Allison Sinclair has an extreme clinical level of prosopagnosia, face blindness. “Why, just this week I found out that the friendly strawberry blonde woman at work is not one person but two. No wonder our ongoing conversations get confusing!” ~ learn more
Founder Jim Simons passed away this week, shortly after I finished listening to Acquired’s 3-hour review of the impressive investment firm he built. “RenTec’s alchemic colossus has posted annual returns in the firm’s flagship Medallion Fund of 68% gross and 40% net over the past 34 years, while never once losing money.” ~ learn more
This is a fun story about science and scientists. It ends with an interesting quote from science historian John Heilbron: “The myth you slay today may contain a truth you need tomorrow.” ~ learn more
For that juicy bit, start at 35:30. The other part of this video that stood out to me was his description of the hardware that they sell. Specifically the point that to call it a “chip” misleads by association, because their “chip” is in fact a 70lbs machine consisting of 35,000 parts and selling for $250,000 each. ~ learn more
He was an early investor in Twitter and Tumblr, and always seems to be a bit ahead of the rest of us on digital publishing innovation. He migrated his long-running personal blog to the blockchain and isn’t looking back. ~ learn more
Human forecasting accuracy gets much better when aggregating predictions from a lot of individuals. LLMs are especially bad forecasters compared to these human crowds. But what about crowds of LLMs? “Our finding opens the door for simple, practically applicable steps like forecast aggregation to increase current AI models’ forecasting ability—to predict future events in politics, economics, technology, and other real-world subjects—to a level on par with the human crowd.” ~…
“This sequence of events illustrates how the AI arms race is making geopolitical divides simultaneously more fraught and simpler. In its quest to defend US companies’ IP and prevent China from accessing the most advanced capabilities, the US government is gradually losing its tolerance for ambiguous partnership: you’re either with us or against us.” ~ learn more
“Medicare’s prescription drug benefit as-if-randomly assigns 65-year-olds a drug budget as a function of their birth month, beyond which out-of-pocket costs suddenly increase. Those facing smaller budgets consume fewer drugs and die more: 0.0164 percentage points per month (13.9%) for each $100 per month budget decrease (24.4%).” ~ learn more and original paper
Kristen Holmes is in an enviable position for many health researchers, given the large proprietary dataset she has access to. In addition to the data streams from millions of fitness trackers, the company has a pile date-stamped and labeled event and action data from its users. She previews many insights that her team is in the process of publishing in this interview. ~ learn more
Who’s ready for this future? “Our proposed framework successfully reconstructed both seen images (i.e., those observed by the human eye) and imagined images from brain activity. Quantitative evaluation showed that our framework could identify seen and imagined images highly accurately compared to the chance accuracy (seen: 90.7%, imagery: 75.6%, chance accuracy: 50.0%).” ~ learn more