It's now been almost a year since the New York Times put together this technically impressive yet totally wrong interactive article about how long it would take to get a Covid vaccine.
Turns out that fungus doesn't take over the ant's brain, as thought, but rather creates an internal network of fungus cells that controls the limbs. "The ant ends its life as a prisoner in its own body. Its brain is still in the driver’s seat, but the fungus has the wheel."
Ukrainians put 8,000 cellphones connected to microphones on 6-foot poles around the country to detect incoming Russian drones. They detected 84/84 and shot down 80 of them with AA guns. Cost: $500ea
--- Gen James B Hecker, Commander US Air Forces, Europe
But if you think of WeWork as a massive transfer of wealth from Saudi Arabia to an Israeli entrepreneur via an ethnic-Korean Japanese visionary it's really a heart-warming story of cross-cultural trade worthy of the Model UN
Elon: It's going to blow up, the only question is where. Anything above the tower is a win.
What happens: Clears the tower, makes it through Max-Q, gets to 39Km
New York Times:
Hearing from tech startups getting priced out of Oakland warehouse space because of soaring demand for indoor hydroponic pot farms.
Yes, because it's 2019 and everything is nuts *techies are being gentrified out of neighborhoods by drug dealers*
Another extraordinary night with ChatGPT4 writing ML code. This flow works best:
"Write code to train x with dataset y"
"I'm getting this error. Fix it"
"Another error" (etc for a while)
"Now improve the performance"
"Now wrap it in a GUI"
Weeks of work done in 2 hours
It's time for schools to teach Python, not Java, as their main intro to computer science. Along with being easier to learn and *actually* able to run anywhere on anything (like Basic back in the day), it's the dominant language of AI and computer vision
This is like a scene in a sci-fi movie, but it's real. Must-read technical explanation of how AlphaZero taught itself chess. What we're seeing is nothing less than AI's revealing that for all our intelligence and evolution, we've been stuck in local minima
Probably the best way to see the declining severity of Covid (CFR) is the global daily case vs deaths graph.
Since April, daily cases have risen 5x while daily deaths have *fallen*
I've reached the "anger" stage of coming to grips with life in a ChatGPT world -- I'm angry about all the hours I've spent over the years trying to do hard things in code by searching StackOverflow, random blogs, obscure documentation etc. Feels like all that time was wasted
Another day of record low covid deaths in the US (just 209)
Even the hardest-hit states like Texas & Florida that are a month into their spike in cases (in other words, enough time for deaths to catch up) aren't seeing a rise in deaths. This bodes well..
The goal of all tinkering men is to gradually accumulate an entire hardware store & electronics store in their home workshop
Eventually they die. Their survivors have no idea what to do with all of this stuff, so they have a garage sale visited by tinkerers & the cycle continues
To their credit, the NYT allowed you to try, by clicking, all sorts of (implausible, they suggested) accelerants like fastrack regulatory approval and building factories ahead of approval. But no combination of options got you to how fast we actually got the vaccine.
What's particularly baffling is that more than a dozen vaccines were already in trials *when that article was written*. Thus defaulting most of the purported delays, like "academic research" and "preclinical", to zero
My "Nerd Urban Dictionary" list of fancy words nerds use to prove how smart they are now has more than 200 entries!
I'll bet you're guilty of a few of them (I know I am)
As far as I can tell every advanced software technology, from AI to VR to CV to 3D audio, is just matrix multiplications. If your kids ask why they have to learn linear algebra in high school, that's why.
I don't have as good an answer for long division
The quality of a UI design is inversely proportional to the number of stickers you have to put on it to guide users on what to do.
Oakland Airport's disastrous *new* parking lot gates. Unbelievably even worse than their old ones. Who sold them these?
But even traditional attenuated/killed vaccines (like China's) got out faster than this timeline.
This reminds me of the Erlich/Simon debate. People so often discount the effect of innovation under pressure cc
@stewartbrand
Here's the original NYT piece.
I'm trying to understand why so many people underestimated our ability to get a vaccine (to say nothing of such an effective one) in less than 12 months. Part of it is that mRNA vaccines were still new; they didn't have confidence that they would work.
Zuck says in this interview that the main barrier to AGI soon is energy, which expands at regulatory, not technological, pace. He notes that there has yet to be a gigawatt data center.
