Featured Links - May 8, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Dragon boaters on the bay

• Starship II: A Reprise. A week after his original article, Lavie Ohana looks at the future of the Starship program and sees hard times ahead. 
• We May Finally Know How Our Eyesight Evolved, And It's Not From Our Branch of Life. "New research suggests some components of vertebrate vision may not have been shaped incrementally as their genes passed down family lines, but were 'stolen' from entirely different branches of life."
• Climate Change Is Making Baseball Worse. "Baseball players are hitting more home runs. Is it sheer talent, or warmer air?"
• Inside the secret list of websites that make AI like ChatGPT sound smart. "Tech companies have grown secretive about what they feed the AI. So The Washington Post set out to analyze one of these data sets to fully reveal the types of proprietary, personal, and often offensive websites that go into an AI’s training data." (Paywall free)
• News Minimalist uses ChatGPT to pick the five most significant news stories of the day. You can get a daily newsletter with article summaries. The choices appear to be reasonable.
• Ads, overlays and paywalls, oh my! How to get around the web’s worst annoyances (updated). "Dwight Silverman says: " During my brief stint at Forbes, I wrote a newsletter item and subsequent story on how to get around the web’s biggest annoyances – intrusive ads, overlays and paywalls. Since that May 2021 piece, I’ve found some new tools and strategies. This is an updated version. Content from the original Forbes article is included with permission.)"
• What Are Puberty Blockers, and How Do They Work? "Decades of data support the use and safety of puberty-pausing medications, which give transgender adolescents and their families time to weigh important medical decisions." Scientific American helping to fight transphobe disinformation.