Monday, March 13, 2023

Silicon Valley Bank Contagion

Silicon Valley Bank Collapse Threatens Climate Start-Ups The bank had relationships with more than 1,500 companies working on technologies aimed at curbing global warming........ The bank, the largest to fail since 2008, worked with more than 1,550 technology firms that are creating solar, hydrogen and battery storage projects. ....... the bank issued them billions in loans. ....... “Silicon Valley Bank was in many ways a climate bank” .

Regional Banks Slammed by Fear of a Broader Financial Crisis Across the country, banks of various sizes are battling market turmoil as customers rushed to withdraw their deposits and investors, worried about more bank runs, dumped bank stocks...... The unexpected seizure of two banks in three days by regulators intensified fears of a broader financial crisis, sending the stocks of more than two dozen banks into free fall on Monday, even as President Biden reassured Americans that the banking system was resilient and that customers’ money was safe. ....... protect depositors without rewarding risk-taking executives and investors. ........the KBW Bank Index, a proxy for the industry, down nearly 12 percent. On a day when the S&P 500 stock index ended up flat, shares of First Republic tumbled 60 percent and Western Alliance slumped 45 percent. ....... the 2008 financial crisis, when 465 banks failed within four years, sometimes dozens in a month ....... the banks whose stocks tanked had enough funds to meet their obligations. ........ Last week, Silvergate, a cryptocurrency focused bank, said it would shut down; between Friday and Sunday, the government seized Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. ....... The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, on whose board the former chief executive of Silicon Valley Bank, Gregory Becker, sat until Friday, was responsible for supervising the failed bank............. “The events surrounding Silicon Valley Bank demand a thorough, transparent and swift review by the Federal Reserve,” Jerome H. Powell, chairman of the Federal Reserve ......... Silicon Valley Bank had roughly $175 billion in deposits before last week, and Signature had under $100 billion before it was shut down. ........ Anticipating a blood bath on Monday, First Republic, the nation’s 14th largest bank, said a day earlier that it could grab $70 billion if needed from sources including the Federal Reserve and JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank by assets. Its shares still lost nearly three-fifths of their value on Monday — at one point touching $30, a low they had not touched since the end of 2010. .......... “On each coast, we have bank failures that are uniquely focused on very wealthy and very connected industries.” ....... On Sunday, the F.D.I.C. said that all customers of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank with deposits above $250,000 would be made whole. ......... Bigger banks had little interest in the $1.1 million loan he needed — puny by their standards ....... .

Preventing panic in the banking sector A government-organized deposit guarantee should tame the animal spirits. .



3 Lessons From Silicon Valley Bank’s Failure Here’s one takeaway: The bank’s extremely online clientele may have contributed to its downfall....... The bank had a gold-plated reputation inside the Silicon Valley start-up scene.... ...... was a Silicon Valley institution, and that it counted many of the tech industry’s best-known start-ups and investment firms as its clients ...... what brought S.V.B. down wasn’t lending to risky start-ups, or gambling on sketchy crypto coins, or some other ill-considered tech scheme. It was an old-fashioned bank run, set off back in 2021 by a series of old-fashioned bad decisions......... It was known for taking a risk on start-ups that no other banks would touch. ....... as it collapsed, start-up founders told stories of how they’d gotten their first business loans or their first credit cards from Silicon Valley Bank. Some tech workers got their home mortgages and car loans there. ........ and the entire start-up ecosystem collapses because many cannot make payroll — could be catastrophic......... Silicon Valley Bank’s extremely online clientele may have contributed to its downfall. ........ At most normal, midsize regional banks, what happened at S.V.B. probably wouldn’t have led to a panic. Banks sell assets all the time. They run into liquidity problems and raise short-term capital to solve them. Most of the time, customers never notice or care. ........... talk to each other on the internet all day. Once a few people in tech raised questions about the firm’s solvency, Slack channels and Twitter feeds lit up with dire warnings from venture capitalists, and soon many people were panicking. ......... the clubby, herd-following nature of the industry it served. ....... With any luck, a big bank will subsume the old S.V.B. seamlessly, make its larger depositors whole, and there will be no domino effect — no taxpayer bailouts, no mass start-up failures, just a simple and orderly bank failure. ......

