The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• He wrote a book on a rare subject. Then a ChatGPT replica appeared on Amazon. From recipes to product reviews to how-to books, artificial intelligence text generators are quietly authoring more and more of the internet. (Washington Post)
• The Crypto Winter Cost People More Than Their Money: Some acolytes lost faith, others blamed devils—and some went even harder. An essay exploring what happens when the prophecy of blockchain fails. (Bloomberg)
• Is It Time to Quit Coffee for Good? A growing chorus of concerned former “addicts” are trying to wake people up to caffeine’s negative effects. (Esquire) My answer ius “No!”
• Richard Feynman: The One and Only: Richard Feynman was the Michael Jordan of physics. His intellectual leaps, seemingly weightless, defied explanation. In 1960, in his early forties, restless and unable to find a physics problem worth working on, Feynman taught himself enough biology to make an original discovery of how mutations work in genes. (New York Review of Books)
• Your IQ isn’t 160. No one’s is. Stratospheric IQs are like leprechauns, unicorns, or mermaids. (The Intrinsic Perspective)
• The Time Thief Who Stole 106 Rare Clocks in a Daring Heist: Authorities eventually recovered 96 of the lost timepieces, including a $30 million watch commissioned for Marie Antoinette. (Smithsonian Magazine)
• On the trail of the Dark Avenger: the most dangerous virus writer in the world: Bulgaria in the 1980s became known as the ‘virus factory’, where hundreds of malicious computer programs were unleashed to wreak havoc. But who was writing them, and why? (The Guardian)
• Seaflooding: The Surprising Solution to Mitigate Climate Change, Create More Life, and Grow the Economy: Do You Like the Mediterranean Today? What if I told you there was a way to mitigate that, while creating new habitats and more life, growing the economy, and making money along the way? (Uncharted Territories)
• The Texas GOP’s War on Renewable Energy: What’s behind the Legislature’s relentless campaign against wind and solar power, which are saving Texans billions? (Texas Monthly)
• Russia Has a Vodka Addiction. So Does Vladimir Putin – But Not the Same Way. The Russian leader is famously sober. There’s a reason that his country isn’t. (Politico) see also How Russia’s invasion transformed one Ukrainian city: Ukraine’s late-summer counteroffensive liberated much of the region, but Moscow relentlessly targeted Kharkiv with airstrikes for much of last year. Mayor Ihor Terekhov said more than 6,500 houses were damaged, and 500 multi-story residential buildings were so badly wrecked they cannot be restored. Around 80 hospitals and clinics were damaged. So were cultural institutions, museums, universities, subways, buses, cars, and garages. (Vox)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with venture capitalist and seed investor Howard Lindzon. He is the founder and CIO of Social Leverage, where he makes early-stage investments. He founded Wall Strip (sold to CBS in 2007), co-founded StockTwits (which pioneered the ‘cashtag’ e.g., $AAPL), and was the first investor in Robin Hood. Social Leverage recently launched its 4th fund.
The Rise and Rise of A.I. Large Language Models (LLMs)& their associated bots like ChatGPT
Source: Information Is Beautiful
Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.
~~~
To learn how these reads are assembled each day, please see this.
