ACOB

Or, another compilation of bs
Author

Zakhar Kogan

Published

May 6, 2024

Short takes

NFL salary caps and $100 bills

One way to drool and cry is watching NFL player salary caps. A nice meditation, too!

The authors observe a nice potential cause - denomination effect: people are more likely to spend smaller currency banknotes if given equal sums. E.g. we’ll spend 5 $20s before even thinking of spending the (my precious…) $100.

GPT in 60 lines

Even smaller than Karpathy’s nanoGPT, but still functional. BTW, Andrej had also started two more edupositories: llm.c (training) and llama2.c inference. He’s just that awesome, yeah.

The god of interactive explanations

Totally awesome longreads on:

You’re welcome to venture on his website and lose a few hours fascinated ❤️

America’s oil

Okay. It looks like most progress is credited to discovering the fracking process - pushing liquid (water + sand + chemicals) into rock fissures, setting the oil/gas reserves free or, at least, much easier to access.

Fracking, which, it turns out, being all awesome - presumably pollutes the environment even more than traditional methods:

So, anything and the whole nine kilometers, from polluting the water reservoirs to earthquakes 😍

Veganity!

Not all vegan meat substitutes are created equal. Some of the possible risks:

  • If highly processed, some meat bases (soy, legumes) can increase T2D risks, cause hypertension and reduce life expectancy. However, that’s an argument made up of whole cloth - it would totally depend on the production process pipeline;
  • Missing key nutrients and amino acids - this would be a viable argument if one only ate the same type of meat, over and over, every day. Hopefully, that’s not the case for 99%… However! Remember the guy who’s eating pizza for 25+ years and feeling it;
  • Less protein - another bullshit argument spun out of thin air: when papa wants more protein…he eats more protein?
  • High in sodium and saturated fats - again, totally dependent on the brand and production processes.

Bottom line? CNET, that was fun to read! Actually not, that’s just a pile of FUD.

A penny for a SAT

Basically, income does not only influence happiness levels, but one’s test scores. Some top universities had optional tests’ policy during COVID, but are now dropping it in favor of good ol’ “do a test and get accepted”.

What are the possible reasons to that? Maybe, if we take Harari’s Sapiens ‘gathering -> hunting -> farming’ as a metaphor, higher income can lead to a child doing less chores and more education/tutoring/volunteering. Or, if we remember the philosophers, writers and mathematicians of the past, some having affluent upbringing and not having to work.

An exploration into athletic records

Can we keep beating them forever or, as MCU or DC Comics tell us, going over ‘the human performance limit’ is not possible?

Reuse

MIT

Citation

BibTeX citation:
@online{kogan2024,
  author = {Kogan, Zakhar},
  title = {ACOB},
  date = {2024-05-06},
  url = {https://teleogenic.com/posts/240506-acob},
  langid = {en}
}
For attribution, please cite this work as:
Kogan, Zakhar. 2024. “ACOB.” May 6, 2024. https://teleogenic.com/posts/240506-acob.