Silicon Valley will have regulation to thank for its survival.

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13: News Bulletin

The US Treasury, Federal Reserve, and the FDIC say all Silicon Valley Bank depositors will be “fully” protected, and their money will be available on March 13
HSBC plans to acquire Silicon Valley Bank UK for £1, citing “strategic sense for our business”; as of March 10, SVB UK had ~£5.5B loans and ~£6.7B deposits
Having perfected the art of using hype to move markets, VCs managed to hype their own rumors to collapse SVB, accidentally slaying a much loved accomplice
SVB draws support from 500+ VCs, including General Catalyst and Sequoia, while 5,000+ founders and CEOs sign a Y Combinator petition asking US Congress to act
Sources: long before its collapse, SVB remained technologically stagnant, including failing to integrate Stripe's tech and biometric authentication on mobile



CNN wins its first Oscar for Navalny, in the documentary feature film category, about Russian dissident Alexei Navalny and commissioned by CNN Films and HBO Max
New York shuts down Signature Bank as US regulators cite a “systemic risk exception” like for SVB, announcing all of Signature's depositors will be “made whole”
The closure of SVB, Silvergate, Silvergate Exchange Network, and Signature adds stress to a troubled crypto industry; fiat conversion costs may rise by 20%-40%
Signature closing means its real-time payment platform Signet can no longer serve crypto clients, a blow after SEN closed; BTC jumps ~7% and USDC regains peg
As AI explodes, humanity must accelerate its adaptation or reach a collective, enforceable decision to slow the development of these technologies

A YouTuber who went viral as a toddler says she resents her family for monetizing her childhood, as some influencer parents take their children off social media
Netflix wins six Oscars, including the Best International Feature Film for All Quiet on the Western Front and the Best Animated Feature Film for Pinocchio
A developer runs Meta's 13B LLaMA model, considered to be competitive with GPT-3, on his laptop, showing local language models are feasible on consumer hardware
Meta plans to block Canadians' ability to view or share written and broadcast news on Facebook and Instagram if the country passes its proposed Online News Act
A look at the unprecedented level of executive turnover at Apple, which lost 11 key people, most just below Senior Vice President, since the second half of 2022

Twitter is in decline and less stable under Elon Musk, echoing LiveJournal and Tumblr falling apart under new ownership that didn't understand their communities
Worried that cloud giants offer concentrated hacking targets, the US plans to regulate the security practices of Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and others
An interview with Gowalla co-founder and CEO Josh Williams as he re-launches his location-based social networking app at SXSW, 14 years after its debut



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Sunday, March 12, 2023

Rapid Reforesting With Drones

Rapid reforesting with drones is only one of many good options. The traditional method of getting people out there in large nubmers can be great for raising consciousness. Mass action can have other positive fallouts.

Drones can survery large tracts of land at a rapid clip. They can access slopes that might be hard or at least dangerous for humans.

The pods might have the seed and the nutrients. But the young trees also need some water. They might get eaten. But then those issues are also there if you plant the trees slowly.

DroneSeed uses swarms of drones to reseed forests after devastating wildfires “We’re a one-stop shop for reforestation,” said Grant Canary, CEO of DroneSeed. ...... Since the start of this year, 32,247 wildfires have burned over 3.3 million acres in the United States. .

THE MECHANISM OF DRONE SEEDING TECHNOLOGY: A REVIEW
Seed Plant Drone for Reforestation

End-to-End 3D Drone Mapping Software
https://earthly.org
https://sea-trees.org



Autonomous seed-shooting drones can plant 40,000 trees a day That's 25 times faster, at 80 percent the cost of conventional means.
This seed-firing drone can plant 40,000 trees a day The objective is to sow the seeds for 100 million trees by 2024



How this Aussie start-up is using drones to replant the world
Arbor Day: These drones can plant trees faster than we can In a bid to restore forests and fight climate change, Canadian startup Flash Forest aims to plant 1 billion trees by 2028, using drones and aerial mapping.

