A weekly collection of links to interesting things curated by Colin Wright.
Strong Links vs. Weak Links
If you're running an airline, oil rig or nuclear plant your focus must be on eliminating the weak-links that can cause catastrophes. Other businesses, though, have strong-link problems. It doesn't much matter if there's a lot of rubbish on Netflix as long as there's sufficient good stuff to attract customers. It has the strong-link problem of how to find good shows and can ignore the weak-link one of what to do about rubbish.
This Doctor Pioneered Counting Calories a Century Ago, and We’re Still Dealing With the Consequences
Familiar territory even to schoolchildren today, the calorie was, more than a century ago, a niche concept just beginning to emerge from the laboratory and into public view. Peters was about to supercharge that evolution, in the process turning the meaning and use of the calorie on its head and spurring its transformation into one of the most enduring and significant health concepts of the modern day. The calorie gave the public its first penetrating view inside the foods they ate, providing an elementary understanding of nutrition. But it would also go on to torment millions, enrich corporations, inspire generations of advertising campaigns, provoke widespread guilt and pride, and even, some argue today, lead Americans, fat gram by carb gram, calorie by calorie, into epidemic levels of obesity, by instructing the masses to focus on calories rather than on nutrients and steering them toward highly processed carbohydrates.
60-Year-Old Miss Buenos Aires Says Change Is Coming as Miss Universe Run Comes to an End
A 60-year-old Argentine beauty queen’s run for Miss Universe may have come to an end, but she says her remarkable journey is the “first step of a change” in society’s perceptions.
Alejandra Rodriguez made headlines across the world in April when she was crowned Miss Buenos Aires, becoming the first sexagenarian to win a contest organized by the Miss Universe franchise.
While she was unable to repeat that triumph on Saturday to become Miss Argentina and earn the right to represent her country in the Miss Universe pageant, she did win the “best face” category and celebrated her breakthrough as marking the beginnings of a shift in how beauty is perceived.
“This is the first step of a change that is coming,” Rodriguez, an attorney and journalist by profession, told CNN en Español after the contest.
Ways to Think About AGI
As we all know, the Large Language Models (LLMs) that took off 18 months ago have driven another such wave. Serious AI scientists who previously thought AGI was probably decades away now suggest that it might be much closer. At the extreme, the so-called ‘doomers’ argue there is a real risk of AGI emerging spontaneously from current research and that this could be a threat to humanity, and calling for urgent government action. Some of this comes from self-interested companies seeking barriers to competition (‘This is very dangerous and we are building it as fast as possible, but don’t let anyone else do it’), but plenty of it is sincere.
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However, for every expert that thinks that AGI might now be close, there’s another who doesn’t. There are some who think LLMs might scale all the way to AGI, and others who think, again, that we still need an unknown number of unknown further breakthroughs.
Who’s Actually Using Threads? Young Protesters in Taiwan
As thousands of people gathered outside Taiwan’s legislature on Tuesday to protest against a bill that would give more power to China-friendly parties, Yuan, who was volunteering at a nearby church, noticed that the large crowd was running short on supplies.
He fired off posts on the Threads app listing items that protesters needed, such as snacks, bottled water, and plastic bags. Supplies arrived within minutes.
“My Threads page was like a wishing well,” Yuan, who requested to be identified with part of his first name for privacy reasons, told Rest of World. “We got everything we asked for.”
AI Data Center Demand Poised to Juice US Power Needs
New projections help crystallize a huge challenge: meeting the surging energy needs of data centers as artificial intelligence joins other forces pushing up U.S. power demand.
The balance of fuels that meet this added thirst — gas, renewables, coal, batteries, nuclear and more — will sway future carbon dioxide emissions.
The Electric Power Research Institute sees these digital hubs draining between 4.6%-9.1% of U.S. electricity in 2030, based on four scenarios.
Last year it was 4%, the nonprofit's new report states.
It's very regional too — the state-by-state graphic above averages their four growth cases.
Today, data centers in 15 states account for 80% of the total.
Atari Buys Intellivision Brand, Ending ‘Longest-Running Console War in History’
For fans of old-school games, it’s kind of like Coke acquiring Pepsi: Atari, which produced one of the first hit home game consoles, announced a deal to acquire the brand of long-time rival Intellivision and the rights to more than 200 games from Intellivision Entertainment.
Atari and Intellivision battled it out what is considered the game industry’s first console war, starting in the late ’70s. The first Intellivision home video game console was released by Mattel Electronics in 1979, selling an estimated 5 million units through 1990, and it vied for market share against the Atari 2600, which was released in 1977. Mattel even recruited actor George Plimpton to appear in a series of ads comparing the two systems, as well as an eight-minute video shown at the Gamescom trade show.