December 2020

December 30, 2020 by yorksranter 3 comments

Coasian Hell: Back Into Hell

The Coasian Hell series were some of the most popular posts ever on this blog, and I’m quite proud of them, so how about a follow-up? One Coasian objection to the concept might be that the actors in the system can trade their way around to an efficient outcome through side-bargaining between them. This is…

December 20, 2020 by yorksranter 2 comments

how much do you think we spent on contact tracing?

So how much money has the government spent on the contact-tracing programme? Silly question. Everyone knows the number is £12bn. Or maybe £22bn. I am generally sceptical of the National Audit Office; it’s managed to mission-creep into being a general purpose policy evaluation group, but its terms of reference haven’t kept up, so it has…

SpaceX has now landed more boosters than most other rockets ever launch | Ars Technica
SpaceX has landed about 85 percent of the Falcon rockets it has launched. These days, more than 90 percent of all its missions launch on previously flown boosters. So rocket recycling is totally a thing.
Tesla profits drop 55% as Elon Musk dodges cheap car questions | Ars Technica
Musk continues to maintain that Tesla's future is in AI. It spent $1 billion on GPUs in Q1—almost as much as it spent on total R&D during the same time // that's funny as they have both training and inference asics
Man who bought fake Greek driving licence is sentenced | Bradford Telegraph and Argus
Saghawat Hussain paid £1,800 for a counterfeit full Greek driving licence, which he then sent to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA). He had hoped to dupe the Swansea-based agency into giving him a full UK licence so that he could drive illegally having not passed his test // what is it with these […]
Eric Eiswert: Ex-Pikesville athletic director framed principal with AI voice, police say - The Baltimore Banner
Baltimore County Police arrested Pikesville High School’s former athletic director Thursday morning and charged him with using artificial intelligence to impersonate Principal Eric Eiswert, leading the public to believe Eiswert made racist and antisemitic comments behind closed doors // a real one!
Royal Navy shoots down Houthi missile in first since Gulf War
The first time *ever* - the Iraqi Silkworm was a cruise missile (and was more than 30 years ago). anyway, give 'em a banana
Towards Greener LLMs: Bringing Energy-Efficiency to the Forefront of LLM Inference
in times of lower throughput needs, it is more energy-efficient to run TP8 than TP2 // because the GPUs can frequency-scale down. also worth remembering that the pre-fill is compute bound, the rest is memory bound
Inflation comes unstuck | UBS Global
Aside from rents and fictitious owners’ equivalent rents, there is deflation in almost every consumer price subcategory somewhere in the US. With collapsing clothing prices in Tampa or plunging communication prices in Chicago, it is difficult to argue that structural inflation stickiness exists when every key sector has deflation somewhere in the country. Food prices […]
Christian Heinzel on X: "God Rheinmetall is just so fucking cool, fully containerised 3D printer, metal 3D printer and CNC setup to produce custom replacement parts right behind the front, gone from a first display unit to production units being sent to U
God Rheinmetall is just so fucking cool, fully containerised 3D printer, metal 3D printer and CNC setup to produce custom replacement parts right behind the front, gone from a first display unit to production units being sent to Ukraine in less than a year
Saison startet im April: Das sind die fünf schönsten Biergärten Berlins
dammit why didn't I know about 5?
(1) Arin Dube on X: "Important new research showing how minimum wages were absorbed in past decade in US. It led to reallocation towards higher prod firms. Most of the cost increase was passed through to prices. Employment changes were modest." / Twitter
The reallocation results are quite important. They find MW winnows out lower prod employers but surviving higher prod employers actually see profits rise // Card-Krueger, the gift that keeps giving. A crucial way in which minimum wages ended up not costing jobs was that especially crappy firms shut down and their employees were rehired into […]