Archive: 2025-07

s3_unzip.sh - unzip large files on S3 — a script for downloading large zip files to an ec2 instance with mounted EBS, unzipping them, and writing them back. (2025-07-27 · gist, mlp, s3, script )

From April on the Trump cuts to NOAA, but that quote, /me gestures broadly — “If we don’t understand what’s happening and why it’s happening, you can’t be adapting. … You’re just going to suffer,” (2025-07-07 · climate, mlp, politics, quotable )

The mystery of em‑dashes: part two with quantitative evidence — The rise of em‑dashes in AI‑generated text happened because models are trained on older pre-digital text and an em-dash has a lower cost for LLM’s loss function over “, and”. (2025-07-07 · ai, language, mlp, punctuation, research )

Ethan Zuckerman data work to find statistically improbable restaurants — “Newark, NJ has the highest percentage of African restaurants and that Quincy, MA has the lowest proportion of Mexican restaurants of any American city over 100,000. (If you’ve been to Quincy, that tracks)” (2025-07-03 · data, ethan.zuckerman, food, geography, mlp, restaurant )

Paper looking at how to reduce the negative impact of data centers on the grid from the Nicholas Institute — 0.5% of flexibility around need for high availability power reduces nearly all the negative impact of data centers on the grid. Straightforward to achieve with batteries. (2025-07-03 · climate-hope, datacenter, energy, mlp, paper, study )

Kernza is a wheat-like perennial food crop with positive agricultural properties — Currently in the trough of disillusionment due to yields only 30% of wheat today but interesting. (2025-07-03 · agriculture, climate, climate-hope, crops, kernza, mlp, wheat )

Mamdani, Trump and the End of the Old Politics - The New York Times — On how Mamdani’s campaign centered listening vs speaking, video vs text, and online vs traditional media (2025-07-01 · attention, ezra.klein, mlp, podcast, politics, pundits, zohran.mamdani )

Mayoral Spew: Zohran Mamdani Won (Officially, Decisively) — “Cuomo actually got more votes this year than Eric Adams did in 2021, but Mamdani received over 117,000 more votes than Cuomo.” (2025-07-01 · attention, cuomo, hellsgate, mlp, nyc, politics, voting, zohran.mamdani )