Random facts 9 – things I learned recently – Hugh Howey: “I’ll write 2 books a year for 10 years. And at the end of that 10 years I’ll know if I’m a writer.

All of these costs will trend down until eventually it’s just like…the cloud. Like they’re all the same. You might use AWS or Oracle or IBM Cloud, they all have different purposes, but you don’t really care, but there might be lockin. You build your stack on AWS, it’s kinda expensive, you want to switch but it’s difficult… if I had to guess that’s how this plays out…
Turner Novak

Tunnel vision helps. Being a bit of a shit helps. A thick skin helps. Stamina is crucial, as is a capacity to work so hard that your best friends mock you, your lovers despair and the rest of your acquaintances watch furtively from the sidelines, half in awe and half in contempt. Luck helps—but only if you don’t seek it.

And the Portuguese rutter? That’s our death warrant, for of course it’s stolen. At least it was bought from a Portuguese traitor, and by their law any foreigner caught in possession of any rutter of theirs, let alone one that unlocks the Magellan, is to be put to death at once. And if the rutter is found aboard an enemy ship, the ship is to be burned and all aboard executed without mercy.

Alan Greenspan in 1966, when he was still in the private sector:
An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions…In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves

It is breathtaking how slow, substandard and unfocused many companies out there get through the day. And think nothing of it. The lack of energy is palatable. There is performance upside everywhere. As a leader, your opportunity is to reset in each of these dimensions. You do it in every single conversation, meeting, and encounter

In a system that depends on irresponsible government spending (especially for perpetual war) and fiat printing to cover that irresponsibility, alarm bells cannot be allowed to work. There must be no pure price signals. And above all, an alarm bell must not also serve as a life-raft that’s easily accessible to everyone, especially the general public, in the form of an ETF. There must be no escape hatch

The overall degree is negligible. In 2013, researchers found that the average degree of personalization in Google Search was 11.7%, of course varying widely by query and rank. Higher positions, for example, have a higher chance of being personalized than lower positions.11 A study from 2019 found that Google personalizes 2/10 results when searching for people and 4/10 for political parties. In other words, not much

When you’re healthy you have 10,000 needs, but when you’re sick you only have 1

marketplaces are fueled by two core properties: 1) discovery and curation (presenting things that users want to see and interact with), and 2) trust and reputation (providing assurances to users)

I think for most people who want to do great work, the right strategy is not to plan too much. At each stage do whatever seems most interesting and gives you the best options for the future. I call this approach “staying upwind.” This is how most people who’ve done great work seem to have done it

From Mercedes effectively renting you your accelerator pedal by the month to Internet of Things dishwashers that lock you into proprietary dish soap, enshittification is metastasising into every corner of our lives. Software doesn’t eat the world, it just enshittifies it.

Tyler Cowen, economist, professor, and founder of the popular blog Marginal Revolution, developed three laws while he was teaching macroeconomics. One: “There is something wrong with everything,” two: “There is a literature on everything” and three: “All propositions about real interest rates are wrong.”

Also, he changes one menu item every week. Has a massive spreadsheet that tells him what’s being ordered, profit margins on each item, etc. He gets rid of the least popular thing, tries something else. Every. Single. Week

The interesting thing about OnlyFans is that OF agencies use the models as image/video content to bait simps. However, many of the OF girls are unable to talk to so many simps at once and end up using virtual assistants who are following a script in an attempt to extract maximal value from simps by sending them prepared media from a google drive after the simp tips his final buck. Even if it is not real, it feels real to the end consumer and that is all that matters

They say movies are the shared dreams of the audience—that’s why they have to be experienced in the dark.

“Peter Thiel used to insist at PayPal that every single person could only do exactly one thing. And we all rebelled. You feel like it’s insulting to be asked to do just one thing.
But Peter would enforce this pretty strictly. He’d basically say: ‘I will not talk to you about anything else except for this one thing that I’ve assigned to you. I don’t want to hear about how great you’re doing in this other area. Just focus until you conquer this one problem.’…
The insight behind this is that most people will solve problems that they understand how to solve. Roughly speaking, they will solve B+ problems instead of A+ problems. A+ problems are high-impact problems for your company but they’re difficult–you don’t wake up in the morning with a solution to them, so you tend to procrastinate…
If you have a company that’s always solving B+ problems, you’ll never create the breakthrough idea because no one is spending 100% of their time banging their head against the wall every day until they solve it”

