About 18 months ago, I posted Topics I would read a deep dive on inspired by Gwern's questions page. Some Silk Road questions there were resolved (the original guy got pardoned, and the Silk Road 2 guy is out raising funds for a startup).
My own questions turned out not to be that relevant. Bill Clinton spoke at the DNC again, though support may waver one day.
An HBO documentary suggested a new candidate for Satoshi.
The Equal Rights Amendment got a nod from Biden (?). New-format talk shows were created and dissolved (Taylor Tomlinson), and Jon Stewart partially returned to The Daily Show while running a podcast. Some people went to jail for contempt of Congress. Yellowstone became the quintessential most-watched show with little media presence, and now every platform has a spinoff or similar show.
Tech
After a recent Reddit post about the deteriorating quality of the Transformers codebase, why don't they use a code-generation model to help with refactoring or making high-quality documentation? You don't need the whole codebase in context, just OG class, refactorable class, and internal knowledge of Transformers and Python.
This is more of a rhetorical 'why can't they?' because isn't it obvious that LLMs aren't good enough or reliable enough, even for this org with massive LLM infrastructure?
The highest-profile LLM bot on GitHub which I know about so far is gabyhealth from Go lang.
In 2024, the Defcon hacker conference had to change venues rather late, and hotel guests were still harassed by room searches. Security may have been looking for the Flipper Zero, which is relatively common (banned in Canada). There was a report on Hacker News that even conference badges (light-up circuit boards with pixel games) were deemed suspicious by hotel staff. Are they going to need to have advice about not having hardware out in your room / on casino floors?
Google used to have their own food ordering app (orderfood.google.com), and it disappeared in summer 2024 without a word? It was helpful for places with a small online presence. This might be connected to complaints about referrals and generating websites for businesses, but that goes back a couple of years.
Culture
Su Meck wrote a book about her amnesia recovery, and did a book tour in 2013–14. The most recent job on her LinkedIn started in 2018, and her Twitter stopped in 2021. Maybe she's taking an internet break? Can't help but wonder if she is alright.
Fast Radio Bursts are as scary as any other big cosmological thing out there. Something one kilometer wide in another galaxy periodically dumps out more energy than the sun and we don't know why?
Is the McDonald's employee who recognized Luigi a super-recognizer or was something else going on?
I am often reminded of a Tweet (?) that future historians will never believe that "Taylor Lorenz" was one real person. Every project that she does seems to polarize people not politically, but on whether each piece is doxxing, platforming, etc. Her channel now is often long-form content about infuriating characters, or how someone dealt with infuriating trolls, stuff like snark subreddits which are extremely relevant to TikTok and the more insane parts of online life, but I can't picture someone in my real life even acknowledging.
What is going on culturally that the K-drama Potato Lab had both an idealized rural drama and a Seoul chaebol office plotline?
I could read a long article about the Catholic church's process for verifying and planning saints' graves (based on what I learned in Kalaupapa) and validating miracles before beatification.
Did Chadwick Boseman tell someone to kill off his character in Avengers: Infinity War in case his health deteriorated?
Food
I was surprised by this YouTuber's video where she and her husband admit to never eating fish and chips before. They got a deep fried squid in a night market video so they're not especially picky eaters…?
Doing some reading, about 1 in 5 Americans said that they haven't had any seafood in the past month, and the stats vary a lot by race. Are there geographic trends, health anxiety, family history, an aversion to fishiness of fish? How does this vibe with the cultural perception of pescatarianism?
After reading that the American public was often unfamiliar with pizza in the 1940s, I liked this collection of early mentions of pizza. I swear there was one article where a lawyer or a reporter had to explain what a pizza was, but I couldn't find it.
The New York Times wrote that chicken tenders were only known in New Hampshire up until the 1980s. My mom confirmed that she hadn't heard of chicken fingers until after having kids. Is this real? The joke "chicken don't have fingers" was topical and new?
Misinformation
Many people tracked flights out of Damascus as the Assad regime fell, speculating if Assad might be headed to Kuwait, UAE, etc. One plane took an odd path before ending tracking southwest of Homs. There were 12+ hours of people posting and re-posting claims that Assad was shot down, when no one had ever produced information about the flight or images of a crash.
This was an interesting progression - the rumor mill was primed by the first claim (we can track Assad via random flight tracks). It sucked in some obsessive news watchers. Then the less-online public sees multiple accounts "confirming" a significant crash at the same time.
The plane later was connected to a Russian air base in Syria.
After the pardon of the Silk Road guy, many people started talking as if the site was rife with human trafficking and murders-for-hire. I can't tell if this was BlueAnon, general anti-Bitcoin sentiment, or anti-Trump politics, but it came out of nowhere considering this wasn't in any earlier discussion about Silk Road.
In the aftermath of the Trump attack, the InterestingAsFuck subreddit seemed to have the best handle on posting videos from multiple vantage points and information from witnesses, before devolving into political content (interesting or not). The "pics" subreddit and others were saturated by shitposts with safer, older photos. The subreddit has hyper-focused a few more times (most recently with the Luigi arrest and Elon Musk's salute). Is this the hazards of a popular less-modded subreddit, or something else?
I'm surprised how people misremember distinct events from the 2020s, for example a claim that covid "spread for months before it turned deadly". Some of this appears to be thinking that the current H5N1 must be / should be parallel to what happened in covid.
Similarly that the Harris campaign centered trans rights (notably absent from the DNC compared to 2016 and 2020) or that Trump won because he carried a majority of women or Gen Z voters (gained ground vs. 2020, but not the same thing at all).
Politics
Did Biden's Justice Department plan to ignore Donald Trump, time the trials for the 2024 primaries and screw up, or did it genuinely take years to collect evidence? Was a pardon or ambivalence on the table until the classified documents case?
The red-aura Independence Hall speech ("Battle for the Soul of the Nation" in September 2022) might be a significant point in the timeline, but I'm not sure how.
When conservative media made fun of Kamala Harris quotes, I noticed they're almost always tautologies ("When we talk about the children of the community, they are children of the community", "It is time for us to do what we have been doing. And that time is every day"). I am curious whether this is a tone-of-voice thing, media training gone wrong (always say A, if lost return to A), or something that she's done forever? Sometimes I catch myself doing the same thing to end a run-on sentence during an interview.
Was there a media-wide botching of the Matt Gaetz story? If the Justice Department gave up on his case, I feel like we have bad information or the FBI DGAF.
The 2024 Republican primary? There were MULTIPLE debates do any of those people make a peep today.
I was unconvinced with the original timeline for random busybodies uncovering General Petraeus's scandal. It looks like the story had to be cooked a bit more to get some details.
