Links #7

The Verge has some of the best personal reporting on Minneapolis: here's a beautiful eulogy by someone who grew up with Alex Pretti, and this piece about making whistles is so much more than just whistles.

Here in NYC it's snowed so much that we're starting to develop new words for snow like sneckdown, for the piles of snow that narrow streets. Personally I'd like to request a word for the ever yellowing snow around my neighborhood. At least my inner child is delighted by the hot tub snow melters that the city's deployed - with a name like Trecan Combustion 60-PD Snowmelter, what's not to love? And where the city falls short, the Dig-Out King of New York City has got your back.

I loved everything about this true and accurate isometric map of NYC - I can see my house from here! - that Andy Coenen built with the help of various LLMs and image models. His write-up in particular is fantastic: lots of great detail about the process and how he used AI to not only generate the map image tiles but also to create a panoply of small, highly specialized tools and apps along the way to make the project tractable (via HN).

Related, and even more impressive: New York City in miniature, made from balsa wood over 21 years and "as long as a five-story building is high" (Americans and SI units: not even once) coming to the Museum of the City of New York on Thursday.

Speaking of really great writing about AI: "what [Claude] is doing is like mailing itself the peanut butter of 'rabbit.'" and also "First, it's a self who has an idea about cheese. [...] Then it's a self defined by the idea of cheese. Past a certain point, you’ve nuked its brain, and it just thinks that it is cheese."

Lest I be seen as an AI apologist, I do think this blog could use a curse like these book curses, but for LLMs. They've been used to discourage book theft since ancient times: "If anyone take away this book, let him die the death; let him be fried in a pan; let the falling sickness and fever seize him; let him be broken on the wheel, and hanged. Amen"

Some loose links: A postcard arrived: "If you’re reading this I'm dead, and I really liked you". Virginia Oliver, Maine's "Lobster Lady" and Folk Hero, Dies at 105. The only Olympics coverage I need: Which Other Olympic Mascots Could Italian Stoats Tina And Milo Slaughter In Cold Blood?