“Failure is the information you need to get where you’re going”
Every time in Delphi’s history when we expected or “needed” something to happen. It didn’t happen and ended up turning out for the better.
– We weren’t able to raise money to start our business so we bootstrapped it ourselves and today, Delphi is fully employee owned.
- We weren’t able to finish raising a fund, and today – Delphi Ventures is basically all prop capital.
- There were numerous times we *almost* got acquired and ended up saying no – and it’s resulted in us building up Delphi into a brand we’re proud to be building for the space first and foremost

When galaxies collide, the black holes at their center begin orbiting one another before merging, and astronomers have just identified the largest pair yet. Researchers estimate that the black holes at the center of elliptical galaxy B2 0402+379 (the Loop’s longtime favorite galaxy, obviously) weigh about 28 billion times the mass of the Sun.

Curse of Knowledge: The inability to communicate your ideas because you wrongly assume others have the necessary background to understand what you’re talking about.

Compassion Fade: People have more compassion for small groups of victims than larger groups, because the smaller the group the easier it is to identify individual victims.

Bottom line: There is room up in organizations to boost performance by amping up the pace and intensity. Considerable slack naturally exists in organizations to perform at much higher levels. The role of leadership is to convert that lingering potential into superlative results
—
We see in professional sports all the time how teams go almost overnight from losing to winning with basically the same roster, but different leadership. Call it what you want, the X factor, whatever, it is real. Anybody can dial into this, but not many do.
—
It is not easy because you will drive people out of their comfort zones. There will be resistance. Change is hard. Some will vote with their feet. If you want to be popular as a leader, this may not be for you. The role of a leader is to change the status quo, step up the pace, and increase the intensity. Leaders are the energy bunnies and pacemakers of the organization. Some people drain energy from organizations; not leaders, they engulf organizations with energy.

Open Source vs. Proprietary Models: Zhu discusses the ongoing debate between open-source and proprietary AI models. He predicts that open-source models will eventually catch up with, if not surpass, their proprietary counterparts. This viewpoint reflects his belief in the democratization of AI technology and skepticism toward the long-term dominance of closed, proprietary systems.

If you’re not nervous it doesn’t mean anything to you — Justin Thomas

The inevitable direction of history is that the vast majority of AI systems will be built on top of open source platforms – Yann Lecun

“Deep learning, which is fundamentally a technique for recognizing patterns, is at its best when all we need are rough-ready results, where stakes are low and perfect results optional“ Still true

Your worst day is a chance to show your best qualities, to stand out, and to learn an enormous amount about yourself. Very few people plan or prepare for what they’ll do and how they’ll act during those times. Those who do might well end up turning their worst day into their best

In short, it will FEEL like a regular bear cycle, but in reality the game has changed for BTC and ETH – forever.
This means the window in time for the average non rich person to get generational exposure to BTC and ETH is closing, very rapidly
—
Essentially, most people will be priced out of owning 10 ETH or 1 BTC.
I also believe that going forward alts will be less appealing each cycle as people just prefer the concensus trade of BTC and ETH that are guaranteed to go up due to ETF flows + because of new market participants size, you could still get 20-50% per year, with way less downside risk.
As such I think people will be less interested in altcoins.
This mimics how the S&P500 works, with basically 4-6 massive tech firms, like Google, apple, amazon, meta etc. Propping up the entire thing

Hugh Howey (on Tim Ferriss): I’ll write 2 books a year for 10 years. And at the end of that 10 years I’ll know if I’m a writer.

The trouble with Xi Jinping is that he is 60 percent correct on all the problems he sees, while his government’s brute force solutions reliably worsen things. Are housing developers taking on too much debt? Yes, but driving many of them to default and triggering a collapse in the confidence of homebuyers hasn’t improved matters. Does big tech have too much power? Fine, but taking the scalps of entrepreneurs and stomping out their businesses isn’t boosting sentiment. Does the government need to rein in official corruption? Definitely, but terrorizing the bureaucracy has also made the policymaking apparatus more paralyzed and risk averse. It’s starting to feel like the only thing scarier than China’s problems are Beijing’s solutions.

