Technology

The AI is building itself. On his Moonshots show, Peter Diamandis and mates discuss what they call an historical inflection point. 

Light unto the nations: Israel launches the national Iron Beam laser defence system.

It’s over too quickly, these two great alliterative-entitled Americans in conversation, Alan Alda and Kevin Kelly on AA’s Clear+Vivid podcast. Alda has such a gracious voice, and Kelly’s meets it. Kelly introduces some novel standpoints, earning his “world’s most interesting man” Tim Ferris monicker. The impetus and much of the conversation revolves around AI chatbots.

Managing Editor of eVTOL News Dan Gettinger rounds up recent developments by eVTOL leader Archer, Beta, Eve, Joby, Lilium, Volocopter and Wisk.

So Marc Andreessen’s interview with Tyler Cowen is making some waves because he seemed unable to justify Web3 (see tweets from Ian Bremmer, and, more predictably caustically, Nassim Nicholas Taleb). Personally I think Andreesse ha’s made the case better elsewhere, for instance, saying that if the internet had originally had a money layer then we’d never have had spam. But for me, as the developer of a new RSS reader, I was more interested in Tyler’s question about RSS:

Tyler Cowen: Do you still use an RSS reader?

Mark Andreessen: I do. This is actually an exciting moment on that topic for those of us who love these things. I use Feedly, which I like a great deal. It’s a guy. The guy who does it is a guy who used to work for us, a wonderful guy. I think it’s a great product and the inheritor of the now-lost Google Reader, the ruthlessly executed Google Reader.

This is talking about books, but Substack ⁠— one of our companies ⁠— has a new reader. It’s primarily for reading Substack. It basically is recreating, in my view, the best of what Google Reader had. That’s the other one that is getting a lot of use right now. I use both of those.

TC: Why does RSS at least seem to be so much less important than before?

MA: RSS is one of those things. I would say this gets into a broader, overarching, huge debate-fight happening in the tech industry right now. Internet got built on two models, which are diametrically opposed.

So Marc Andreessen uses Feedly and Substack! I wonder why both. I also want to know which reader TC uses ⁠— I seem to recall him saying that he does use one. The man seems to reply to hoi polloi ⁠— maybe I’ll ask him.

Incidentally I was surprised that this was not one of the better Conversations with Tyler. It didn’t really warm up into a good actual converation. For instance, I’d have thought MA would have asked TC, the world’s most renowned information omnivore, which RSS reader he uses. MA came across as a bit robotic, whereas I hadn’t gotten that impression from him before.

Germany’s industry-leading Lilium demonstrates both vertical take-off and landing with its Phoenix 2 eVTOL technology demonstrator, reports eVTOL.com.

So it seems that video gaming positively impacts childrens’ intelligence

We analyzed 9855 children from the USA who were part of the ABCD dataset with measures of intelligence at baseline (ages 9–10) and after two years. At baseline, time watching (r = − 0.12) and socializing (r = − 0.10) were negatively correlated with intelligence, while gaming did not correlate. After two years, gaming positively impacted intelligence (standardized β =  + 0.17), but socializing had no effect.

Not only is it newsworthy that Israeli company Watergen is installing its drinking water generators in Syria, but that (opposition web site) Syria TV reported the fact.

The BoJo Doctrine: Exploit the potential of all renewable energy technologies in this country, from tidal power to hydro to geothermal … Make a series of big new bets on nuclear power.”

As an antidote to the war in Ukraine, not far away, in Germany, development of the Lilium eVTOL continues apace. It’s perhaps the most exciting of the upcoming electric planes. The eVTOL Innovation YouTube channel has just dropped a video The Insane Engineering behind The Lilium Jet.

Following Tyler Cowen’s growing presence of a web-surfing morning, I note that although the elite is Leftist, the most eminent and influential public thinkers are not. As well as TC I’m thinking of Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Niall Ferguson, Elon Musk. Maybe now even Joe Rogan?

Perhaps it’s a question of age; these guys are all Gen Xers more or less, and all would probably have considered themselves socially liberal and economically conservative by the standards of their youth and early adulthood in the 80s and 90s. There is also a large swathe of others in their wake.

Who on the dominant Left has their stature? Paul Krugman? Is it still Noam Chomsky?

Three of the five I mention are or were known first as builders of enterprises, and TC is now getting into that game, as is Ferguson with the new University of Austin.

Marc Andreessen has just tweetstormed a section of an Ayn Rand lecture on the contrast between the tribes of Apollo 11 and of Woodstock. Whilst I commend his pro-Deplorables stand, I do feel that as one of the fathers of the age he could be utilizing his mystique to do more, starting perhaps with banging heads in San Francisco. During a recent podcast interview with I forget whom, he dismissed laughingly the prospect of running for office; perhaps he should reconsider. Also, just for some rounding, he might want to read Mailer’s Of a Fire on the Moon, surely an Apollonian who yearns for the Dionysian.

eVTOL Innovation YouTube channel extols the Lilium as the most promising of the upcoming ways we will fly.

The design of Lotus’s upcoming electric vehicle looks like a sleeker Esprit, reports Hearst’s Road & Track; when it’s released we can say we saw the blueprints for this car two years ago.

In American Affairs, my man David P. Goldman argues once again that the United States must step up its basic technological research if it is to avoid losing preeminence to China ⁠— and we are all to avoid falling prey to a rather less liberal hegemon. Spengler’s point:

The definitive inventions of late twentieth century technology ⁠— laser-powered optical networks, fast and light integrated circuits, and the Internet ⁠— all came out of Defense Department projects whose originators could not have foreseen the impact of the new discoveries … All the elements of the modern digital economy ⁠— integrated circuits, laser-powered optical networks, sensors, and displays ⁠— were invented at the behest of NASA or the Defense Department.

