NotBoring on a16z, a 16K word essay.
NYTimes: “The more brain power you’ve built up over the years, the more you can stand to lose before you experience impairment. Researchers still don’t agree on how to measure cognitive reserve, but one theory is that better connections between different brain regions corresponds with more cognitive reserve. To build up these connections, you need to stimulate your brain, said Dr. Joel Salinas, a neurologist at NYU Langone Health and the founder and chief medical officer of the telehealth platform Isaac Health. To do that, try an activity that is “challenging enough that it requires some effort but not so challenging that you don’t want to do it anymore,” he said.”
Mint: “Data-centre investments hint at a shift in the AI race. Soon, reliable and affordable electricity will confer a decisive advantage in this sector. As Albert O. Hirschman argued in National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade, an economy’s true power lies in its ability to manage the choke points that affect its industries. In the AI ecosystem, the US has been leveraging its dominance in chip design by strategically limiting exports to China, while Beijing has exerted pressure on the US through its control of rare-earth materials needed to make chips, magnets and other components of advanced technology. But as the scale of the AI industry and its reliance on computing power grows, the bottleneck will move from chips to electricity because all the data centres in the world will not help if they lack a continuous supply of affordable energy. The International Energy Agency estimates that roughly 20% of planned global data-centre capacity will be at risk by 2030, owing to grid bottlenecks and interconnection queues. And as energy supplies are constrained, costs will rise, eventually trickling down to households and firms.”
Dean W. Ball: “Coding agents are language models situated within attendant software infrastructure (variously referred to as an “AI system,” “agent scaffolding,” or an “agent harness). There are many apps you can download that allow you to use coding agent, like Cursor, Windsurf, Cognition’s Devin (which is more focused on enterprise uses), Factory AI’s Droid system, or Google DeepMind’s Antigravity. But if you are new to coding, I think many of these tools could overwhelm you at first (though you may want to try them after you gain experience). They are what are known as integrated development environments (IDEs), with more of an emphasis on looking at and editing code than is in fact necessary for most new users…These agents have been around for almost a year now, but in recent weeks and months they have become so capable that I believe they meet some definitions of “artificial general intelligence.””