Data centers used to have to be placed close to demand, for speed reasons. But AI training is
This is a good rule of thumb from
@vboykis
about which software tool to use, depending on how much data you have (I've never gone beyond pandas myself)
I've been keeping a list of words nerds use to sound smart ("smarty signalling"). I'm guilty of some but not all.
Add to it in the comments here:
cc
@smc90
@emckean
@jopearl
While AI is having a summer, robotics is stuck in winter. While the perception problems have been largely solved (thanks to AI), the other robotics problems -- understanding, planning, grasping, energy, flexibility, judgement, etc -- need breakthroughs.
If Silicon Valley (10x innovation) is terrified of China (20x innovation), how does Europe (1x innovation) feel? Extra-terrified or just reconciled to being a nice place to vacation and send your kids to school? Or...?
Top 5 things I've been wrong about recently & why:
1) Desktop manufacturing (3D printers, CNC) goes mainstream. Too hard, no killer app
2) Open source hardware (as opposed to software). Cloners didn't reciprocate, HW followed smartphones in complexity, got too hard for amateurs
@bobmcmillan
If you clicked all the most optimistic options, despite the article repeatedly telling you how foolish that would be, you would still have been more pessimistic than reality
This is what I was so excited about. Nvidia finally has a $99 dev board... they got it SO right. 20-40x the power of RaspberryPi w/ full Ubuntu & Jetson SDK support (which is where other "RPi killers" fail). Plus RPi-compatible I/O.
This was MADE for
@DIYRobocars
and
@DIYDrones
This is brilliant:
1) Fall woefully behind in a technology
2) Realize that you have no chance of ever catching up
3) Declare that the technology that you can't do is evil and promise to do no more of it
4) Write a letter to Congress
5) Profit!
Interesting how much of the day California is using 100% renewable electricity. It's most of the workday
Also note how batteries (shown here as black) are smoothing out the transitions
Here'e some perspective on how the US is faring versus Europe in the spread of Covid
On a per-capita basis, of the European majors only Germany has done better than the US in death rate
Today's
#covid19
stats from the
@WHO
. China now seems well under control. South Korea and Iran up a bit, Italy down a bit. Still surprisingly low numbers from the US (probably due to very limited testing)
One thing that allowed the modern drone industry to innovate so fast is that most of the core patents were filed by aerospace companies back in the mid-twentieth century and have since expired. The quadcopter patent, for example, was filed in 1962
Must watch: AlphaGo, the mind-blowing documentary about the epic competition between Google's AI & the best Go player in the world. It brilliantly captures an inflection point in humanity--and the game of Go. Could be a Black Mirror episode, but it's real
Today robotics is approx 60% computer science, 30% electrical engineering and 10% mechanical engineering. A few decades ago it was primarily mechanical. Standard embedded computing platforms, from RaspberryPi to Android, changed everything
This is super cynical, but when I see a news story I immediately look for the metadata: Who manipulated the journalist to write this?
Business story: the company or its enemies?
Environment: which NGO?
Labor: which Union?
Politics: don't even get me started
Some quick thoughts on new Intel Lidar:
Price of $349 is very compelling. It's described as a "Lidar Camera", but it's essentially a solid-state Lidar. It returns 23m pixels points/sec in a 70°x55° cone with 9m range. That's very high def
I'm impressed
Why would anyone use Clubhouse again knowing that anything you say, even in an unguarded moment, can be recorded and used to cancel you?
It's like Russian roulette with a microphone
Some personal/professional news: I'll be joining
@kittyhawkcorp
(Larry Page & Sebastian Thrun's eVTOL company) as COO as part of a 3DR acquisition. The path from drones to remotely-piloted passenger aircraft is becoming increasingly clear, especially from a FAA cert basis...
Inequality is not a bug in the US system; it's a feature. That's what it means to be a capitalism-based country: maximum opportunity invariably leads to inequality. Our "safety net" is widespread prosperity. Our job is to push that as far and wide as possible
San Francisco just stopped enforcing the law about five years ago. Traffic, shoplifting, drug use, car break-ins, etc
If nothing else, the catastrophic results will be fodder for a generation of economists & social scientists to digest & learn from. And in the meantime, a prod
This is really an amazing statistic. Turns out most people who wanted pot were already finding ways to get it. Supply grew 100x and demand grew maybe 2x and here we are.
