One of my favorite scientific figures is this one of the entropy levels of 100 world cities by the orientation of streets. The cities with most ordered streets: Chicago, Miami, & Minneapolis. Most disordered: Charlotte, Sao Paulo, Rome & Singapore. Paper: appliednetsci.springeropen.com/articles/10.10…
To illustrate, here is how the maps look for Minneapolis (most ordered) & Charlotte (most disordered), rendered with this amazing tool for showing maps of roads by @anvaka: anvaka.github.io/city-roads/?q=…
Here's the cities organized by alphabetical order from the paper (by @gboeing )
On a related note, here is the alignment of runways around the world, along with a rather amazing global zoomable map 👇 of every runway & how it is oriented.
To lower your city’s entropy level, use this map extending the streets & avenues of New York’s grid to cover the world. 10 Downing Street is really 3,709th Street & East 10,894th Avenue. All roads meet in Ishkuduk, Uzbekistan, the antipodean anti-New York. extendny.com/#S22.St.4.Ave/9
Also on the topic of roads: 2,000 years later, the paths of Roman roads explain economic development patterns in Europe, but not so much in North Africa, where the general use of camels after 100BCE led to less need for wheeled vehicles. (Cool subway-style maps by @sasha_trub)
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So how is Runway AI able to model fluid dynamics reasonably well?
The prompt: "A highly detailed portrait of a marble eagle with honey oozing down. Cinematic, highly detailed, film grade."
It isn't perfect (the viscosity seems to change a bit, etc), but why does it work at all?
This is going to be one of those posts where the reactions are divided between "this isn't anywhere as good as you could get with a physics model of fluid over a surface" & people who say "wait, how does a text-to-image model have anything like consistent physics for new scenes"
That prompt: "overhead shot: Two pirate ships sailing back and forth in a cup of coffee in a storm. Cinematic, highly detailed, film grade."
The Civ series is sort of like Ender’s Game, but for management rather than murdering aliens. Business school students who were good at Civ V also turn out to be better planners, organizers, and problem-solvers, in this small experiment.
Other games work as effective tests of fluid intelligence:
⌨️Performance in MOBAs like League of Legends and Dota correlates with intelligence
🎮Performance in FPSs like Battlefield, Destiny, and (likely) Fortnite don't show the same pattern
This qualitative research paper argued that the the skills of a raid leader in World of Warcraft & MMOGs work for offline leadership skills as well. Good guild leaders make good real leaders.
AI detectors have high flaw positives & teacher intuition seems to work even worse: “Here we show in two experimental studies that novice and experienced teachers could not identify texts generated by ChatGPT among student-written texts.”
Probably the most consequential technology that should have been “obvious” but wasn’t:
🌾The moldboard plow. As this excerpt from Mann's 1491 shows, it was a simple idea which China had for nearly 2k years before Europe! It was basically a prerequisite for the Enlightenment.
The invention of the moldboard plow in Europe was at least a millennia closer to the invention of the iPhone than it was to the invention of the moldboard plow in China!
Plus:
🚲The wheel was invented surprisingly late & maybe only once (as anything other than a toy). It came after sailboats & harps, and was not used at all in the Americas
🐴And the horse collar, a simple invention that sped up plowing by 50%, wasn't common in Europe until 1000
I asked the Devin AI agent to go on reddit and start a thread where it will take website building requests
It did that, solving numerous problems along the way. It apparently decided to charge for its work. Going to take it down before it fools anyone... reddit.com/r/forhire/comm…
Agents are going to open a whole bunch of cans of worms.
It was actively monitoring the thread to take offers.