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From What ever happened to the Great Resignation? by Paul Krugman

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The Great Resignation now looks like a Great Misunderstanding.

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Ladies and gentlemen, now on the tee, Tiger Woods. Go Tiger!

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After his birdie putt lips out on #5, Tiger hits a laser 6 iron to 3 feet on #6 and taps in to go -1 and one shot off the lead. A solid start.

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Wow! Great finish by Tiger. Nice playing by the young Chilean, Joaquín Niemann, in Tiger's group and Scottie Scheffler in the group behind theirs.

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Well, this is something you don't see often: Tiger Woods enjoying a semi-leisurely final round at Augusta and the companionship of a fellow golfer. Not the round he hoped to be having but fun to see him in good spirits and still mobile at the end of a grueling week. The dude abides.

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Yotam Ottolenghi said:

https://www.nytimes....896ed87b2d9c72a

I will start my first column on the pages of this magazine with an uncomfortable confession: I eat everything. I am greedy. I love to eat, so yes, I eat everything. Not literally. I won’t consume any food, obviously not; but there isn’t a kind of dish that I don’t like by definition. I eat the high end and the low end and anything in between. My saving grace, I suppose, is that at least within each category of foods, I can tell a fine example from a not-so-good one. A drawer in my home kitchen, unashamedly packed full of my top brands of instant noodles, is proof.

I got this ability to be discerning but not snobbish from my father, who once famously confessed to me that he actually liked hospital food. “Just as long as it is well prepared,” he qualified, as he greedily stuck a spoon into a bowl of fluorescent green jelly rejected by my mother, who was recovering in the hospital from a knee operation. There was a little bit of irony there and some cheeky taunting of my mother, which he loved doing, but there was also a universal truth: Even food that’s designed to be bland, inoffensive and easy to digest and to mass-produce can be good, or bad, depending on how much thought and consideration goes into its making.

Having clearly inherited my father’s gluttonous acceptance of all types of food, I often have to resort to others’ strong opinions for some robust arguments. On the emotive subject of white foods, for example, I quote two close friends who sit on opposite sides of the dispute. One wouldn’t touch anything that’s pale, runny and smooth. Mashed potatoes, white sauce, anything custardy — all are off the table. My other friend would, if he could, live on a diet of neat mayonnaise and pouring cream. I would happily share a meal with either.

Then there’s the question of temperature. Here I often think of my late mother-​in-law, who had unyielding culinary views. She wouldn’t serve anything that wasn’t magma-level hot. “It’s no good if it’s not piping hot,” she would say, before pouring her smoldering soup into equally scorching bowls. I never listened to her and always burned my mouth. How could anything be so hot? As I am someone who makes a living by selling cold food in my London delis, it’s a miracle that she and I were even on speaking terms.

More seriously, though, the issue of hot versus cold does seem to be a dividing line between what is perceived as serious and complex cooking, on the one hand, and quick-and-easy meals on the other. Just hearing the word “salad” — the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of cold food — sends you down the path of a picnic or a simple side dish, something thrown together without much consideration or fuss. Think potato salad, coleslaw or a bowl of dressed leaves.

The layering of flavors, textures and colors is what our chefs do every day to create their salads.
Yet this couldn’t be further from the truth. For me, a truly marvelous dish can come at any temperature. In my London delis, we have food on display throughout the day. Most of it is vegetables and legumes cooked and dressed in a multitude of ways; all are affectionately referred to as salads. There’s a real art to making these dishes stay fresh and seductive and tasting like a million dollars even after a couple of hours.

The yogurty butter beans here, spread out on a plate like an artist’s canvas, dotted with feta and a vibrant range of green hues — peas spiked with herbs and a sprinkle of pistachio dukkah, the spice mix made with seeds and nuts — are a vivid illustration of the power of one of these salads. With zero technical skills required and very little effort, this dish can be prepared in advance and put together when you need it. It could also sit around for a few hours and stay delicious and fresh. And it’s no less complex or enticing or satisfying than any warm dish.