“When you cook for yourself there’s love in there”

“resilience matters in success…I don’t know how to teach it to you except for, ‘I hope suffering happens to you’..greatness comes from character & character…is formed out of people who suffered..I wish upon you ample doses of pain & suffering” – Jensen Huang

We are in a “Tower of Babel” moment of AI research, where hundreds of thousands of scientists, engineers, and technologists are collectively using the same language to tackle every engineering problem under the sun.

As I usually do, I’ve appended our 1997 letter, our first letter to shareholders. It gets more interesting every year that goes by, in part because so little has changed. I especially draw your attention to the section entitled ‘‘It’s All About the Long Term.’’

that an effective technique of conversion consists basically in the inculcation and fixation of proclivities and responses indigenous to the frustrated mind.

A counterculture is blowback. It’s intentionally offensive to establishment beliefs. Find it repellent? Good, it’s meant to gatekeep you.

Norwegian endurance training hack: high volume lactate threshold training. Train just below lactate threshold so you can do a lot more volume instead of at or above which requires a lot more recovery

More than a thousand years before Christ, Zarathustra preached the existence of a heaven and a hell, the idea of a bodily resurrection, the promise of a universal savior who would one day be miraculously born to a young maiden, and the expectation of a final cosmic battle that would take place at the end of time between the angelic forces of good and the demonic forces of evil.

in 2016, Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo AI challenged 14-time world champion Lee Sedol and won four out of five games. The next revision of AlphaGo was completely out of reach for human players: it won 60 straight games, taking down just about every notable Go player in the process.

the Bell Labs patent lawyers wanted to know why some people were so much more productive (in terms of patents) than others. After crunching a lot of data, they found that the only thing the productive employees had in common (other than having made it through the Bell Labs hiring process) was that “Workers with the most patents often shared lunch or breakfast with a Bell Labs electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist. It wasn’t the case that Nyquist gave them specific ideas. Rather, as one scientist recalled, ‘he drew people out, got them thinking'”

Once you make a decision, go all in.
Commit fully to your choices. Half-hearted efforts yield half-hearted results.
Indecision only leads to stagnation and missed opportunities.
Stay committed to your goals, even when faced with obstacles and setbacks. Perseverance is single-handedly the most important key to achieving a goals.

we’ll see Software 2.0 subsume more and more of the existing Software 1.0 stacks, resulting in more compact human-written codebases with the bulk of engineering complexity offloaded to data and learning. One of the most profound benefits of end-to-end machine learning is that it can drastically reduce the amount of code needed. Before deep learning, the AI backing Google Translate was roughly a 500,000-line codebase. After deep learning, a single neural network could be expressed in about 500 lines of TensorFlow code, with the bulk of “translation knowledge” now replaced with data.

Bezos shareholder letters
—
I invite you to please read the section entitled It’s All About the Long Term, as it is the best way I know to help make sure we’re the kind of company you want to be invested in. As we wrote there, we don’t claim it’s the right philosophy, we just claim it’s ours!
—
We are doubly-blessed. We have a market-size unconstrained opportunity in an area where the underlying foundational technology we employ improves every day. That is not normal.

Hayek would in particular focus on the function and effect of prices. Prices, he went on to explain in the following years, are the market’s decentralized and socially scalable means of communication. Although established as a simple function of supply and demand for goods and services in an economy, Hayek described how prices actually embed a wide array of relevant information that individuals require to make economic decisions.

Bitcoin is the most successful financial meme since gold and even at today’s all-time high, all the bitcoin in the world is still only worth about 1/14 of all the gold in the world.
Unlike the gold meme, which has infected about as many minds as it ever will, the bitcoin meme is growing — and it’s growing in a time when 1) people have more money than ever to invest and 2) people are more than ever looking for lottery-ticket type investments

Financial Nihilism goes hand in hand with Populism – a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups

The dirty secret of influencer marketing: ~80%+ of influencers DO NOT CARE about anything but $
I see this happen 24/7 in my space. They don’t care about product quality, brand (theirs or the brand they’re repping), their audience, etc. They just want $$$
The reasons why are simple:
– They don’t make a lot of $ (even large accounts)
– This is usually their 1st business venture
– They suffer from extreme short-term thinking / high time preference
– They don’t understand how brand is built
– They can be quite entitled

Peter Thiel on The Power Law of Distribution:
“One distribution method is likely to be far more powerful than every other for any given business:
Distribution follows a power law of its own.
This is counterintuitive for most entrepreneurs, who assume that more is more. But the kitchen sink approach—employ a few salespeople, place some magazine ads, and try to add some kind of viral functionality to the product as an afterthought—doesn’t work. Most businesses get zero distribution channels to work. Poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure. If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business.”

