Who do you trust to tell you what's good?
We are drowning in recommendations and somehow more lost than ever. Algorithms have gotten very good at predicting what you might click next based on what you already clicked, but that is not the same thing as taste. This piece makes a compelling case that the most valuable signal is still just a real person with a genuine point of view sharing something they love, and that the personal context behind a recommendation is what makes it worth anything at all. It left me thinking about how much I trust the people I actually know over any platform that claims to know me.
Freedom is not the highest form of wealth
The author spent two years with genuine freedom and came back with a counterintuitive conclusion: meaning is the highest form of wealth, not freedom. His argument is that the pursuit of freedom provides its own meaning, but once freedom is actually achieved it loses that meaning entirely. What you're left with is an existential "now what" that nobody warned you about. I found this one genuinely thought-provoking, especially for people at a stage where they've already won the financial game and are figuring out what the next chapter is actually for.
The human work behind humanoid robots is being hidden
This MIT Technology Review piece should be required reading for anyone investing in physical AI. The argument is that the humanoid robotics industry is quietly obscuring how much human labor is still required to make these machines look autonomous, and the parallel to Tesla's early Autopilot branding is hard to ignore. Workers spend weeks in VR headsets and motion capture suits performing repetitive tasks just to generate training data, and remote operators step in when robots get stuck in ways the demo videos never show. The gap between what these companies are demonstrating and what is actually happening operationally is significant.
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The Anthropic Hive Mind
Steve Yegge spent years as a senior engineer at both Google and Amazon, so when he says something unusual is happening at Anthropic, it's worth paying attention. His argument isn't just about the models. It's about the organizational culture, the caliber of people, and the way the company thinks collectively. Interesting read regardless of where you stand on the AI race.
Meet the Startups Trying to Build Military-Specific AI
A wave of veteran-founded startups is now building AI trained exclusively on military and combat data, designed to work without cloud connectivity in denied environments. Companies like Smack Technologies just closed a $32M seed round on this thesis. The bet is that the Pentagon will never fully trust a general-purpose model for critical decisions, and that purpose-built systems are the only real path to adoption.
How to Design a More Meaningful Life
Dave Evans and Bill Burnett, the Stanford professors who wrote Designing Your Life, join Dr. Laurie Santos on The Happiness Lab to make the case that major life decisions shouldn't be planned, they should be prototyped. The idea is to treat your own life like a design problem: run small experiments, iterate, and let the data tell you what works. Practical in a way that most self-help conversations aren't.
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“Everything That Moves Will Become Robotic”
Horsepower. Raw horsepower. After watching NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote speech at NVIDIA’s GTC conference, I couldn’t help but think about it.
While all of the GTC conferences have centered around artificial intelligence since 2015, this year stood out. It’s all about power this week — computing power… and having the “horses” to accelerate even faster.
Three things to remember in times like these
The key takeaway for me is that the economy is too good to expect a rapid cooling off anytime soon. The faster disinflationary fall we’d been enjoying since the middle of 2023 has now trampolined on us and the data is coming in warmer and warmer. When people are working, people are spending. Almost everyone is working. That’s it. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.
Ed Thorp: Survival of the Fittest Mind
Are you incentivized to chase deals and put money to work, or is there time to follow curiosity and investigate thoroughly? What are you optimizing for: short-term returns or making good decisions?
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What I Am Reading:
GPT-3 Generates Hype in Closed Beta
Open AI’s language model can do things like write computer code from a simple description given to it by a human or generate a thought leadership essay on a particular topic (no matter how esoteric). This is the most exciting and incredible technology I have seen in decades. Some of the things I have seen people do with it are truly incredible!
What will happen to cryptocurrency in the 2020s - The Coinbase Blog
This article was written in January and we are now 8 months into 2020. It’s interesting to see how much of Brian Armstrog’s predictions actually came true as Bitcoin breaks the $10K barrier.
The Ability to Regulate Your Emotions is Quickly Becoming The Premier Skill of The 21st Century
When I am asked about what traits I am looking for in a founder the most important one for me is emotional fortitude. Excerpt: “When something happens, our brain’s automatic response is to be reactive. When our amygdala, the small part of our brain that regulates fight or flight is set off, we have to avoid taking the bait of our raw emotional reactions that make us want to overreact,” Kris says.
