On the Edge #18
We celebrated Eveince's fund performance at the end of the year by outperforming fund objectives and beating all long-only funds in the Crypto Hedge Fund Research database. (Link)
Nuclear fusion breakthrough (Link). With this achievement, we don’t expect to have fusion-enabled reactors any time soon, there’s a long way ahead. This breakthrough proves that we’re on the right path, the tools we’ve built are working and the experiment qualifies as a fusion ignition. This is a big deal.
One of the most important achievements of AI this year is CICERO. A game in which AI uses Diplomacy to beat a human in strategy. (Although it didn’t get the attention it deserves.)
Again OpenAI and their new embedding API: "outperforms our previous most capable model, Davinci, at most tasks, while being priced 99.8% lower"
Musk doing his own thing with Twitter, I personally don’t like this one. (Update: During writing this post I found out that Paul Graham will not regularly use Twitter and will evaluate alternatives. He’s also a defender of Musk's decisions)
It was amazing to see some ideas coming to life. I explained the idea behind this tool to generate music in an email and some days later I saw it in the news. This product also reminds me of another concept I had to run SQL queries on Internet data.
Unstable diffusion: why not use AI for porn?
Recently with the protests in Iran, I had an epiphany about the importance of conflict. Conflict creates empty spaces between human societies, allowing them to manage a more local society. A global governing system will eventually lead to mass surveillance (Like what happens in China) if even it’s possible. Imagine a world without borders, there, of course, will be government (or any other servants of the society) how we’re going to be able to resolve conflicts at that scale? I can’t imagine voting can do any good at that scale. I personally don’t have any understanding of someone’s life in Romania, and vice versa. And creating that level of understanding is also impossible. People can’t consume that amount of information. This again reminded me of how important openness is. Conflicts are necessary for openness. Related to this topic I found this piece from Noah Smith resonating so much with this idea.
Bringing attention to Iran with “Eyes on Iran“
Pierre and Marie Curie believed in some kind of spirit realm, and seances. (Link) For a man of science, this seems odd, but it makes sense to me.
This past few days I read more about how women have been discriminated against in the past and the present. I’ll be sharing more about this. For now, read about Hatshepsut, who was the second historically confirmed female pharaoh. People couldn’t accept a woman as king, so she put a false beard on her statues, a symbol of her pharaonic power. She ruled longer than all pharaohs in her dynasty with prosperity and full of amazing projects.
A sloth enjoying the ride
This solo from Prince (3:30) - Prince, Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, Jeff Lynne and others - "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"
My playlists