Perhaps the most important insight NASA has gleaned from studying team dynamics—in space and on Earth—is the preciousness of one trait in particular: a sense of humour. Studies of crews overwintering at the South Pole show that a confined group needs people to fulfil various roles, including leader, storyteller and social secretary. But the most important task by far is that of the clown, a person who is funny and also wise enough to understand each member of the group and defuse tensions. Laughter, as much as courage, will sustain astronauts on their long quest to Mars.

The guy I know who is the best at friendships (also a spectacular salesman) keeps proposing plans. I asked him why once & he told me:
People get busy. If you want to be their friend, don’t take it personally & keep asking.
He did this with me & he eventually became one of the few genuine, lifelong friends I’ve made in adulthood.

Studies show that by adding physical activity to our lives, we become more socially active—it boosts our confidence and provides an opportunity to meet people. The vigor and motivation that exercise brings helps us establish and maintain social connections.

That’s why mottoes such as Google’s “Don’t be evil” and Facebook’s “Make the world more open and connected” mattered; they instilled a sense of mission in workers

Nothing is Something: “The most underutilized parenting strategy is doing nothing.”– Dr. Becky Kennedy

When Facebook was telling MySpace users they needed to escape Murdoch’s crapulent Australian social media panopticon, it didn’t just say to those Myspacers, “Screw your friends, come to Facebook and just hang out looking at the cool privacy policy until they get here.” It gave them a bot. You fed the bot your MySpace username and password, and it would login to MySpace and pretend to be you, scraping everything waiting in your inbox and copying it to your Facebook inbox
—
When Microsoft was choking off Apple’s market oxygen by refusing to ship a functional version of Microsoft Office for the Mac in the 1990s — so that offices were throwing away their designers’ Macs and giving them PCs with upgraded graphics cards and Windows versions of Photoshop and Illustrator — Steve Jobs didn’t beg Bill Gates to update Mac Office. He got his technologists to reverse-engineer Microsoft Office and make a compatible suite, the iWork Suite, whose apps, Pages, Numbers and Keynote could read and write Microsoft’s Word, Excel and PowerPoint files

Obviously the most exciting story to write will be the one you want to read. The reason I mention this case explicitly is that so many people get it wrong. Instead of making what they want, they try to make what some imaginary, more sophisticated audience wants. And once you go down that route, you’re lost

The signals have changed over the years: After horse equipage, it was Hermès trunks for traveling by rail, then large Hermès bags for day trips by automobile, and then small Hermès handbags for everyday use (originally sized to fit in the overhead bin of an airplane

The first modern LLM, Jeremy Howard’s ULMFit, was trained on Wikipedia. GPT was trained on a corpus of books. GPT-2 was trained on the reddit-curated “WebText,” corpus, i.e., a crawl of websites linked on Reddit. GPT-3 expanded the dataset scope to web text from CommonCrawl. Data selectivity trended downward as data volume and diversity requirements went up.

It is one of the main tasks of a real leader to mask the grim reality of dying and killing by evoking in his followers the illusion that they are participating in a grandiose spectacle…

Puzzlingly though, despite facing an increased risk of skin cancer, people who are exposed to lots of sun appear to have longer life expectancies, on average, than sun avoiders.

—

Prior editions:

Your relationship with time (from Auren Hoffman)

Really thought provoking piece from Auren (his podcast is great too):

https://auren.substack.com/p/seconds-to-strategy-how-your-relationship

To quote:

There are five types of time:
1. Micro Time (sub-second)
2. Engagement Time (Seconds)
3. Business Time (Minutes to Hours)
4. Strategy Time (Days to Weeks)
5. Big-Thinking Time (Months to Years)

If forced to choose, I’m probably a 3. Leaning towards 4.

I also wonder how correlated this is with age and context. For example in university, I was definitely more 2, and during my Wall Street internship I was very 1 and 2.

