WSJ: “Hacks, now returning for its fourth season, has birthed one of the industry’s most sought-after writing teams, a Hollywood threesome—but professional. Lucia Aniello and Paul W. Downs, who are married, and longtime friend Jen Statsky, who officiated at their wedding, have defied expectations not just with their success but with a work arrangement that few could replicate. A collaboration among three people is rife with potential for trouble, whether it’s two-against-one battles, three-way competition or gold-silver-bronze status anxiety. But on a recent afternoon at Universal Studios in Los Angeles, Downs and Aniello sitting on either side of Statsky, no one lets another’s joke go by without a laugh…The writers are all millennials roughly the same age. But in their work, they’ve gained acclaim by delivering sharp commentary on those much older and younger.”
Thomas Friedman: “I’d never seen anything like this Huawei campus [in Shanghai]. Built in just over three years, it consists of 104 individually designed buildings, with manicured lawns, connected by a Disney-like monorail, housing labs for up to 35,000 scientists, engineers and other workers, offering 100 cafes, plus fitness centers and other perks designed to attract the best Chinese and foreign technologists…China starts with an emphasis on STEM education — science, technology, engineering and math. Each year, the country produces some 3.5 million STEM graduates, about equal the number of graduates from associate, bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. programs in all disciplines in the United States. When you have that many STEM graduates, you can throw more talent at any problem than anyone else. As the Times Beijing bureau chief, Keith Bradsher, reported last year: “China has 39 universities with programs to train engineers and researchers for the rare earths industry. Universities in the United States and Europe have mostly offered only occasional courses.””
Ege Erdil and Matthew Barnett: “There’s no reason to expect most of the economic value of AI to come from R&D at any point in the future. A much more plausible scenario is that the value of AI will be driven by broad economic deployment, and while we should expect this to lead to an increase in productivity and output per person due to increasing returns to scale, most of this increase will probably not come from explicit R&D.”
FT: “Minecraft is, by a very long way, the best-selling video game of all time. As of last year it had sold 300mn copies, or 3.6 per cent of the planet’s population. It has players everywhere on Earth, including Antarctica and Vatican City. Yet for both non-gamers and hardcore players, there remains something mysterious about this popularity — the game’s graphics are basic, its action rudimentary. In our age of lavish gaming blockbusters, how did this simple block-building game survive a decade of industry upheaval, a corporate buyout and the dramatic downfall of its creator to become the defining game of our times? Minecraft casts players in a near-infinite landscape composed of 3D blocks, where they can mine resources, craft items and build structures. There is an objective-based version of the game, in which monsters come to hunt you at night and there’s a dragon to defeat, but the game’s heart is its Creative Mode, a virtual playground for free-form building. Compared with more violent games, Minecraft has been seen by parents as a relatively benign force in their children’s lives. After all, kids have been playing with blocks for centuries; Minecraft is merely this century’s Lego.”