Warehouses full of unsellable pot
It's now clear that we're all going to keep calling this place "Twitter" the way we kept calling him "Prince" after he became the artist-formerly-known-as glyph.
Also the way people on the East Coast give directions: "take a left where the church used to be"
It's upsetting but true that 80% of startups are inevitable zeros (which becomes obvious in the first 1-3 years), 5% are obvious hits (also soon obvious) and 15% are going to take longer--often as much as a decade--to know whether they're going to be 0x, 1x or 10x returns
My daughter's immigrant friend, asked during her dissertation defense why she had not dealt with the Marxist interpretation of her topic: "I grew up in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. I do not indulge in recreational Marxism."
Great point by
@ylecun
in this
@lexfridman
interview: language is not acquired by infants until they already understand the basics of how the physical world works. So much physics is so ingrained it's not described in language & is thus unavailable to LLMs
One of the great things about the AI boom is that now we have a real transformative platform everyone can now admit that Web3 and the Metaverse were total BS.
Silicon Valley always has to have a Big New Thing and while waiting for a real one, we must invent fake ones
All the big profit pools in tech fall into two classes:
1) Exploiting human weakness (fashion, social, vaping, consumerism, etc)
2) Transcending human weakness (AI, robotics, frictionless marketplaces in property, finance, etc)
I'm always on team
#2
Perspective: I took over
@Wired
in 2001 in the worst of crash & 9/11. It was best time to do so for 3 reasons:
1) Great talent available
2) Market failings obscured my own. Cover to make tough changes
3) A year from now, your YoYs are going to look amazing
The decline in drone prices is nothing short of astounding.
This thing has HD video transmitted by WiFi to iOS and Android app, a proper controller, sun shade, etc.
$15.86 with free shipping. How is this even possible?
This is not an original thought, but after countless pitch meetings, it's clear we need more domain experts & fewer technologists starting companies.
We need better problem definition, in both economic & socio/cultural adoption framing, not better tech (tech is the easy part)
One silver lining: the year's influenza epidemic is ending much sooner than last year's thanks to all the precautions.
Could represent a cumulative savings of thousands of deaths
The last two "AI" company pitches I got were literally using the standard
@TensorFlow
demos, unmodified. Are there any VCs out there still falling for this?
Last year I wrote a chapter for an AI book. I'm now told that it's scheduled for publication in....Spring 2019. Traditional publishing is like putting writing in a time capsule and hoping it's still interesting when it's dug up.
Exciting announcement from
@UberATG
at today's
@DIYRobocars
event. "Micromobility" = autononomous scooters & bikes that can drive themselves to charging or better locations. Hiring now
A strong candidate for the greatest speech ever given by a venture capitalist.
@KTmBoyle
crushed it, both with a rousing call to arms and the powerful theme of "how to win a war against America?", when that war is not armed conflict but our own internal self-destruction
Shockingly, the new Microsoft Edge browser is better than Chrome and I've switched (for now). My fan isn't on all the time and I've got memory to spare.
If you use Windows, try it -- you might be impressed
Competition is good
I'm re-skimming the Feynman Lectures, which made a huge impact on me when I was young, and realized that half the value is just in the table of contents.
If each one of these entries sparks a burst of recollection, you've done well. (There are 12 of these across the 3 volumes)
Definitely feeling an end to car culture. Have to twist my kids' arms to get them to apply for a driver's license and have no interest in upgrading my own car, a thrashed old Toyota. Would rather take Lyft than drive my own car.
On the sad occasion of
@Make
's shutdown (temporary, I hope), I wanted to call out five companies that have managed the "Maker -> Pro" path successfully, becoming good businesses without losing their Maker cred:
#1
@Adafruit
: Limor &
@ptorrone
are the rarest combination..
Just heard a story about the absolute worst way to do a layoff:
1) Company needs to cut 20% of staff
2) Tells team of 10 people "2 of you quit or all of you take a 20% cut. You decide"
3) Of course they all decide to take pay cut
4) A week later, the 2 best quit for better jobs
3) Xbox beating Playstation. Given PC link, thought this was inevitable. Still not sure why it didn't happen
4) Quantified Self. It's been a decade & I still get no useful insights from all my wearables. Can't believe apps aren't automatically correlating life and health data
Impressed that my daughter's 7th grade public school science class assignment is to design a mRNA vaccine.
One silver lining of the pandemic is that's been a great teaching opportunity for genetics and immunology