Monday, April 03, 2023

4: Taiwan

Ryan Hass on Taiwan: Has US-China rivalry passed a tipping point? President Biden and President Xi (習近平) agreed at their meeting in Bali last November to dispatch Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Beijing to explore steps that could lend greater stability and predictability to the relationship. Blinken’s trip was derailed when a Chinese spy balloon violated American airspace on the eve of his visit. ......... In the period since, both Washington and Beijing have shifted focus away from managing bilateral relations toward strengthening themselves for long-term competition with each other. .......... The United States and its partners have further tightened China’s access to high-end, dual-use technologies. Washington has secured new military basing access in the Philippines. Rapprochement between the Republic of Korea and Japan has reconfigured the regional strategic picture in America’s favor. And domestically, members of Congress have become more seized with countering China and are working to mobilize the American public on this score.......... Beijing also is working to drive wedges between the United States and Europe. China’s leaders will use upcoming visits by French, Spanish, and Italian leaders to encourage Europe’s strategic autonomy. ......... China also is working to present itself to the Global South as a force for peace, a contrast to American “hegemonism,” an economic growth engine, and a leader that respects each country’s governance model and growth path. This narrative got a boost when China brokered a peace deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran. ........... For some, crossing the abyss means that the United States and China are settling into a new Cold War. For others, it means rising risk of a military confrontation or conflict.......... First, unlike the Cold War, the US and China are not leading two separate systems that are in competition with each other. Rather, they are both enmeshed within a single system and are both deeply interdependent on each other. ......... there is still no public enthusiasm for resolving differences on the battlefield. Leaders in Washington and Beijing remain sober to the reality that conflict would destroy their pursuit of national ambitions.......... a willingness by Biden and Xi to step in and cool tensions whenever the relationship risks overheating. Both leaders have served as a pressure release valve to lower tensions consistently over the past two years. ......... while US-China tensions clearly are rising and risk of conflict is above zero, I would caution against falling prey to doomsday predictions. The sky is not falling and war between nuclear-armed powers is not near .

3D Printing Promises to Transform Architecture—and Create Forms That Blow Today’s Buildings Out of the Water . In the 1880s, adoption of the steel frame changed architecture forever. Steel allowed architects to design taller buildings with larger windows, giving rise to the skyscrapers that define city skylines today. .......... “large-scale additive manufacturing.” Not since the adoption of the steel frame has there been a development with as much potential to transform the way buildings are conceived and constructed. ........... a future in which buildings are built entirely from recycled materials or materials sourced on-site, with forms inspired by the geometries of nature. ........... Clay is an intriguing alternative because it can be harvested on-site— ........ But plastics and polymers could have the broadest application. These materials are incredibly versatile, and they can be formulated in ways that meet a wide range of specific structural and aesthetic requirements. They can also be produced from recycled and organically derived materials. .......... Even common materials like concrete and plastics benefit from being 3D-printed, since there’s no need for additional formwork or molds. ........... Since there is no need for tooling, forms or dies, large-scale additive manufacturing allows each part to be unique, with no time penalty for added complexity or customization. ............ Another interesting feature of large-scale additive manufacturing is the capability to produce complex components with internal voids. This may one day allow for walls to be printed with conduit or ductwork already in place. .



'तिमी पेन्सन पकाएर आएको, म छातीमा ढुंगा खाएर लडेको'





5,000 Twitter Followers. 90 Days. 1 Guide.
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Elon Musk And Peter Diamandis Walk Into A Bar



The bartender, intrigued by their request, asks them, "What kind of donuts would you like?"

Elon Musk replies, "I'll have a rocket-shaped donut, please."

Peter Diamandis chimes in, "And I'll have a donut shaped like a space station!"

The bartender, amazed by their futuristic donut requests, exclaims, "Wow, you guys really think outside the box!"

Elon Musk and Peter Diamandis exchange a knowing smile and reply in unison, "No, we think inside the donut."

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Ilya Sutskever, Andrej Karpathy

A.I. Researchers Are Making More Than $1 Million, Even at a Nonprofit Both were recruited from Google. ......... 22,000 people worldwide have the skills needed to do serious A.I. research — about double from a year ago. ......... They recruited several researchers with experience at Google and Facebook, two of the companies leading an industrywide push into artificial intelligence. .......... “I turned down offers for multiple times the dollar amount I accepted at OpenAI,” Mr. Sutskever said. “Others did the same.” He said he expected salaries at OpenAI to increase as the organization pursued its “mission of ensuring powerful A.I. benefits all of humanity.” .......... OpenAI spent about $11 million in its first year, with more than $7 million going to salaries and other employee benefits. It employed 52 people in 2016. ........... Some researchers may command higher pay because their names carry weight across the A.I. community and they can help recruit other researchers. ........ “When you hire a star, you are not just hiring a star,” Mr. Nicholson of the start-up Skymind said. “You are hiring everyone they attract. And you are paying for all the publicity they will attract.” ......... And another researcher, Andrej Karpathy, left to become the head of A.I. at Tesla, which is also building autonomous driving technology........ In essence, Mr. Musk was poaching his own talent. Since then, he has stepped down from the OpenAI board, with the lab saying this would allow him to “eliminate a potential future conflict.”

