It is not warm here. Brrr.
 Microsoft Research have released BioGPT: "a large language model trained on biomedical research literature. The model achieves better-than-human performance on answering questions from the biomedical literature, as evaluated on PubMedQA." Now this seems like a perfect use of this tech; hopefully with no politically correct guardrails... 
 James Pethokoukis: In defense of ‘cornucopianism’ and a more populous planet. "It’s no easy task to select just one wrong-headed assertion among so many in the Scientific American essay 'Eight Billion People in the World Is a Crisis, Not an Achievement'." Things are getting better in general, and worse in specific...
 This is pretty cool: Pentagon releases pilot’s Chinese spy balloon selfie. Well it's not really a selfie - that would require a picture taken from the balloon itself - but still, cool.
 Excellent read: The Great Dumpling Drama Of Glendale, California. This is more about malls and mall culture than dumplings. BTW those dumplings are excellent and we voyage all the way into LA to get them at the Beverly Hills mall...
 Yes, please: stop doing threads. Yes, we know where the 140 character limit came from, and it's cute and all, but there must be a way to do longer-form articles ... like blogging!
Matt Webb is Tinkering with hyperlinks. "Hyperlinks should look different if it’s busy at the other end. Like: maybe they should be noisy, or glow, or have a yellow halo that gets bigger and bigger." What a great idea :)
 Liron Shapira: one weird trick to sanity-check any startup idea. It is: describe a specific customer use case. Seems pretty straightforward and yet, many startups address a [perceived] general need without addressing an [actual] specific one.
 Love this: 20 Mechanical Principles Combined in a Useless Lego Machine. It's not useless, because it's a useful demonstration.
 Well: California is racing to electrify trucks. Can the industry keep up? As always, the tension between "clean" and "economic". Economic will always win, but clean and economic is even better.
Note: "economic" includes government subsidies.
 via Elon Musk: Mouse bait.
 Dave Winer: the devolution of the web. This hits pretty close to home.
Well, off into the weekend. Stay warm, everyone!
| 