How to think creatively on command
AI's Next Big Takeover: Audiobooks
Making Deepfakes Gets Cheaper and Easier Thanks to A.I. Meme-makers and misinformation peddlers are embracing artificial intelligence tools to create convincing fake videos on the cheap.
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12: News Bulletin

Dendra and its ‘forest-patrolling drones’ close $10m Series A from Airbus, others (2020)
The importance of blue carbon mangroves
The benefits of mangrove restoration from blue carbon to biodiversity
7 important agreements reached at COP15
The Wildfire-Climate Change Cycle and how to Tame it

This Geothermal Startup Showed Its Wells Can Be Used Like a Giant Underground Battery
Detection Stays One Step Ahead of Deepfakes—For Now
GPT-4 Might Just Be a Bloated, Pointless Mess
Microsoft Unveils AI Model That Understands Image Content, Solves Visual Puzzles
Figure Promises First General-Purpose Humanoid Robot

Ethereum Moved to Proof of Stake. Why Can’t Bitcoin?
Face Recognition Software Led to His Arrest. It Was Dead Wrong
As AI Booms, Lawmakers Struggle to Understand the Technology
Key Steps in Evolution on Earth Tell Us How Likely Intelligent Life Is Anywhere Else
Stability AI, Hugging Face and Canva Back New AI Research Nonprofit

I Made an AI Clone of Myself
California Company Sets Launch Date for World’s First 3D-Printed Rocket
ChatGPT-Style Search Represents a 10x Cost Increase for Google, Microsoft
Ingenious Technique Could Make Moon Farming Possible
The US Copyright Office Says You Can’t Copyright Midjourney AI-Generated Images

AI Is Dreaming Up Drugs That No One Has Ever Seen. Now We’ve Got to See if They Work.
MIT Team Makes a Case for Direct Carbon Capture From Seawater, Not Air
This Startup Can 3D Print a Battery Into Any Shape You Want
Confusion Spirals in Crypto as the US Cracks Down
For the First Time, Genetically Modified Trees Have Been Planted in a US Forest



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Saturday, March 11, 2023

11: News Bulletin

Blue Origin Says It Can Make Solar Panels Out of Moon Dust
This Box Wing eVTOL Will Run on Hydrogen and Have a Range of 620 Miles
This 3D Printed Community Is Printing One House per Week for a Year
Cutting Out Just a Muffin a Day Can Make You Age More Slowly, Study Finds
Robots Could Be Doing Almost Half of Our Household Chores Within a Decade



Humans Didn’t Invent Mathematics, It’s What the World Is Made Of the Pythagorean school of thought in ancient Greece .... reality is fundamentally mathematical. More than 2,000 years later, philosophers and physicists are starting to take this idea seriously. ......... mathematics is an essential component of nature that gives structure to the physical world. ....... Bees in hives produce hexagonal honeycomb. Why? ..... bees have evolved to use this shape because it produces the largest cells to store honey for the smallest input of energy to produce wax. ........ There are two subspecies of North American periodical cicadas that live most of their lives in the ground. Then, every 13 or 17 years (depending on the subspecies), the cicadas emerge in great swarms for a period of around two weeks. ...... Why is it 13 and 17 years? Why not 12 and 14? Or 16 and 18? ....... 13 and 17 are prime numbers. ......... cicadas have a range of predators that also spend most of their lives in the ground. The cicadas need to come out of the ground when their predators are lying dormant. ........ Suppose there are predators with life cycles of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 years. What is the best way to avoid them all? ......... Once we start looking, it is easy to find other examples. From the shape of soap films, to gear design in engines, to the location and size of the gaps in the rings of Saturn, mathematics is everywhere. ......... mathematical facts are discovered: not just by humans, but by insects, soap bubbles, combustion engines, and planets. ........ Plato also maintained that mathematical objects exist outside of space and time. But such a view only deepens the mystery of how mathematics explains anything.......... physical reality is made of mathematical objects in the same way matter is made of atoms. ....... the idea that reality is a simulation. A simulation is a computer program, which is a kind of mathematical object. ....... reality is made of mathematical objects and minds. Mathematics is how the universe, which is conscious, comes to know itself. ........ Mathematics gives matter its form, and matter gives mathematics its substance. ........ As the boundary between physics and mathematics blurs, it becomes harder to say which parts of the world are physical and which are mathematical. ..... The time has arrived for a Pythagorean revolution, one that promises to radically alter our understanding of reality.