The layering of flavors, textures and colors using an arsenal of delicious condiments — seed and spice mixes, pickles and flavored oil, crunchy-nutty sprinkly things, confit garlic, dried tomatoes, preserved lemon and many more — is what our chefs do every day to create their salads.

The way in which these condiments and dishes come about is something I am particularly proud of, because recipe creation in our company is pretty democratic. Many people have a go at it, and everyone is welcome to comment. A great example of this happens four times a year, for every change of season, when the deli chefs get together in our test kitchen to discuss the new menu and try some ideas. In these meetings, I observe with joy, and a bit of fatherly pride, how they all bring out their jars of condiments, dressings and sauces and build their beautiful salads in big bowls and on platters. Once the dishes are patiently put together, we all taste and comment. The knowledge and skills that go into making those dishes have all the trappings of serious restaurant dishes but none of the fuss and last-minute cooking angst.

In the coming months, I would like to explore and share some ideas that started off in one of our kitchens and can easily migrate to yours. Regardless of their temperature, or their color, or whether you would want to serve them at your next fancy dinner party or a last-minute, low-key picnic, they all hold good, practical lessons for making food delicious — unapologetically so.

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Ben Thompson said:

DALL-E, the Metaverse, and Zero Marginal Content

Last week OpenAI released DALL-E 2, which produces (or edits) images based on textual prompts; this Twitter thread from @BecomingCritter has a whole host of example output, including Teddy bears working on new AI research on the moon in the 1980s.

OpenAI has a video describing DALL-E on its website.

... The Internet has had two effects: the first is to bring the marginal cost of consumption down to zero. Even with the printing press you still needed to print a physical object and distribute it, and that costs money; meanwhile it costs effectively nothing to send this post to anyone in the world who is interested. This has completely upended the publishing industry and destroyed the power of gatekeepers.

The other impact, though, has been on the production side; I wrote about TikTok in Mistakes and Memes:

That phrase, “Facebook is compelling for the content it surfaces, regardless of who surfaces it”, is oh-so-close to describing TikTok; the error is that the latter is compelling for the content it surfaces, regardless of who creates it…To put it another way, I was too focused on demand — the key to Aggregation Theory — and didn’t think deeply enough about the evolution of supply. User-generated content didn’t have to be simply pictures of pets and political rants from people in one’s network; it could be the foundation of a new kind of network, where the payoff from Metcalfe’s Law is not the number of connections available to any one node, but rather the number of inputs into a customized feed.

Machine learning generated content is just the next step beyond TikTok: instead of pulling content from anywhere on the network, GPT and DALL-E and other similar models generate new content from content, at zero marginal cost. This is how the economics of the metaverse will ultimately make sense: virtual worlds needs virtual content created at virtually zero cost, fully customizable to the individual.

Of course there are many other issues raised by DALL-E, many of them philosophical in nature; there has already been a lot of discussion of that over the last week, and there should be a lot more. Still, the economic implications matter as well, and after last week’s announcement the future of the Internet is closer, and weirder, than ever.

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Q: What do trolls eat?

OpenAI's question answering API said:

A: There is no definitive answer to this question, as trolls are fictional creatures with no set diet. However, some popular interpretations of trolls depict them as eating rocks or dirt, while others show them as eating small animals or even humans.

https://beta.openai..../guides/answers

Q: What is an internet troll?

OpenAI's question answering API said:

A: An internet troll is someone who deliberately posts inflammatory, offensive, or provocative comments in an online community for the purpose of provoking an emotional reaction or disrupting normal on-topic discussion.

Q: What do internet trolls eat?

OpenAI's question answering API said:

A: Internet trolls eat other internet trolls.

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From Tyler Cowen's April 20, 2022 conversation with Thomas Piketty:

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COWEN: If I look at France in the early 1960s, as you know, the rate of finishing or even starting higher education is extremely low, but France basically is doing fine. Do you view that as evidence for the view that it’s really the continuity of cultural capital that matters and not so much policy?