And:

If you are one of those people that has a great “gut”, you likely should be in a career where quick-time decisions rule. The more you trust your gut, the more you should choose a profession where you are making decisions quickly.

And:

The longer the timescale you are optimizing for, the more you should spend reading (and gathering information). The shorter your timescale, the more you should spend doing (for muscle memory).

Definitely going in the bible.

Fascinating analysis of AI’s effects on freelancer hiring demand: everyone wants a chatbot

Bloomberry Jobs Report

tldr: writing, translation, & customer service jobs declined; everyone wants a chatbot, apparently

A few excerpts:

To my pleasant surprise, most of the job categories actually had an increase in the number of jobs since ChatGPT was released, with the exception of 3 categories that had large declines in jobs.

The above is important to keep in mind for AI luddite doomsayers; as the history of technology has repeatedly shown, though there may be short term disruption and harm to labor, the long term trend is that technology = more (newer and better) jobs

I was surprised to see graphics design, video editing/production, and even software development jobs go up, given all the anecdotal stories we’ve been hearing about people using ChatGPT to generate code, illustrations and even full featured videos.

And surprising on first blush, although perhaps logical if you assume good general purpose AI has reduced the need for specialized ML:

While there was a initial increase in data annotation jobs, the # of data annotation jobs have been fairly flat in the past 10 months. And the # of machine learning jobs has actually decreased a bit since ChatGPT was released.

Finally, I guess everyone loves to chat:

The most popular use case, by far for AI right now is in developing chatbots

Full article: https://bloomberry.com/i-analyzed-5m-freelancing-jobs-to-see-what-jobs-are-being-replaced-by-ai/

Random facts – things I learned (March 8 2024) – “if you make an effort in training when you don’t especially feel like making it, the payoff is that you will win games when you are not feeling your best”

RANDOM FACTS

I think he’s a genius because he’s solved a huge problem, which is that writing is really lonely. And it’s brutal to sit down and be by yourself and write. He eliminated it, first, by the dictation, by having the typist. And now he’s totally eliminated it by having a roomful of people. It’s a hell of a lot more fun than sitting alone in a room and feeling depressed

Like, wow, an AI that can write a Reddit comment! Well, there are millions of Reddit comments, which is precisely why we now have AIs good at writing them. Wow, an AI that can generate music! Well, there are millions of songs, which is precisely why we now have AIs good at creating them.
Call it the supply paradox of AI: the easier it is to train an AI to do something, the less economically valuable that thing is. After all, the huge supply of the thing is how the AI got so good in the first place.

Policymakers want wealth-flation (assets go up) but not pleb-flation (because that leads to unrest and protest)

More recent efforts to optimize The Pile (and its relatives) for language model training arrived at the same conclusion: more web text makes the model smarter. This is counterintuitive: doesn’t the median quality level of web text pale in comparison to hand-picked high quality text corpora? The answer seems to be diversity: web text, for all its failings, has nearly every conceivable usage of language

In May of last year, Andrej Karpathy tweeted his view of the sufficient conditions for good datasets, and so strong models: ‘Large, Clean, Diverse’.

jobs like generating AI content, developing AI agents, integrating OpenAI/ChatGPT APIs, and developing AI apps are becoming the rage. But by far the #1 use case? Chatbots, with the # of jobs related to developing chatbots exploding 2000% since the release of ChatGPT and the OpenAI API. If there is a killer use case for AI today, it’s in developing chatbots.

There is a long tradition of this: The first automobile (pictured above) looked like a horse-drawn carriage without the horse, early telephones looked like telegraph systems, early movies looked like filmed plays.
YouTube became one of the biggest winners of Web2 because it broke this skeuomorphic mold by being the first video-hosting service to go all-in on user-generated content.

To my pleasant surprise, most of the job categories actually had an increase in the number of jobs since ChatGPT was released, with the exception of 3 categories that had large declines in jobs.
The 3 categories with the largest declines were writing, translation and customer service jobs. The # of writing jobs declined 33%, translation jobs declined 19%, and customer service jobs declined 16%

A single layer perceptron (SLP) is a feed-forward network based on a threshold transfer function. SLP is the simplest type of artificial neural networks and can only classify linearly separable cases with a binary target

But, then, perhaps the Genoan was like those clever men who never know more than they need and believe only what it is in their interests to believe

The thrill of winning is in direct proportion to the effort I put in before. I also know, from long experience, that if you make an effort in training when you don’t especially feel like making it, the payoff is that you will win games when you are not feeling your best – Rafa Nadal’s memoir

“With GrubWithUs we learned that friction can kill marketplaces. On eBay, you could have 300 sellers who were listing the exact size of shoe you were looking for, and you would have to sort through ratings, comments, shipping information to find exactly what you need. We wanted to remove that friction from the experience. And since we’re an authenticated marketplace, people could trust that they would receive exactly what they ordered,” says Lu.

