Chris Anderson
@chr1sa
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Occupy the skies. @chr1sa2 on Threads Photo by @chrismichel
Orinda
Joined November 2008
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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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."
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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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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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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This is the open source flight code that the NASA Mars drone is running.
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Blade Runner 2049 is the only thing that really captures the Bay Area today
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All laws should have a sunset provision that they expire in ten years unless someone is willing to actively defend them and get them renewed.
Tell me your most radical position that cannot be placed on the left-right political spectrum.
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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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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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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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How can @BostonDynamics compete with @UnitreeRobotics? The Chinese firm's robot dogs cost less than 1/10th as much and, as recent videos have shown, are capable of way more nimble and speedy movement. I'm getting PTSD flashbacks to 3DR competing with DJI in drones. It was near
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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The latest research suggests that our intelligence advantage is more collective (sharing of knowledge via language and writing) than individual. One of the breakout differences between modern humans and those that came before is in the vocal cords and capacity for symbolic.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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. .
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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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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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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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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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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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@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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@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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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.
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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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!.
IBM will no longer offer, develop, or research facial recognition technology
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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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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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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
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Having now had a chance to compare Tesla FSD 12.4 in San Francisco with Waymo, I don't yet see how Tesla can field a robotaxi fleet anytime soon. With the Tesla, I still get 3-4 disengagements in my daily 1.5 hour commute, which is really not bad. But there's no room for any.
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I can't get over the fact that we still don't really know how instinct is passed on (as opposed to learned behavior).
Spiders are the structural engineers of nature. Credit: Rachel Barry
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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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The Tesla thinks dangling testicles are a traffic cone.(closeup of picture in original tweet)
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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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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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Alligator snatches drone out of the air and it promptly catches fire in its mouth
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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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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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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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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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You can contribute to this project! It's called Safe Skies and was started by history professor Timothy Snyder.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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Just another example of Flight Simulator 2020's amazing use of real-world and real-time data in its environment creation.
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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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"recreational Marxism".
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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This map of the drone industry is insane. Even I haven't heard of half of them.
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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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I was supposed to debug my Lidar SLAM algorithm but instead I made a fart detector with a methane sensor
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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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This is one of the best interviews Bezos has done. The last two minutes, where he talks about what it's like to be misunderstood, is perhaps the best. Billionaires are just geeks who won the lottery. It doesn't make them saints or wizards. They're just regular people trying to.
Jeff Bezos Live at DealBook Summit 2024
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I feel like I'm among the last to get the v12 FSD Tesla software upgrade, but now that I have I'm as blown away as everyone else. End-to-end neural networks are the future. It's only a matter of time before Waymo, Cruise and the rest get this; no range of sensors can compete.
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Check out this cool addition to ArXiv, the open source scientific paper repository, which adds comments. Called alphaxiv, you can either change the URL of any paper to and see the comments or load a Chrome plug in that automatically
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Open source image processing sw read licence plates just as well. How many huge govt contracts could be the same?
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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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It was literally faster for @Replit's new software engineer agent to automatically build me a working interactive demo of how Model Predictive Control works than it was for me to watch a YouTube video explaining the same thing. Took less than 90 seconds. Agentic workflows are
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By comparison, here's how three other media outlets described it, from negative to positive
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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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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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Inside the cab of a modern self-driving farm combine. Incredible.
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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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Where's my flying car? Well, you can't have one today mostly because of the dark nexus of regulatory overreach and runaway legal and insurance costs. Lawyers crushed the US private aircraft industry in the 1980s with liability lawsuits, and the FAA killed most of what was left
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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