AI 'prompt engineer' jobs can pay up to $335,000 a year and don't always require a background in technology

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Gokul Rajaram: HBR 2025



You’re the founder/CEO of a $75M+ revenue company. You not only have PMF, you are the leading player in your category, a category that you created. You raised a humongous round in 2021 so while you’re not profitable, you have 5+ years of runway. Life is peachy, right?

Not so fast. You have 3 problems:

(a) Your growth has slowed down as buying cycles have lengthened. You were growing 50-70% YoY, now it’s 10-20% YoY. This dramatic, unprecedented slowdown has made you question your TAM, your category, everything.

(b) Your new investors from 2021 - remember them? - are pushing you to grow faster. They want to see their investment grow 3x in 3 years. You don’t want to tell them that it’s instead probably shrunk by 70% in the last two years.

(c) Your execs and employees are growing nervous. They’re questioning what the real value of the company is. You don’t have good answers for them.

What do you do? Do you pour fuel on uncertain growth, increase your burn, shorten your runway? Or do you cut back, become profitable, grow more predictably? How do you mollify your stakeholders?

It’s April 2023. You stand at the floor-to-ceiling windows of your penthouse (bought with the proceeds of your secondary sale in 2022), pondering these fundamental questions as you look out at the glittering (SF / NYC / Miami / London / Bengaluru) skuline. Your board meeting is this coming week. What is your strategy? What will you communicate to them?



As the CEO of a company that has seen a significant slowdown in growth and is facing pressure from investors and employees, it's essential to come up with a strategy that can address these concerns while ensuring the long-term success of the company.

Firstly, I would focus on understanding the reasons behind the slowdown in growth. I would review our current product offerings and see if they are still meeting the needs of our target customers. I would also evaluate the competition to identify any emerging trends or changes in the market that we need to adapt to.

Secondly, I would communicate with our investors and stakeholders transparently about the challenges we are facing and the steps we are taking to address them. I would explain that our primary focus is on long-term sustainability and that we will not compromise on this by taking short-term measures that could harm the company in the long run.

Thirdly, I would explore ways to increase revenue and profitability without compromising our product quality or brand value. This could involve exploring new revenue streams or optimizing our existing processes to reduce costs.

Finally, I would prioritize employee morale and motivation by fostering a culture of transparency and open communication. I would make sure that every employee understands the company's vision and is aware of the steps we are taking to address our challenges.

In summary, my strategy would be to take a cautious approach while maintaining a long-term perspective. I would focus on understanding the reasons for our growth slowdown, communicate transparently with investors and stakeholders, explore new revenue streams, and prioritize employee morale and motivation.



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Sunday, April 02, 2023

Does ChatGPT Melt The Chinese Firewall?

China has a very filtered Internet. But ChatGPT is, can be offline. So does it not completely melt the Chinese firewall? Will not the Chinese now have full access to all of the Internet, or at least the Internet upto the year 2021, or whenever the cutoff date is?

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Just Applied To Y Combinator

In 2010, Paul Graham and I were featured in the same BBC article.





