Roundup of random things
Why red became the universal warning light color, AI Search is not meant to be a 'google killer', two more Prince videos and a quick roundup of Trump 2.0 articles.
The reason red light became the universal warning light color is because experiments showed it can be seen from the furthest away. If you’re old enough to remember AM and FM radio, you may know that AM radio covers far larger distances. You might also know that FM radio waves are higher frequency (i.e. shorter wave length radio waves). Shorter wavelength means more waves per second, and therefore also more information can be transferred per second. Maybe you also know that 3G, 4G and 5G have progressively shorter wavelengths (in the microwave range1), enabling more information to be transferred per second, but at the cost of lower range. You might also recall from physics classes that going ‘up’ in the Electromagnetic Radiation (EM) spectrum from 5G, we get to infrared, then to light, UV, X-Ray, etc. It’s all the same ‘stuff’ just at different frequencies. Today I learned that the reason that the stop signal or warning signal is a red light is the same reason that 5G has lower range than AM radio: Red light can be seen from a longer distance, in every weather condition than any other color light, because it has a longer wavelength. Isn’t science cool.
ChatGPT Search and Perplexity are not “Google Killers” yet. I’ve seen this argument quite a bit and I think it starts from a false premise, that they are supposed to be Google Killers in the first place. Apparently, the average google query is 2-3 words (“Weather Bali”, “300 EUR in SGD”, “Amazon SG”), and the average Perplexity query is 11 words. This all makes perfect sense to me. AI has replaced Google for about half of my searches, and they are the longer searches, like “give me some toddler friendly recipes with kale”, or “was wework the biggest venture capital loss ever”. Try to google those kinds of things and you’ll drown in an ocean of ads and SEO optimized slop. Have you ever searched for recipes on Google and then you have to scroll past a 2000 word made up crap story about how someones grandma used to make scones in the summer? Perplexity doesn’t do that.
A friend reminded me I had forgotten this masterpiece in my Ode to Prince:
I also realized myself that I had forgotten this one:
Trump 2.0
Interesting pieces:
Identity politics isn't working, Noahpinion
Group labels are political, but little theory and evidence explains how group labels shape politician evaluations…Latinos’ relationship with “Latinx,” a gender-inclusive label, is a theoretical test case. Using several datasets, we find: Latinos are less likely to support politicians who use “Latinx”…Latinos who oppose “Latinx” are less likely to support politicians who used or are associated with “Latinx”…Latinos in areas where “Latinx” is more salient are more likely to switch their vote toward Trump between 2016-2020[.]
Breaking: Sources Say the Story You’re Reading Isn’t Real is an interesting and quite shocking set of examples of made up stories from the MAGA sphere, which were amplified on X.com.
Last week, Musk himself shared a screenshot of a story published by the Atlantic with the headline: “TRUMP IS LITERALLY HITLER.” The screenshot was a fabrication; nothing like the purported article had ever appeared in the magazine. Readers dutifully added a community note to Musk’s tweet pointing out that the screenshot was a satirical fabrication. But it remains up to this day.
Is a progressive Joe Rogan impossible?
This piece makes the reason many Americans hate woke so much in a very clear and resonant way.
When I was growing up, my vague perception of politics was that Democrats were the cool party and Republicans were the party of lame, upright scolds.
Which party was more likely to get mad at you? Definitely conservative Republicans. This was the age where the Moral Majority was still influential and conservative Christianity was at the forefront of Republican thought. If a song was too obscene, if a woman dressed a certain way, if anyone dared be gay in public - Republicans got mad. They were the party of scolds, the party of lectures and book banning and righteous indignation at stuff that a lot of us would just shrug at.
Somewhere along the way, that changed. Who today is more likely to lecture you for saying something they consider offensive or out of bounds? It’s obviously Democrats - specifically progressive Democrats. Today it’s progressives, not conservatives, who are prone to scolding and nagging. It’s progressives who try to cancel people for using the wrong pronouns or having the wrong opinions or saying the wrong thing about race. Conservatives are now the ideological movement that embraces edgy contrarianism. You may think this is good or you may think it’s bad, but I don’t think it can be denied that this is the state of things.
For what it’s worth, I sympathise with this quite a bit. I’ve personally felt quite a bit of resistance to the extreme ‘woke’ stuff in the past 7 years. Still, the Democrats have decisively stepped away from that extreme left fringe of their party, but it wasn’t enough.
Some optimism
The biggest positive in my view is that Trump won fair and square. He even won the popular vote. This means that he does not have any incentive to continue attacking democracy. The other potentially positive is that Trump is in a position to take credit for some of the good things Biden did, like fix inflation and unemployment. If Trump can start owning the solutions that Biden implemented, he might continue on the same path. On the border issue, he only has to implement the bipartisan bill that Republicans cynically blocked earlier this year to increase their chance of winning the election. On the economy, things look muddier. It looks like Elon is successful in talking Trump out of implementing drastic tariffs immediately, that’s good. As for reorganizing the government, it’s going to be interesting to see what happens. It would be good to reduce and revamp various regulatory agencies that stop the US from building things, but I would trust the democrats a lot more to come up with effective plans. Elon Musk and Dan Ackman want to ‘zero-base’ and rebuild the government agencies from the ground up. That seems quite unlikely to happen, but I do think it could be interesting to have obviously competent business people (unlike Trump himself) take a look at the way the government operates. So, curious to see what happens on that front.
Some worries
But the tax cuts are a near certainty, and Trump and Elon have said multiple times that they want to enable to president to control the interest rate. Tariffs and tax cuts in themselves probably drive up inflation, and if Trump then forces the Fed to keep interest low, that creates a dangerous mix. But the part that I’m most worried about is foreign policy. Trump seems clearly set on voluntarily losing Cold War 2 against the new Axis Russia, China and Iran. That scares me. Europe’s faith would be in the hands of Germany, and I don’t know if they will step up. Japan and Korea will probably need to get nuclear weapons asap to deter China and North Korea. China will very probably become more and more aggressive in the pacific. The whole situation looks super scary to me.
As a quick aside: This explains also why radiation from phones and Wifi is not dangerous. Microwaves can do nothing else but warm things up. Even if you were to put your hand in a microwave oven, the only damage it would do is through heating. But it’s important that a phone’s signal is less than 1 Watt and a microwave is at least 500 times that amount of power.