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Chris Anderson Profile
Chris Anderson

@chr1sa

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Occupy the skies. @chr1sa2 on Threads Photo by @chrismichel

Orinda
Joined November 2008
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
3 years
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.
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
6 years
Best view of the @Intel drone swarm performance at the Olympics
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
7 years
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."
@edyong209
Ed Yong is not here
7 years
I've been writing about the zombie ant fungus for years but it turns out to be even creepier than I had thought.
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
2 months
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
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
5 years
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
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
3 years
This is the open source flight code that the NASA Mars drone is running
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
4 years
Blade Runner 2049 is the only thing that really captures the Bay Area today
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
1 year
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:
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
5 years
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*
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
1 year
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
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
6 years
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
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
6 years
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
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
4 years
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*
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
1 year
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
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
4 years
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..
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
1 year
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
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
3 years
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.
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
2 years
TIL: Uber and Lyft drivers are renting Teslas because the cost of the rental is less than the cost of gas for their own cars
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
3 years
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
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
29 days
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)
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
6 years
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
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
5 years
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?
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
3 years
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.
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
3 years
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.
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
15 days
@StephanSturges The point being that the hardware really isn't adding much to a phone app
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
28 days
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
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
1 year
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)
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
4 years
If you had any doubt that Tesla's "we can do everything with cameras, no Lidar needed" position is not just wrong, but dangerous, here you go...
@electricfuture5
Electric Future 🇦🇺 🚗⚡☀️
4 years
Car kept jamming on the brakes thinking this was a person 🤦‍♂️ The NN was dreaming @greentheonly
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
1 year
@OTerrifying That's half pig, half bull. Pull?
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
8 years
After many years of self-tracking everything (activity, work, sleep) I've decided it's ~pointless. No non-obvious lessons or incentives :(
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
4 years
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
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
5 years
This is, believe it or not, San Francisco's new District Attorney. In a city staggering under record drug crime and car break-ins...
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
5 years
@Austen You swing by her desk and say "I don't have anything this week. You good?" and then leave before she answers?
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
2 years
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.
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
6 years
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...?
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
5 years
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
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
6 months
@PabloPeniche As the former editor of that publication (long ago), all I can say is that it's sad to see.
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
3 years
@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
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
5 years
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
@NVIDIARobotics
NVIDIA Robotics
5 years
Today we announced the Jetson Nano, a small but mighty #AI computer that makes it possible to create millions of intelligent systems. #GTC19
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
4 years
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!
@verge
The Verge
4 years
IBM will no longer offer, develop, or research facial recognition technology
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
4 years
Berkeley sunset with a bit of mist cc @berkeleyside
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
2 months
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
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
4 years
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
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
4 years
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)
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
4 years
I can't get over the fact that we still don't really know how instinct is passed on (as opposed to learned behavior)
@wonderofscience
Wonder of Science
4 years
Spiders are the structural engineers of nature. Credit: Rachel Barry
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
6 years
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
@PopMech
Popular Mechanics
6 years
15 patents that changed the world
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
6 years
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
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
4 years
The Tesla thinks dangling testicles are a traffic cone (closeup of picture in original tweet)
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@SDElevator
SelfDrivingElevator
4 years
“This👏is👏why👏you👏test👏everywhere👏including👏Florida👏” - @Tweetermeyer
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
6 years
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
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
5 years
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
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
6 years
Was this obvious? If so, why?
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
3 years
Alligator snatches drone out of the air and it promptly catches fire in its mouth
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
4 years
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
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
4 years
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
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
3 years
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...
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
4 years
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
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
4 years
TIL: every @FedEx plane is named after an employee's child
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
2 months
You can contribute to this project! It's called Safe Skies and was started by history professor Timothy Snyder
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
1 month
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
@zachcoelius
Zach Coelius
1 month
The SF police commission owns this disaster.
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
5 years
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
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
3 years
I can't believe this is where we live now -- the Orinda hills are horse country but still just 15-20 minutes from San Francisco
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
4 months
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"
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
5 years
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
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
1 year
@TenreiroDaniel Chamath: Sometimes correct, never in doubt
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
3 years
Just another example of Flight Simulator 2020's amazing use of real-world and real-time data in its environment creation
@matvelloso
Mat Velloso
3 years
Cargo ship stuck in Microsoft Flight Simulator
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
5 years
"recreational Marxism"
@charlesmurray
Charles Murray
5 years
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."
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
7 years
Just met startup w/ 6 (!) co-founders, all of whom had a C title. CEO, COO, CFO, CTO, CIO, CRO. Pls don't do this. It makes you unfundable
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
2 months
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
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
6 years
This map of the drone industry is insane. Even I haven't heard of half of them
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
1 year
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
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
6 years
I was supposed to debug my Lidar SLAM algorithm but instead I made a fart detector with a methane sensor
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
5 years
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
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
4 years
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
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
6 years
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?
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
1 year
By comparison, here's how three other media outlets described it, from negative to positive
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
3 years
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)
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
5 years
It seems clear that Facebook is now entering its gentle decline phase. Not collapse, but even worse: deeply uncool (but still big) Mombook
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
4 years
Inside the cab of a modern self-driving farm combine. Incredible
@AGofTheWorld
Ag of The World
4 years
Here’s what I’m doing inside the cab!!
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
4 years
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
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
6 years
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?
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
3 years
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
6 years
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.
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
5 years
Exciting announcement from @UberATG at today's @DIYRobocars event. "Micromobility" = autononomous scooters & bikes that can drive themselves to charging or better locations. Hiring now
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
6 months
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
@JoshuaSteinman
joshua steinman (🇺🇸,🇺🇸)
6 months
Here it is:
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
4 years
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
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
9 months
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)
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
28 days
@sillynous From the post
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
6 years
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.
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
5 years
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..
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
2 years
@erikengheim Yes, California is a state of wild extremes. Less than five miles from that picture you showed, it looks like this
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
3 years
Checking: Can we blame this whole climate shitshow on the anti-nuclear activists yet?
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
6 years
@BenedictEvans Our single home uses more data today than all of Canada did when I wrote the first Economist cover story on the Internet in 94
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
3 years
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
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
1 year
my proudest moment
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
5 years
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
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
3 years
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
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@chr1sa
Chris Anderson
3 years
"The brave do not live forever. But the timid do not live at all." Great line from today's inspiring @virgingalactic flight
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