How Y Combinator Started I don't think we've ever managed to remember our birthday on our birthday. ......... The VC fund was doing what now seems a comically familiar thing for a VC fund to do: taking a long time to make up their mind. ......... As we turned onto Walker Street we decided to do it. I agreed to put $100k into the new fund and Jessica agreed to quit her job to work for it. Over the next couple days I recruited Robert and Trevor, who put in another $50k each. So YC started with $200k. ........... The company wasn't called Y Combinator yet. At first we called it Cambridge Seed. ........ Initially we only had part of the idea. We were going to do seed funding with standardized terms. Before YC, seed funding was very haphazard. You'd get that first $10k from your friend's rich uncle. The deal terms were often a disaster; often neither the investor nor the founders nor the lawyer knew what the documents should look like. Facebook's early history as a Florida LLC shows how random things could be in those days. ........ We started Viaweb with $10k we got from our friend Julian Weber, the husband of Idelle Weber, whose painting class I took as a grad student at Harvard. Julian knew about business, but you would not describe him as a suit. ............ In return for $10k, getting us set up as a company, teaching us what business was about, and remaining calm in times of crisis, Julian got 10% of Viaweb. I remember thinking once what a good deal Julian got. ............ we wanted to learn how to be angel investors, and a summer program for undergrads seemed the fastest way to do it. No one takes summer jobs that seriously. The opportunity cost for a bunch of undergrads to spend a summer working on startups was low enough that we wouldn't feel guilty encouraging them to do it. ............. The structure of the YC cycle is still almost identical to what it was that first summer. ............ We never expected to make any money from that first batch. We thought of the money we were investing as a combination of an educational expense and a charitable donation. But the founders in the first batch turned out to be surprisingly good. And great people too. We're still friends with a lot of them today. ............ It's hard for people to realize now how inconsequential YC seemed at the time. .......... Jessica and I invented a term, "the Y Combinator effect," to describe the moment when the realization hit someone that YC was not totally lame. When people came to YC to speak at the dinners that first summer, they came in the spirit of someone coming to address a Boy Scout troop. By the time they left the building they were all saying some variant of "Wow, these companies might actually succeed." .......... it took a while for reputation to catch up with reality ....... That's one of the reasons we especially like funding ideas that might be dismissed as "toys" — because YC itself was dismissed as one initially. ........ The density of startup people in the Bay Area was so much greater than in Boston, and the weather was so nice. ........ Plus I didn't want someone else to copy us and describe it as the Y Combinator of Silicon Valley. I wanted YC to be the Y Combinator of Silicon Valley. So doing the winter batch in California seemed like one of those rare cases where the self-indulgent choice and the ambitious one were the same........ we didn't have time to get a building in Berkeley. We didn't have time to get our own building anywhere. The only way to get enough space in time was to convince Trevor to let us take over part of his (as it then seemed) giant building in Mountain View. .......

The first dinner in California, we had to warn all the founders not to touch the walls, because the paint was still wet.



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Anand Sanwal: The Vision Man Of CB Insights

I have been a long time subscriber to Anand's newsletter, easily over a decade. I feel like his particular expertise is a vastly under-monetized resource. He data crunches his way to amazing insights into many tech sectors today and his projections into the future are also insightful.
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Two Martians Walk Into A Bar

Two Martians walk into a bar, and Elon Musk turns to the other Martian and says, "I heard Earth is flat." The other Martian looks at him incredulously and says, "Elon, you're an alien! You've seen the curvature of the universe with your own eyes!" Elon just shrugs and says, "Eh, I guess I just haven't been paying attention." The bartender overhears this exchange and chimes in, "Well, I guess this bar is the only place flat-earthers are welcome."



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Saturday, April 01, 2023

1: Lex Fridman

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1: Big Ben



GPT-4 Is a Reasoning Engine Reason is only as good as the information we give it ......... there are at least two important components to thinking: reasoning and knowledge. Knowledge without reasoning is inert—you can’t do anything with it. But reasoning without knowledge can turn into compelling, confident fabrication. .......... Even though our AI models were trained by reading the whole internet, that training mostly enhances their reasoning abilities not how much they know. And so, the performance of today’s AI models is constrained by their lack of knowledge. .......... GPT models are actually reasoning engines not knowledge databases. .......... if you want to make an investment that indexes the success of companies building in AI as a whole, one smart move would be to invest in a vector database provider, or a basket of them. (Alternatives might be to invest in OpenAI, or a basket of large cap software companies like Microsoft and Google that build AI, or chipmakers like NVIDIA that build the GPUs that AIs run on.) ......... AI’s advancement is a raindance that calls forth capital from Patagonia vest wearing angels. ....... People have been saying that data is the new oil for a long time. ........ We tend to underappreciate the significance of the input—what information we feed it to produce those results. Its answers are largely dependent on the information we make available to it for analysis. It’s only as powerful as its starting point. .



How to avoid war over Taiwan A superpower conflict would shake the world ......... Europe is witnessing its bloodiest cross-border war since 1945, but Asia risks something even worse: conflict between America and China over Taiwan. Tensions are high, as American forces pivot to a new doctrine known as “distributed lethality” designed to blunt Chinese missile attacks. Last week dozens of Chinese jets breached Taiwan’s “air defence identification zone”. This week China’s foreign minister condemned what he called America’s strategy of “all-round containment and suppression, a zero-sum game of life and death”. ........... Is it willing to risk a direct war with another nuclear power to defend Taiwan, something it has not been prepared to do for Ukraine? And by competing with China militarily in Asia, could it provoke the very war it is trying to prevent? ........ China could use “grey-zone” tactics that are coercive, but not quite acts of war, to blockade the self-governing island and sap its economy and morale. Or it could launch pre-emptive missile strikes on American bases in Guam and Japan, clearing the way for an amphibious assault. Since Taiwan could resist an attack on its own only for days or weeks, any conflict could escalate quickly into a superpower confrontation. .......... a war over Taiwan could involve a new generation of arms, such as hypersonic missiles and anti-satellite weapons, causing untold destruction and provoking unpredictable retaliation ........... Taiwan is the world’s essential supplier of advanced semiconductors. America, China and Japan, the three largest economies, and among the most interconnected, would deploy sanctions, crippling global trade. America would urge Europe and its other friends to impose an embargo on China. .......... War is no longer a remote possibility .......