Pythagoras’ revenge: humans didn’t invent mathematics, it’s what the world is made of
Mathematical Explanation: A Pythagorean Proposal
Who are Jehovah’s Witnesses? A religion scholar explains the history of the often misunderstood group 8 million members across 240 countries. ........ understood “Jehovah,” a version of the Hebrew “Yahweh,” to be the name of God the Father himself. ........ looked forward to Jesus Christ establishing a “millennium” or a thousand-year period of peace on Earth. This “Golden Age” would see the Earth transformed to its original purity, with a “righteous” social system that would not have poverty or inequality. ....... look forward to the Golden Age that Russell and his Bible students expected. ........ the group’s belief in a literal thousand-year earthly reign of Christ ....... they do not vote in elections, serve in the military or salute the flag. Such acts, they believe, compromise their primary loyalty to God...... Jehovah’s Witnesses have no political affiliations, and they renounce violence. However, they make an easy target for governments looking for internal enemies, as they refuse to bow down to government symbols. Many nationalists call them “enemies of the state.” ......... Jehovah’s Witnesses were jailed as draft evaders in the U.S. during both world wars. In a Supreme Court ruling in 1940, school districts were allowed to expel Jehovah’s Witnesses who refused to salute the American flag. Through subsequent legal battles in the 1940s and 1950s, Jehovah’s Witnesses helped expand safeguards for religious liberty and freedom of conscience both in the United States and Europe. ......... In Nazi Germany, Jehovah’s Witnesses were killed in concentration camps; a purple triangle was used by the Nazis to mark them.

SCIENTISTS DISCOVER ENZYME THAT CAN TURN AIR INTO ELECTRICITY
ECONOMISTS COMPARE CRYPTO TO "COCAINE" IN SCATHING TAKEDOWN
Company Raises $100M After Announcing Shift to AI, But Has No Discernible Product We're in the middle of an AI gold rush — but is there any gold?
CONGRESSMAN CLAIMS THE US GOVERNMENT HAS "REVERSE-ENGINEERED" ALIEN TECH FROM UFOS IT'S A PRETTY OUTLANDISH THEORY.
NOAM CHOMSKY: AI ISN'T COMING FOR US ALL, YOU IDIOTS "THAT DAY MAY COME, BUT ITS DAWN IS NOT YET BREAKING."
MICROSOFT SAYS OPENAI'S LATEST BLOCKBUSTER AI IS DROPPING "NEXT WEEK" WE HAVE QUESTIONS.
WE'RE TOTALLY OK WITH THIS 48,500 YEAR OLD "ZOMBIE" VIRUS BEING RESURRECTED WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?
SCIENTISTS PLAY TINIEST GAME OF BASEBALL BY THROWING AND CATCHING INDIVIDUAL ATOMS EAT YOUR HEART OUT, ANTMAN.
Report: Elon Musk is Building His Own Town in Texas Musk wants his own company town where people live and work for him. ........ a "Texas Utopia" along the Colorado River where SpaceX, Boring Company, and Tesla employees can live, work, and play, and never have to leave. .



