We’ve all heard it: AI is coming for junior-level jobs. If you are in your 20s and you use a computer for work, you have already been affected . Plenty of handwringing ensued . But fear not, it is an illusion.…

During this challenging period, please stop getting together with friends, and baking sourdough bread. Just don’t do it.

This isn’t easy for any of us. I’ve enjoyed gathering with many of you in groups of 5 or more around Dillon’s reclaimed walnut butchers block kitchen island as ambient bacteria rapidly ruined a large mound of moist room temperature wheat in front of us, thus commencing the Satanic ritual that augurs the arrival of all sourdough into this realm. The time we spent in close proximity while partially decomposing what was only moments ago perfectly suitable human nourishment was often the highlight of my week…

No, Facebook Did Not Panic and Shut Down an AI Program That Was Getting Dangerously Smart - Gizmodo

If you look up a word in the dictionary, you’ll find it is described using other words. The mathematically-inclined among us (and machines are very much mathematically inclined) might notice the relationship between this property of language and the ability to describe vectors in terms of other vectors. Such linear algebra doesn’t even rise to the level of artificial intelligence, and instead follows a long tradition of developing mathematical analogues for physical phenomenon like the orbits of the planets or the transverse lengths of rectangular corn fields. Algebraic projections of language, or “embeddings,” are merely the first step in building a translation or natural language system.…

The Decline of the Baronial C.E.O. - The New York Times

War is the great leveler. You’ve either taken that hill or held that city, or you have tragically and perhaps catastrophically lost it. There was no room for positioning, prevaricating or PowerPoint. A culture of leadership, borne of such proximate encounters with an unyielding reality, readily elevates only those who produce concrete and evident results.…

Why the Fed Raised Rates - The New York Times

The Federal Reserve is ready to party like it’s 1988.

The rest of us are eying a labor-force participation rate that is lower than it has ever been through the 80s and the 90s (a period that included 3 recessions). The share of part-time employment is still higher than before the Great Recession. Even full-time employment now rarely includes such economic stabilizers as defined-benefit pensions or comprehensive healthcare coverage. This might be why all those jobs Yellen is celebrating don’t seem to be doing a thing to inflation, which has remained well below the Fed’s own target of 2% for most of the last 10 years. But wow, 4.3% unemployment! It’s enough to make us all feel young again!…

Western Nations Worry That Children Won’t Be Better Off

The 2006 movie Children of Men (based on a novel of the same title) explores a dystopian future in which an 18-year pandemic of infertility leaves the planet entirely child-less. The film’s premise of social breakdown goes unchallenged since we intuit humanity as a kind of pyramid scheme. The next generation is synonymous with a people who are smarter, healthier, longer-lived, more diverse, and more tolerant than the lot in which we find ourselves today. Whether or not we assume the future will have more people, we all presume that the future will have better people.…

Work - XKCD

The appeal to a golden era “when we used to make things” isn’t just nostalgia or judgmentalism. It refers to a qualitative but real difference between building vs. taking. Building things imposes a certain rigor not only on our thinking but also our values. When we build we are advancing the aggregate capability of humanity in some small way. We don’t all have to be sending people to Mars, we can also build by working out the inner mechanisms of some new gadget that others will find useful or putting together a cake others will find delicious. When we take, we are instead simply shifting around the spoils of such efforts from others to ourselves by, say, helping ourselves to their savings by opening fake bank accounts.…

Watching Canada’s Biggest Rock Band Say a Dramatic Goodbye - The New Yorker

There was a time, not any longer, when our capacity to take in a culture and a feeling was so great it would happen by osmosis, when the background music of our childhoods, looping quietly through the department store or filling the empty kilometers of a road trip, would affix itself like a plank in the stage on which years later we would play grownups.…

Amazon to Expand Private-Label Offerings—From Food to Diapers - The Wall Street Journal

An “effective infinity” is a quantity so large we cannot help but treat it as infinite, only it isn’t. The number of grains of sand on all the beaches in the world is effectively infinite, since you could never conceive of a device or process that could manipulate or even consider them all, yet there can only be so many of them on a finite planet.…

Theranos Under Fire as U.S. Threatens Crippling Sanctions - The New York Times

In my experience, leaders that “make it” tend to be hugely ambitious when talking about what they want to do and incessantly conservative when discussing what they have done. Around the time Google flirted with being the largest public company in the world, Larry Page offered publicly and privately his observation that the company had accomplished maybe 1% of what it should be doing. You have to know a bit about engineers, relentless problem solvers, to not see that as a slight: the best reward to an engineer for a job well done is a new set of bigger and more interesting problems to solve. Larry made his observation with excitement, not disappointment. Almost a decade ago, Elon Musk declared his intention to colonize Mars and for years afterward was posting videos on YouTube of his company’s rockets blowing up. This was his way of telling his team at SpaceX that they were only 1% of the way there and what a cool thing that was.…