President Xi Jinping has told the People’s Liberation Army to be ready for an invasion by 2027, says the CIA.

.......... The military balance no longer so clearly favours America as it did in the 1990s. And public opinion has shifted in Taiwan, not least because of how China has snuffed out freedoms in Hong Kong. Only 7% of Taiwanese favour reunification. .......... Both sides are shoring up their positions and trying to signal their resolve, with destabilising consequences. ......... the mysterious severing of undersea internet cables to remote Taiwanese islands. .......... Top American and Chinese defence officials have not spoken since November. During the recent spy-balloon incident, a “hotline” failed when China did not pick up. ......... The island is admirably liberal and democratic, and proof that such values are not alien to Chinese culture. .......... A botched invasion, however, would cost Mr Xi and the Communist Party dearly. ........ The goal should not be to solve the Taiwan question, but to defer it. .......... The first 15 years of the American-Soviet cold war featured a terrifying mixture of brinkmanship and near-catastrophic mistakes, until the Cuban missile crisis prompted a revival of diplomacy...... the two rival systems must find a way to live together less dangerously.



Google Bard is about to get supercharged the current metaphorical Lebron James of large language models: GPT-4........ Training a large language model on outputs from someone else's large language model is a little like photocopying a map and calling yourself a cartographer — not a good look.



Trump was indicted. We collected the best tweets about it.
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ChatGPT, Ganesha And Mahabharata

How did Ganesha write the Mahabharata?

According to Hindu mythology, Ganesha did not write the Mahabharata, but he played a crucial role in its composition.

It is said that the sage Vyasa wanted to write the Mahabharata, but he faced a significant challenge: the epic was so vast and complex that he could not remember it all. Therefore, he needed someone who could write down the verses as he dictated them.

That's when Lord Brahma suggested that Vyasa seek the help of Lord Ganesha. When Vyasa approached Ganesha, the elephant-headed deity agreed to assist him on the condition that Vyasa would recite the verses continuously without pause. Vyasa agreed, but he also set a condition of his own: Ganesha had to understand the meaning of each verse before writing it down.

The writing process then began, with Vyasa reciting the verses and Ganesha writing them down. Whenever Vyasa needed a break to compose a new verse, Ganesha would ask for clarification on the previous verse's meaning. This way, the entire epic was composed with Ganesha as the scribe and Vyasa as the author.

This story is considered a metaphor for the idea that writing or creating anything significant requires collaboration and mutual understanding between different talents and perspectives.



In the first part of the epic poem Mahabharata, it is written that the sage Vyasa (Vyāsa) asked Ganesha to transcribe the poem as he dictated it to him. Ganesha agreed, but only on the condition that Vyasa recite the poem uninterrupted, without pausing.



Even though Vyasa is said to be the author of the epic, the physical writing of this great work of literature is attributed to Ganesha. The story goes that Vyasa had the entire story planned out in his head but knew what a daunting task it could be to write it down. And so he prayed to Brahma to help him out. On Brahma’s suggestion Vyasa then sought out Ganesha, the god of wisdom and knowledge, to write out the epic........... Ganesha agreed but said that he had but one condition: that Vyasa shouldn’t dictate without interruption. Should Vyasa stop, Ganesha proposed, he’d drop the task right there and leave. Vyasa agreed but put his own counter-condition: that Ganesha should first understand what was being dictated to him before writing it out......... The elephant-headed god agreed and thus began the greatest literary collaboration. Vyasa narrated the story of the Mahabharata and Ganesha kept writing as furiously as Vyasa kept dictating. In fact at one point, the reed he was using to write broke and Ganesha was left without a writing instrument. To continue without interruption, Ganesha is believed to have broken one of his tusks, dipped it in ink and simply continued as if nothing had happened. This is the reason why Ganesha is depicted with a broken tusk today. .......... There were occasions when Ganesha had to pause for brief moments to understand the complex compositions of Vyasa before writing them down. This was the only time that Vyasa had a moment to breathe. ........ And so, after three long years of constant dictation, Vyasa completed the epic with Ganesha having written down every single word and verse after having understood its entire meaning.

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