is fundamentally flawed. In a “weak-link” domain, progress depends on the worst work, and peer review makes sense - we should try to weed out bad science. But I’m inclined to agree with him that science is a “strong-link” domain, where bad ideas will eventually flame out while good ideas move us forward.
