Ben Thompson on ESPN: “The biggest long-term question, though, has to be around sports itself. Sports leagues could extract ever higher rights fees from ESPN because ESPN could extract ever higher affiliate fees from cable TV providers; if the latter is broken than the former is as well. Yes, vMVPDs like YouTube TV will still exist — and be big winners — and Disney still plans an ESPN streaming service. All of those options, though, entail dramatically increased customer choice; leagues like the NBA have shrugged off declining ratings with the certainty that they would, via cable TV subscribers, get paid regardless, but now the choice isn’t just whether to click the remote, but whether to simply click cancel and watch something else. Better to re-bundle sooner rather than later!”
WSJ: “At the heart of America’s political and cultural turmoil is a crisis of trust. In the space of a generation, the people’s confidence in their leaders and their most important institutions to do the right thing has collapsed. The federal government, big business, the media, education, science and medicine, technology, religious institutions, law enforcement and others have seen a precipitous decline. As public faith in the performance, credibility and integrity of these institutions has collapsed, so too has mutual trust—the social glue that holds the country together. Americans have become suspicious of one another, distrusting their fellow citizens as much as they distrust foreign adversaries… It will require a fundamental change in the nature of the relationship between the people and their leaders. It will require political change so that Americans can take back control of the institutions that direct the country and affect their lives. Only by restoring the primacy of the values that made America the most successful nation on earth will Americans again trust their leaders.”
WSJ: “Feelings, in the enterprise of your life, are like weather to a construction company. If it rains or snows or is unseasonably hot, it affects the ability to get work done. But the right response is not trying to change the weather (which would be impossible) or wishing the weather were different (which doesn’t help). It is having contingency plans in place for bad weather, being ready, and managing projects in a way that is appropriate to the conditions on a given day. The process of managing this weather is called metacognition. Metacognition (which technically means “thinking about thinking”) is the act of experiencing your emotions consciously, separating them from your behavior, and refusing to be controlled by them. Metacognition begins with understanding that emotions are signals to your conscious brain that something is going on that requires your attention and action. That’s all they are. Your conscious brain, if you choose to use it, gets to decide how you will respond to them.”
New Yorker on gene editing: “CRISPR, which may be the single most transformative biological technology of the twenty-first century, is a natural phenomenon, evolved over billions of years. It was first observed in the nineteen-eighties, when researchers noticed unexplained sequences of viral DNA in E. coli. Eventually, they realized that these sequences played a role in the bacteria’s immune system: they could find and destroy other pieces of viral DNA. Isolated and distributed in tiny vials to laboratories around the world, CRISPR would become the primary tool of genetic engineering. A couple of drops, introduced by pipette to a cell, could reliably cut the double strand of DNA, changing the function of its genes. Research that once consumed years of a scientist’s career could now be completed in a few weeks. The CRISPR system is often likened to a pair of scissors.”
WaPo: “For more than a decade, personalized song recommendations, enhanced photos and easier drives home have been fueled by forms of artificial intelligence. What’s changed recently is the magnificent blunt force of scale computing. The number of roads on the planet or songs ever sung seems like a lot of data, but it’s a light breakfast for a network fueled by a graphics processing unit. GPUs are silicon chips on steroids. Originally designed for video games, the current generation of GPUs allows machines to process hundreds of billions of different parameters, allowing systems to mimic the multilayered synapse-firing of the human brain.These neural networks, trained on endless buffets of text and aided by reinforcement learning from human feedback, are the secret sauce. They’re what allow your prompt to be translated into impossibly large numbers and back out as a chatbot’s elegant linguistic response.”
