Maria Konnikova: “In poker, as in life, information is power. Don’t ever give your opponent extra information if you don’t have to. Don’t ever show your cards.”
WSJ: “In India, manufacturing’s contribution to its gross domestic product has fallen from around 17% two decades ago to 13% in 2023, according to World Bank data. The country has about 65 million manufacturing jobs, while four times as many people work in agriculture. Millions of young people join the workforce every year in the world’s most populous nation…To challenge China, India needs to get out of the way of Its factory owners.”
NYTimes: “Just two decades ago, China had little capacity to make cars, and owning one was considered novel. Today, China produces and exports more cars than any other country in the world…China’s home market for car sales is the world’s largest — almost as big as the American and European markets combined. As China’s domestic market grew, so did its production capacity, propelled by massive government investment and world-beating advances in automation. Yet in recent years, the pace of sales has fallen behind as consumer spending slows in China’s economic downturn. The result is that China today has the capacity to make nearly twice as many cars as its consumers need.”
Mustafa Suleyman: “Memory is the critical piece because today every time you go to your AI you know you have a new session and it has a little bit of memory for what you talked about last time or maybe the time before but because it doesn’t remember the session five times ago or 10 times ago it’s quite a frustrating experience to people because you don’t go and invest deeply and really share a lot and really uh you know look to build on what you’ve talked about previously because you know it’s going to forget so you sort of tap out after a while and it turns you know into a shallower experience but we have prototypes that we’ve been working on that have near infinite memory and so it just doesn’t forget which is truly transformative.” [via Arnold Kling]
Narayan Ramachandran: “Synthetic biology is the field that lies at the intersection of biology and engineering. In recent years, it has become possible not only to read the biological code, but also synthetically engineer biological ‘bits’ based on the A, C, G, T/U building blocks. We are very early in this revolution. Far more is unknown than known at this juncture, but a few remarkable feats have been achieved. Today, scientists are able to design and print a sequence of biological bits which in turn can generate proteins and enzymes. It has also become possible to synthesize two new nucleotides, allowing for combinations that are not present today in nature. Most applications of these advancements in the near future will derive from the ability to synthesize proteins. These proteins can perform specific intended functions—say, to create a drug, substitute a current chemical in animal feed or a detergent, or be the key ingredient in a biofuel.”
