Fasting hype meets a meta-analysis. “Intermittent fasting just doesn’t seem to work for overweight or obese adults trying to lose weight,” said Luis Garegnani, after a Cochrane-backed review of 22 randomized trials found IF was no better than standard dietary […]
Selection bias, the real teacher. “In the world of educational data, “too good to be true” usually means there is a hidden variable in how the data was collected or filtered.” Readers may remember that I’m bullish on Alpha School’s […]
The origin of Erewhon. I just learned that the name came from an old science fiction book. “In Erewhon, illness is crime and crime is illness.” Samuel Butler’s 1872 satire flips medicine and morality, with doctors acting more like judges […]
You were training Google’s AI. “At peak, 200 million reCAPTCHAs were solved every single day.” Sharbel argues those clicks were free data annotation from people just trying to log in, and that it helped train computer vision for products like […]
NES Mario in Unreal Engine. “If Nintendo’s NES Super Mario Bros was made with Unreal Engine.” A quick little brain-bender clip that reimagines an 8-bit classic as glossy modern 3D. ~ learn more
Investigators played poker undercover in Austin. “Agents were given $600 each to play some cards on the first trip.” The warrant says the TABC ran multiple undercover visits, with agents tracking chips, drinks, security, and wins and losses as part […]
Paul Graham’s on status brands. “Branding isn’t merely orthogonal to good design, but opposed to it.” Paul Graham uses the Swiss watch industry’s quartz crisis to explain how, once performance becomes a commodity, companies learn to sell status and distinctiveness […]
The 10x lawyer arrives. “This creates, for the first time in the history of the legal profession, the conditions for 10x lawyers.” Zack Shapiro argues AI breaks BigLaw’s leverage model by making individual judgment, not hours or letterhead, the thing […]
Specialized robots, not humanoids. “Humanoids have their place, but there’s a lot of room for specialized robots that do things in an efficient, sort of industrial-scale kind of way, which is sort of where we play,” Kalanick said about his […]
Training a robot to play tennis (with video). “The imperfect human motion data consist only of motion fragments that capture the primitive skills used when playing tennis rather than precise and complete human-tennis motion sequences from real-world tennis matches.” They […]