Archive: March 17, 2023

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Lá Fhéile Pádraig sona duit!

Friday,  03/17/23  09:40 PM

(sigh ... bad thing about an offline posting process is when you forget to sync ...)

Yay, it's St Patrick's Day, hope you enjoy it.  I'm celebrating by recovering from a cold (cough, cough).

David Sacks comments on Bank of America's balance sheet: look what VCs did now! 

Sarcasm aside, I think the key was not their balance sheet - it had problems, but so do many, many other banks - but rather the coordinated sense of panic on the part of their depositors.  The vast majority of BofA depositors are blissfully unaware and will happily leave their money on deposit.

Vodkapundit: How to lose the entire Middle East with this one weird trick.  Sigh. 

Shelly Palmer: Web3 is really here!  Woo hoo, we have a new connection type, web3://.  And so it's all decentralized and secure, right?  Independent of Web2 infrastructure?  Um, no.  It's centralized, just as insecure, and dependent upon Web2.  Do not ask and so then what are the advantages... 

Elon Musk: It’s exciting to see more & more public figures engaging in active dialogue on this platform!  (Referring of course to Twitter.)  Indeed. 

I've found myself on and following Twitter way more than pre-Elon.

Also Elon: Twitter will open source all code used to recommend tweets on March 31.  Wow.  Super transparent but also, a great way to improve the algorithm! 

Also Elon: Engineering is true magic.  Yes. 

Holy cow: landing an airplane on a helipad on top of a hotel.  Do not try this at home. 

Razib Khan considers Steven Pinker: The Blank Slate 20+ years later.  A remember reading it with great excitement, but probably because I was already a student of Dawkins and Dennett, finding it a bit anticlimactic.  I think their works were actually more groundbreaking, especially Darwin's Dangerous Idea


Clive Thompson: the rise and fall of dot-com foosball.  Heh.  Time was, whenever I joined a new company I would buy them a new foosball table.  Did this four times.  Not sure I would do it again - virtual foosball is not really a thing, right?  I did find it great for team-building and breaking up a day sitting at a keyboard with a little activity. 


Berci Mesko on FDA regulation of AI/ML, "adaptive algorithms".  This is going to be tough for everyone; the FDA regulates static systems and the processes for modifying them, in discrete increments.  Regulating a dynamic process will be quite different.  

Dave Winer: on reflection, it's amazing I wasn't killed in my teens.  Heh.  I have a great friend who was at one time a colleague, and another colleague asked him: "how have you managed to live so long?" 

 
 

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