I’ve been reading more articles lately, so I wanted to share some good ones.
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A corporate fraud bigger than Enron? Thread from @ramahluwalia detailing the accusations against Barry Silbert and DCG / Genesis. Another black eye for crypto but honey badger don’t care
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Jessica’s wonderful recounting of early YC days and the lessons she learned and advice she has for startup founders:
When it came to investing, I had something that my cofounders didn’t have: I was the Social Radar. I couldn’t judge our applicants’ technical ability, or even most of the ideas. My cofounders were experts at those things. I looked at qualities of the applicants my cofounders couldn’t see. Did they seem earnest? Were they determined? Were they flexible-minded? And most importantly, what was the relationship between the cofounders like? While my partners discussed the idea with the applicants, I usually sat observing silently. Afterward, they would turn to me and ask, “Should we fund them?”
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Must read from Cory Doctorow on the “enshittification” of the big internet platforms
Search Amazon for “cat beds” and the entire first screen is ads, including ads for products Amazon cloned from its own sellers, putting them out of business (third parties have to pay 45 percent in junk fees to Amazon, but Amazon doesn’t charge itself these fees). All told, the first five screens of results for “cat bed” are 50 percent ads.
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Thorough and accessible round-up of the longevity industry from Nathan Cheng. Wish he had the time to write more of these again!
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The New Yorker on the the present and future of AI:
Neal Stephenson imagined an artificially intelligent book called “A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer”; in effect, it was a chatbot, built specifically to teach the protagonist everything she needed to know, with lessons that were always pitched at the right level and that adapted to her curiosity and feedback—in other words, a perfectly designed curriculum.
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What it’s like to live poor. Many anecdotes that stick with me such as:
When someone is telling me they are or have been poor and I’m trying to determine how poor exactly they were, there’s one evergreen question I ask that has never failed to give me a good idea of what kind of situation I’m dealing with. That question is: “How many times have they turned off your water?”.
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Another Balaji banger on what I beliee is the main storyline with macro and US credit markets:
Jerome Powell and Janet Yellen are bond villains. They destroyed every institution that trusted their words in 2021. They said inflation was transitory and that they’d keep rates low even as late as November 2021. They sold billions in bonds on that false pretense. Then the Fed executed a surprise rate hike, devaluing all the bonds the government had just sold, and turning Treasuries into the new toxic waste.
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Gwern compendium of all things nicotine (tldr: worth trying for yourself)
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Reading this on Amazon ad business is interesting especially in context of Doctorow’s enshittification essay:
“Given [Amazon Ads] margin structure and incremental cost base, it’s highly likely to be generating similar absolute profits to [the Amazon Web Services cloud business].”
Napkin math based on Q2 2023 earnings checks out: AWS revenue hit $22B (at a 30% margin, that is $6.6B of operating profit) while Amazon ads hit $10.7B (at 68% margin, that is $7.3B of operating profit).
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One of the most creative thinkers on Twitter / X crypto right now, love this one reframing AI:
Augmenting humans with tools like Google and AI can accelerate our data, or experiential, age. You can also view this as “prosthetic experience”. Someone enhanced by these tools can posses greater knowledge and wisdom than their biological age suggests. If you’ve been using Google the last 20 years, you’ve accessed several human lifetimes of info compared to someone who had to go to the library and laboriously search through stacks of paper to figure out one thing. If you exist in certain esoteric nooks of Twitter, you’re probably at least a data centenarian.
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