Pluto takes 247.94 Earth years to orbit the Sun. According to my calculations, the Plutonian year that started on July 4, 1776 will end this year on June 12, 2024

Google groups users based on their past behavior to predict what they want. Think about it like Amazon’s “other shoppers also bought”. Multiplied by hundreds of billions of searches, strong patterns emerge

The heavier an animal, the easier it dies from a fall. You can drop an ant over 15,000x its height (~1,250 feet) and it won’t die. Squirrels can be dropped 150x their height. Humans die around 10x our height. If you drop an elephant just 1x its height (~10 feet) it dies.
The bigger you are, the harder it is to reproduce, gestation times take longer. Ant eggs hatch within a couple weeks of being laid. Humans take 9 months. Rhinos 17 months. Elephants take nearly 2 years.

When you read biographies of people who’ve done great work, it’s remarkable how much luck is involved. They discover what to work on as a result of a chance meeting, or by reading a book they happen to pick up. So you need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions.

just get 1% better at whatever you’re working toward each day and you’re guaranteed to make progress

…there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing – not much, but enough that they miss fame – PG

There are five types of time:
1. Micro Time (sub-second)
2. Engagement Time (Seconds)
3. Business Time (Minutes to Hours)
4. Strategy Time (Days to Weeks)
5. Big-Thinking Time (Months to Years)

Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous: “You can’t think your way to right action; you can only act your way to right thinking.”

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

In practicing a skill in the initial stages, something happens neurologically to the brain that is important for you to understand. When you start something new, a large number of neurons in the frontal cortex (the higher, more conscious command area of the brain) are recruited and become active, helping you in the learning process.

The least and most successful among the Italian Americans were the most ardent admirers of Mussolini’s revolution; the least and most successful among the Irish Americans were the most responsive to De Valera’s call; the least and most successful among the Jews are the most responsive to Zionism; the least and most successful among the Blacks are the most race conscious.

Your body is in elimination mode in the morning and drinking water kick-starts your body’s functions and assists in the elimination process. This helps you to feel energised and replenished ready for a great day

Tom Hanks on acting: Hit the marks and tell the truth!

out of the three core layers of internet stack – naming (DNS), transportation (TCP/IP) and application (HTTP), naming is at the very start of the stack

On February 22, 2024, the closing price of the Nikkei Stock Average surpassed the record high of 38,915.87 yen set on December 29, 1989, the peak of the bubble economy. This was the first time in 34 years

Scientific literature shows that adults who exercised for at least 30 minutes a day slept an average of 15 minutes longer than those who did not exercise [19]. Other studies have shown that physical activity can help to reduce sleep disorders, such as insomnia, daytime sleepiness, and sleep apnea [15,19,20]

Amateurs have a goal. Professionals have a system.

Doing the same thing every day seems easy but it actually isn’t

If you don’t believe in God, it may help to remember this great line of Geneen Roth’s: that awareness is learning to keep yourself company. And then learn to be more compassionate company, as if you were somebody you are fond of and wish to encourage.

What does “tape out” mean in chip manufacturing?
The term “tape-out” is used in chip design to signify the completion of the design phase and the start of manufacturing. Originating from older days when the final design was written onto magnetic tape and sent out for fabrication, the term has endured as a symbolic milestone

I should make sure that I’m sufficiently exhausted from working that no one can keep me up at night. That’s really the only thing I can control. – Jensen Huang

We’ve since come to understand that actual biological neurons are substantially more complex than our early models of them, and neural networks have virtually no similarities to the design of actual brains. For instance, the common locust uses a single neuron for implementing its collision detection while flying. This is done through complex dendritic integration, which cannot be represented by our simplified neuron models with linear summation.