PIKETTY: No, because there’s been a huge educational expansion since then. Between 1950 and 1990 and until today, educational expansion in France — and throughout Europe and in most of the world — has been considerable. It is true, in the 1950s, France — but to a large extent, Western Europe — is lagging behind the US in terms of educational achievement. To me, it’s clear that the key reason why the US has been an economic leader at the world level for most of the 20th century is because it was an educational leader.

In the 1950s, as you know very well, you have 90 percent of a generation going to high school in the US, whereas in France or in Germany, it’s 20 percent to 30 percent of a generation. You need to wait until the 1980s or ’90s to reach the same kind of 90 percent of growth going to high school and to have universal access to it.

It was the same also in the 19th century. The US reached 90 percent primary school attendance rate almost a century before Europe, or at least half a century or two-thirds of a century before Europe. I think that was a key explanation why also economic productivity was so much higher in the United States.

I think policy may be a bit different. Especially after World War II, there was an enormous educational push, not only in France and Germany but also, of course, in Japan. Then other countries in Asia also followed this push, and this has completely transformed the economic geography and the geography of productivity. And the huge advantage the US had in the middle of the 20th century, to a large extent, has disappeared today. I think policies, institutions played a major role in these dynamics with specific political and social history in the different countries.

Of course, politics is also the product of the belief system and the perceptions that families have about education, about the culture of education. So all these different dimensions have to be studied together, obviously.

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COWEN: If I visit every major country in Europe, what I observe is the highest living standard is arguably in Switzerland — Norway and Luxembourg aside. Switzerland has one of the smallest governments, and they attempt relatively little redistribution. What is your understanding of Switzerland? What if someone said, “Well, Europe should try to be more like Switzerland. They’re doing great.” Why is that wrong?

PIKETTY: Oh, Switzerland. It’s a very small country, so it’s about the size. . . . Actually, it’s smaller than Île-de-France, which is a Paris region. Now, if you were to make a separate country out of Île-de-France, GDP per capita, I think, would actually be higher than Switzerland. Of course, you can take a wealthy region in your country and say, “Okay, I don’t want to share anything with the rest of the country. I’m going to keep my tax revenue for me. I’m going to be a tax haven based on bank secrecy.” That’s going to make you 10 percent or 20 percent richer.

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COWEN: If I look at nominal income data for the US or, for that matter, Switzerland, those two countries measure as being wealthier than either France or Germany. Do you think citizens in US and Switzerland are happier than the French and Germans?

PIKETTY: If you’re interested in welfare, you need to look at productivity. That’s the first thing. You need to look at GDP per hours of work or income per hours of work. You probably know very well, if you look at OECD data or Bureau of Labor Statistics series in the US — which are almost similar for Eurostat series — everywhere you go to, you will see the GDP per hours of work is virtually the same in US, Germany, France. It’s a few percent different. I’m sure you know these things.

COWEN: Sure. Of course.

PIKETTY: In terms of welfare, of course, as economists, you know what matters is productivity, not income per se because if you have a higher income just because you work longer hours, the effect on welfare is ambiguous. It depends how you value leisure versus work, et cetera. Presumably, European countries decided to have more vacation and a bigger reduction of working times than the US in the 20th century.

It was not the case a century ago. In the early 20th century, working hours were actually shorter in the US than Europe, partly because productivity was higher, so you can afford working less. Anyway, today and in the past century, the decline in working hours has been bigger in Germany and France. Presumably, this was a choice. This was a complicated political process, but nobody in Germany or France today is proposing to divide by two the number of weeks of vacation and go to the US federal law in that respect.

In terms of welfare, my own view, as you can imagine, is that when you multiply your productivity by 10 over the past century, it actually makes sense to take some of this increase in productivity to have more vacation, to spend more time with your children and family, to spend more time traveling around the world.

For me, like for many Europeans, the idea of taking only two weeks’ vacation over the summer when you are so rich looks like one of the most stupid things you can do in life. But look, different people can make different choices, of course, about this.