Iran-Saudi ties: China-brokered ‘win-win’ deal could bring Yemen war to a close, analysts say Tehran and Riyadh have agreed to restore diplomatic relations following the Beijing-led talks that experts dubbed as ‘a major development in the Middle Eastern diplomacy’....... Analysts say the easing of tensions between the rivals could also prompt Saudi and Iran to end hostilities in Yemen by agreeing to a ‘face-saving’ resolution .......... The Chinese-mediated agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia to resume diplomatic relations after a seven-year hiatus is widely expected to de-escalate conflicts across the Middle East. Although details of the deal reached during five days of talks in Beijing have not been made public, many analysts believe they include an understanding on bringing the eight-year war in Yemen to a negotiated close. .



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Friday, March 10, 2023

Apple Producing In India Is A Big Deal

For a long time India has been a promising country that simply did not deliver. That is now changing. There are thousands of tech startups that prove the point. But the move by Apple to start iPhone production in India is a huge symbolic step. That is Apple saying India seems to have done its homework.

India needs a huge manufactuting base to create the large number of jobs it needs for its huge young population. The intractable labor and land laws mean most Indians end up in what gets called the "informal sector." There is a lot of entrepreneurship going on in that informal sector. People do so much with so little. It is heartwarming to see many of those street vendors take digital payments seamlessly.

Google getting an Indian CEO was a big symbolic step. Microsoft getting an Indian CEO was a big symbolic step. That CEO taking Microsoft from 200 billion to over a trillion was big. The recent ChatGPT move on the part of Satya Nadella has been huge and symbolic. And now this move by Apple adds to that momentum.

The two biggest democracies are attemtpting sync.



Apple begins making the iPhone 14 in India, marking a big shift in its manufacturing strategy

Rewriting the Rules of Audience Targeting The way people and tools are handling personal data is fundamentally out of sync with the new privacy-focused world. .......... what if we could personalise advertising without systematically collecting and exposing personal data? ....... The ad industry is fast approaching a crisis point. Cookies are disappearing, mobile IDs are vanishing, and consent rates are falling. This is an existential threat, not just to internet advertising but to the internet in general. If advertising fails, then business models supporting the open internet will fail, professional journalism will struggle, and the internet as we know it will be swallowed up by the walled gardens. ........ the pervasive surveillance of our every move online can no longer continue. ....... a high-level understanding of what publishers needed, a good grasp of privacy rules, very good knowledge of technology and tons of ideas. The canvas they were using to draw the building blocks of what would then become ID Ward (now Anonymised) was truly blank. ......... They spent months absorbing information from all corners of the advertising world, learning the jargon, diving into the tech, figuring out which tools were compliant and which were marketing a lie. They found that regulatory compliance isn’t sexy enough to sell, that companies were happy to break the law if it meant hitting revenue targets, and that leadership was hard to find. In short, they learnt that the industry was, well, a bit of a mess. Convincing a huge, chaotic, fragmented industry that they had to radically change the way they treated data was always going to be difficult, but the need for change was greater than they originally thought and time was on their side. .......... a mission to decouple personalised advertising from personal data. ........ make digital advertising fit for the future and protect advertising business models that support a free, independent internet. There is a direct connection between brands’ ability to speak to consumers online, the ability of journalists to report facts to the public and our right to be informed from a plurality of sources without breaking the bank. ......... without all of the snooping and systematic privacy invasions that are currently rife in the advertising industry ........ By replacing people’s personal data with anonymous datasets across the entire digital advertising ecosystem .



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10: News Bulletin

Rewriting the Rules of Audience Targeting
Scientists Just Revealed the Most Detailed Geological Model of Earth’s Past 100 Million Years
Biocomputing With Mini-Brains as Processors Could Be More Powerful Than Silicon-Based AI
Apple and Foxconn win labour reforms to advance Indian production plans Lobbying in Karnataka leads to landmark legislation that anticipates iPhone production in southern state
Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network Is this the Twitter replacement we've been waiting for?

Artificial Intelligence Is Booming—So Is Its Carbon Footprint
ChatGPT is now available in Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service
Reddit is shutting down its Clubhouse clone Reddit Talk
India Impressions (2023)
The VC's Customer

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