Participants who were genetically biased not to have a tend-and-befriend response got the biggest health benefit of being prosocial. The scientists speculated that caring for others can jump-start the oxytocin system, even if you have a genetic predisposition that makes a tend-and-befriend response less likely.

A great surprise that emerges from the genome revolution is that in the relatively recent past, human populations were just as different from each other as they are today, but that the fault lines across populations were almost unrecognizably different from today.

I think as technical people we have a strong bias to put up code or papers or the final thing and feel like things are mostly self-explanatory. It’s there, and also it’s commented, there is a Readme, so all is well, and if people don’t engage then it’s just because the thing is not good enough. But the reality is that there is still a large barrier to engage with your thing (even for other experts who might not feel like spending time/effort!), and you might be leaving somewhere 10-100X of the potential of that exact same piece of work on the table just because you haven’t made it sufficiently accessible

Morgan Housel gets his best ideas while walking. In an interview, he said, “If I ever get some sort of writer’s block, or I’m just trying to think an article through, I go for walks. I go for two or three walks per day, and that’s where all of the writing happens, and I usually take notes when I walk.”
—
I think the most interesting part of the paper is the finding that walking improves creativity not due to environmental stimulation, but due to walking itself. Whether outdoors or on a treadmill, walking improved the generation of novel and appropriate ideas. Surprisingly, this effect extends to sitting after a walk

One ought to go too far, in order to know how far one can go.

I don’t, for the record, think we are at an iPhone moment when it comes to virtual reality, by which I mean the moment where multiple technological innovations intersect in a perfect product. What is exciting, though, is that a lot of the pieces — unlike three years ago — are in sight. Sora might not be good enough, but it will get better; Groq might not be cheap enough or fast enough, but it, and whatever other competitors arise, will progress on both vectors. And Meta and Apple themselves have not, in my estimation, gotten the hardware quite right. You can, however, see a path from here to there on all fronts

Prior editions:

The killer app comes first (in both crypto and AI)

In crypto there’s a constant chicken and egg debate of apps versus infrastructure. Which is more important? Which accrues more value? As an entrepreneur, which should I build?

For me, this 2018 article effectively settles the debate: https://www.usv.com/writing/2018/10/the-myth-of-the-infrastructure-phase/

The answer: It depends what part of the cycle we’re in.

But when you look at the history of general technologies, the killer app comes first. The infrastructure follows.

For example, light bulbs (the app) were invented before there was an electric grid (the infrastructure). You don’t need the electric grid to have light bulbs. But to have the broad consumer adoption of light bulbs, you do need the electric grid, so the breakout app that is the light bulb came first in 1879, and then was followed by the electric grid starting 1882. (The USV team book club is now reading The Last Days Of Night about the invention of the light bulb).

You could say a series of technological breakthroughs (eg, the right filaments, the right glass container) enabled the first “killer app” (💡💡💡) which then incentivized the infra.

Another example:

Planes (the app) were invented before there were airports (the infrastructure). You don’t need airports to have planes. But to have the broad consumer adoption of planes, you do need airports, so the breakout app that is an airplane came first in 1903, and inspired a phase where people built airlines in 1919, airports in 1928 and air traffic control in 1930 only after there were planes

Same pattern here: a series of new technologies (lightweight engines, proper control mechanisms) enabled the first “killer app” (🛫🛫🛫) which then incentivized the infra.

Crypto’s first killer app is right under our noses: Bitcoin itself.

The killer app was Bitcoin! And what it represents: a sovereign store of value tied to an uncensorable payment network.

Satoshi’s technology breakthrough enabled the killer app (Bitcoin) which has now enabled more than a decade of crypto infrastructure buildout, from alternative Layer 1s to smart contracts to new blockchain primitives.

In generative AI, I think a similar pattern is also unfolding:

ChatGPT was the first AI killer app. The lightbulb moment. 100M+ users within months of launch and one of the fastest growing consumer apps of all time.

ChatGPT opened investors eyes’, blew users’ minds, and now everyone from Google to Softbank to the CCP are spending billions ($7 trillion??) to build and buy AI infrastructure.

And steadily and surely, much of this infrastructure investment and innovation will make AI better, faster, and cheaper. Then more killer apps will be built atop all the GPUs, foundation models, and SDKs. Which then begets more infra. And the cycle continues.