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COWEN: If the relationship between wealth and happiness is so diffuse, and I would agree it may be — so I’m happier than some billionaires I know — why worry so much about wealth inequality? Why not focus on inequality of well-being, which could be something quite different?

PIKETTY: Oh, yes. Ultimately, what I care about is access to fundamental goods like education, health, participation in the political life, participation in economic life. Ultimately, this is what I care about. Income and wealth per se are just a mechanism and tools and ways to go in this direction. But in the end, what’s really important for me is to have the highest possible opportunities and rights to access fundamental goods for everybody. This is all that matters.

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From Building games and apps entirely through natural language using OpenAI’s code-davinci model by Andrew Mayne

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Will this replace programming?

The current model can make programming a lot easier – but we’re not quite at the point where we need to throw out our programming books. If you look at these prompts you’ll see I’m often using programming conventions and talking about arrays and divs, etc. But if you stand back and look at the progress being made in AI code generation it’s obvious things are moving very quickly. However, I think you’re always going to want humans who understand code somewhere in the loop for quality control and making sure the output is aligned with our goals.

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Ethan Mollick, Wharton School said:

The skill of surgeons varies tremendously, with bottom quartile surgeons having over 4x as many complications as the best surgeons in the same hospital. And surgeons are keenly aware of who is good & who is bad - their rankings of others are very accurate. https://nejm.org/doi...6/NEJMsa1300625

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Matt Gross at NYT said:

https://www.nytimes....896ed87b2d9c72a

In the middle of a recent Thursday dinner, my 13-year-old daughter, Sasha, had a question for my wife and me: Can I skip school tomorrow?

This seemed pretty understandable to me. Middle-schoolers in New York City — and elsewhere — have had it rough the last few years, caught between the pandemic, their fast-changing bodies and emotions, and their parents’ unchanging ambitions and expectations. As eighth grade ambles to a close, Sasha has handled those pressures well. I could see why she would want a break.

Still, obviously, the answer was no. You can’t skip school, my wife, Jean, and I told her. You just can’t. Not allowed. Nope!

But I offered Sasha a bit of unsolicited advice, too: Next time you want to skip school, don’t tell your parents. Just go. Browse vintage stores, eat your favorite snack (onigiri), lie on your back in Prospect Park and stare at the clouds. Isn’t that the point of skipping school, after all? To sneak around, to steal time and space back from the arbitrary system that enfolds you? To hell with permission! That’s being a teenager — carving out a private life for yourself under the noses of the authority figures who surround you.

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Fun read: How Rivian’s CEO became the anti-Elon (pay walled except to first 3 readers)

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Do Kwon, Terra founder said:

In a message to TerraUSD stablecoin owners:

I understand the last 72 hours have been extremely tough on all of you - know that I am resolved to work with every one of you to weather this crisis, and we will build our way out of this.

Ethan Buchman, a founder of Cosmos, a hub for blockchains said:

Everyone knows that these algorithmic stablecoins aren’t safe. They have these downside dynamics.

[kenberg]

y66, on 2022-May-07, 15:48, said:

Fun read: How Rivian's CEO became the anti-Elon (pay walled except to first 3 readers)

That is one terrific article/interview/story. I would have gobbled it up when I was 13 and I enjoyed it today. Which perhaps says something about my own need to mature, or maybe it speaks to what I think should be in school libraries, or maybe, my preference, it's just an excellent article.

[Winstonm]

No Hole in My Head
https://www.youtube....h?v=jysuQ4HQpSc

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Who is Élisabeth Borne?

[Cyberyeti]

Winstonm, on 2022-May-12, 10:41, said:

No Hole in My Head
https://www.youtube....h?v=jysuQ4HQpSc

A phrase nobody in my family is currently using atm despite some of the obvious comic potential. My father is currently recovering from having a benign brain tumour removed.

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Missoula’s Most In-Demand Kitchen Is Run by Refugees