Roundup #14: What I've been reading, pet peeves, Underworld, and not being extreme
Steve Jobs at one point ate nothing but apples for weeks, another time carrots. Nikola Tesla became deeply attached to pigeons, once confessed to being in love with a particular white pigeon.
What I’ve been reading
The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of announcements in AI. OpenAI’s o3 has displayed insane progress on intelligence benchmarks, outperforming close to 99% of human coders and getting a much hyped break-out score on a bunch of other benchmarks. But that’s not all, Google released Veo2 (video generation) for early access and it blows away everything else currently out there, including the much hyped Sora from OpenAI. Lastly, Microsoft may be very dependent on OpenAI for a lot of stuff, but their internal team has not been idle. MSFT’s new Phi-4 model brings GPT-4 level capabilities at an efficiency level that it can almost run on a high-end smartphone. The whole story about power consumption and compute being a major problem for AI is going right out the window. GPT-4 (Generation 2) level AI is suddenly everywhere. Ethan Mollick has a good rundown.
A good piece from Noah Smith on Macro-economics and how economic reality never fails to bring down bad regimes in the long run.
Another one by Noah Smith on public order in cities. I really did not realize until now how incredibly badly left-leaning democrats have managed the cities they control, like San Francisco. What I also didn’t know is that every country in Europe puts a lot more cops on the street than the US, and requires 4x to 10x as much training time for police officers. This is pretty crazy and puts things like police violence (under-trained and under-staffed police forces) in a totally different perspective. Not to mention the stupidity, in retro-spect, of the idea of defunding the police.
SF has one of the highest property crime rates of any city in the nation. Car break-ins are ubiquitous, and seeing thieves stripping car engines on the street is commonplace. The city has suffered from the same wave of retail smash-and-grab thefts common throughout the Bay Area since 2020. There is a steady drumbeat of stories about thieves ransacking businesses, invading homes, and robbing patrons in cafes.
Now, having your car smashed or your store ransacked or your laptop stolen out of your hands usually doesn’t kill you. Only very rarely do you actually die from that. But it’s a constant reminder that you’re at the mercy of men who could do violence to you if they wanted. If you try to keep hold of your precious laptop, will the thief pull out a knife and slash your throat? If you accidentally catch someone smashing your car window, will they use the baseball bat on your head instead? If you try to protect the merchandise of the store that employs you — on which you depend for your very livelihood — will the thief pull out a gun or a knife? And so on. Property crime is scary because it carries with it the threat of violence.
The second reason is the presence of a lot of loud, aggressive, erratic people on the streets…San Francisco is awash in methamphetamine (which makes people violent and sometimes psychotic) and fentanyl (which is highly addictive, and may cause violence or psychosis upon withdrawal). Signs of these epidemics are everywhere; needles are everywhere on the streets, and drugs themselves are often discovered just sitting around. A number of downtown areas are basically open-air drug markets…
Streets filled with aggressive, screaming strangers and ubiquitous drug markets usually don’t kill you. But they make many people feel unsafe nonetheless. Could the guy who staggers by you bellowing racial slurs be about to beat you…or stab you… Who used the needles lying on the ground in the park where you take your children to play, and will the drugs they used caused them to turn violent? Etc.
The band Underworld is much older than I thought
Everyone knows Underworld from 90s bangers like Born Slippy, but who knew they spent almost 10 years as a funk and synth pop band in the 80s. This is one of their songs. Definitely had to do a double-take and Wikipedia check to see if it was actually the same band.
After briefly performing as a funk and synth-pop outfit, resulting in two albums between 1988 and 1989, Underworld gained prominence after reshaping into a dance and techno band, releasing albums including Dubnobasswithmyheadman (1994), Second Toughest in the Infants (1996) and Beaucoup Fish (1999), as well as singles "Born Slippy Nuxx" and "Dark & Long (Dark Train)".
Pet peeves
I was caught at a coffee place in Singapore that’s hard to avoid, Da Paolo. I bought an ice cream for my son, and feeling a bit hungry I bought a small mini pizza. It was a brioche based pizza. It reminded me how tired I am of Brioche and how annoyed at its appearance in savory sandwiches, especially burgers. It’s hard to think of a worse bread to use for a burger: it’s sweet, lacks structure, adds even more fat to an already rich food. Fuck brioche.
Parents who talk shamelessly about their kids in front of them (even when the kids are only 2). Seems to be an almost unique pet-peeve, but it really bothers me. Imagine if your parents did that now? Or if your manager would do this with a friend in another company? It’s a super weird thing to do, in my opinion.
The value of not being extreme
Steve Jobs at one point ate nothing but apples for weeks, another time carrots. Nikola Tesla followed slept only two hours a night and worked tirelessly for 20 hours straight. He later became deeply attached to pigeons, feeding and even rescuing injured ones in New York City. He once confessed to being in love with a particular white pigeon. David Goggins is an ex-Navy Seal and Ultra runner, and self-proclaims as the ‘world’s hardest man’. Before joining the SEALs he was an overweight bug exterminator, eating milkshakes and fastfood every day! He then lost 48kg in 3 months.
It was when I read Goggins’ book when it hit me: I just don’t relate to this guy at all. While I enjoyed reading his story I also wonder how long he’s going to keep this up, and what will happen to him if he’s ever forced to stop doing ultrarunning. His accounts on how far you can push your body are definitely inspiring. It made me run a bit faster for sure. But I can’t imagine being like him at all. With everything I’ve ever tried or gotten an interest in, I have never gotten more and more into it the more I do it. While I am naturally in some kind of balance, those extreme folks are not. When they get tipped in a certain direction they accelerate in that direction and swing to the extreme, getting fat and depressed on one extreme, and then drastically swinging in the other direction, whereas I start braking almost immediately. For a long time I thought that was a bit boring. I have friends who would climb construction sites when they were drunk, or who would fall asleep on the street. People who got out of control in one way or another. I never had the funniest stories. But I’ve finally come to see it as a superpower instead, and I’m now happy that this is the case.