Friday Fodder #15
What's Trending? What's Transcendent?
As we bask or wallow — depending on your preferences — in the after-election glow of our screens updating us on every new detail, it felt apropos to look at two of the most extraordinary events of the 21st century that brought us to this moment. It’s a roast and a tweet.
Way back in 2011, Barack Obama spent a solid 5 minutes of his White House Correspondents Dinner speech lambasting Donald Trump. Trump, for his part, had been spewing about the Kenyan birther conspiracy and this was Obama’s payback. From many accounts, this is the moment that Trump decided to build momentum in politics and take over the whole damn show.
And as for the Tweet..
If you’ve ever wondered why Tesla and SpaceX are now headquartered in Texas, or why Musk went from a liberal who wanted to fix the climate with electric cars to Trump supporter #1.. you should start with this tweet. Love the two of them or hate them, a common theme is the main character energy.
On to some reading..
Timely
The EdTech Revolution Has Failed - An extension of Jonathan Haidt’s thesis on childhood and phones, this is a deep dive into all the data that shows why tech doesn’t help in a classroom and the repercussions we’re dealing with. Bring back cursive!
AI Progress has plateaued at GPT-4 Level - GPT4 was awhile ago (in AI progress terms). We’re still there and the question is why. And then there’s this line!
“Perhaps we should not dwell too closely on the question of why it is that the sum of human civilization’s data fed into deep learning techniques plateaus at something smart—but not that smart—lest we see ourselves too clearly in the mirror.”
Polymarket Prediction Post-Mortem - One of the big winners of the election was the betting markets. Maybe not the Polymarket founder, who was just raided by the FBI for reasons unknown, but the markets are doing fine. They’re good, but maybe not so good.
A Graveyard Of Bad Election Narratives - There’s all sorts of wrong reasons why Trump won and Kamala lost. Here they are all wrapped up in one little article, with data to prove why they’re all bunk.
Timeless
IMG_0416 - All about how a particular feature uses a specific naming scheme and gets enshrined in history.
Machines Of Loving Grace - Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, lays out an optimistic vision of the future AI could help bring us by building a case across a defined set of fields. I plan on reading this again gleefully when I’m 150.
Gen AI’s Act Two Is Here - ‘Computer Use’ from Anthropic is a wild new LLM feature. While it’s a timely step in the LLM product wars, here it represents a jumping off point for a brief prediction on how we’ll interact with agents.
WTF Happened In 1971 - Correlation is not causation but the answer is the end of the gold standard.
Books
Same As Ever by Morgan Housel - Most books focus on the things that change, but here the focus is what never changes. Housel covers everything from risk taking behavior to compound interest, and each chapter is built around a story that always fits.
Tweets
Cheers!