David P. Goldman blames the Web technocracy for the end of the American era, comparing it to how Britain lost dominance through the corruption of empire: by eschewing the true wealth creation of manufacturing.

Britain’s best and brightest left Eton and Harrow and went into colonial service, and made fortunes on the sale of British textiles to India, Indian opium to China, and Chinese tea and silks to the West. Britain’s country houses were built on the quick money to be earned from empire, and the British upper class eschewed the dirty work of manufacturing in favor of the faux-aristocracy of the nouveau riche masquerading as landed gentry.

The estimable Goldman is somewhat wrong here I think; web software is much more about conjuring up something from nothing, albeit an intangible digitized something, than it is just shunting stuff around at gunpoint, as he says late-Empire Britain did.

Hiconsumption presents the lovely Lambos.

From the bubbling, dexterous mind of Venkatesh Rao we have two rich essays posted within two days: “Storytelling ⁠— Cringe and the Banality of Shadows” and “Remystifying Supply Chains: Supply chains are TV for matter”.

The supply chain crisis is in some ways more unprecedented than Covid itself, given that containerized supply chains, and the world of distributed, networked, computationally coordinated production they enabled, are only a few decades old.

This is the first crisis of this magnitude to hit them.

To find a comparable crisis in history you have to go back to World War 2, with U boats sinking transatlantic shipping. And that was in an era when global trade was less than a third of today’s levels if I’m not mistaken (as a fraction of GDP) and still in the ancient mode of breakbulk shipping.

If you do business in LatAm, you’ve got a Miami office. Prodigal son Antonio García Martínez returns to Miami, now on a Substack-fueled writing mission.

I was raised in the Miami of the wild 80s and 90s, and more or less abandoned the city for 20 years before going back due to a family illness circa 2014. Much to my everlasting shock, all the twee fineries of overpaid SF tech life were there: pretentious craft beer poured by bearded lumbersexuals inside stylized industrial loft spaces; whimsically-named, garishly-painted food-trucks clustered in parking lots-turned-parks serving Korean/Mexican fusion tacos; pompous ‘Third Wave’ coffee places (in a city where espresso was already ubiquitous) featuring pierced baristas conjuring a pourover with all the seriousness of a priest performing the eucharistic miracle; glass-clad, high-rise condo buildings, indistinguishable from the same douche-cubes in SF’s SoMa (“GRANITE COUNTERTOPS, STAINLESS STEEL APPLIANCES”) growing like mushrooms in a dewy field throughout the formerly sleepy downtown.

Mary Catherine Bateson, conversations at Edge [via Hacker News, again].

Jordan and Israel need to exchange electricity for water. Jordan can produce green solar-powered electricity at 60% of the cost that Israel can, while Israel is the world leader in processing sea water into drinking water. Jordan is in dire need of more water due to a massive influx of refugees who aren’t going anywhere, while Israel needs green electricity to power those desalinization plants.

Writing in TidBITS, Glenn Fleishman gives us 13 AirTag tracking scenarios.

Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile defence in action, in a series of videos compiled by the UK’s The Sun.

This Dutch fellow tracked the mailing of an AirTag to his own home. It travelled 120km just go to 500m. Next he’s going to send one to Norway.

MacStories does an AirTag review roundup.

Adam Engst of TidBITS on the fabulous new Apple iMacs.

In his Telegraph column, the invaluable Ambrose Evans-Pritchard lays it out that the UK has actually handled Covid pretty well:

We can see in hindsight that the UK began the war on Covid much as it has begun almost every major war over recent centuries: half asleep, in utter shambles, with obsolete contingency plans. The first wave had echoes of the Norway campaign in 1940, or the great retreat of the British Expeditionary Force in August 1914. It always seems to take time for Britons to pull themselves together. Ultimately they do. By the end of the First World War, the British armed forces were arguably the best-run logistical machine on the planet.

Ra’anana-based Vertical Field signed with Emirates Smart Solutions & Technologies (ESST) to build a pilot of its vertical farms in the United Arab Emirates. Major cool.

Nice backgrounder at Stat News on the history of mRNA vaccines.

The first lab-grown chicken meat will be served at a Singapore restaurant this weekend!

Israel intercepts a cruise missile in a test of its 3-tier missile defence system.

AnandTech’s deep dive into Apple’s new M1 chip.

iPhone 12 Pro Cinematic 4K: New York by Andy To. Make sure to watch at full resolution.

Israel Aviation Industries’ long-established Heron flew to Ben-Gurion, marking the first ever landing of a drone at a civilian airport.

Lunaz Design’s electrified 1961 Rolls-Royce Phantom V.

technovelgy.com, where science meets fiction, and a glorious taste of the old web.

Marc Andreessen: Build, baby!

There’s just so much obviously that we are all reading about the novel coronavirus, i haven’t been posting here. Starting now, here is an important one: Tyler Cowen (who is great when something big is happening) announces the Emergent Ventures prize winners for coronavirus work.

A deep dive into the newness of the iPhone 11 camera at the Halide blog.

Volvo unveils its first full battery electric model, the XC40 Recharge SUV with 402bhp a 248-mile range. Featuring no front grille!

A deep dive into the Grand Seiko Snowflake on Hodinkee. “The entire thing seems to have been calculated to create an effect of serenity without boredom; of minimalism without sterility.”

AutoCar drives the electric Jaguar I-Pace from London to Frankfurt. As recently as two years ago such a journey simply wasn’t feasible. Now, once you have the more expensive car, it’s much cheaper than driving diesel let alone petrol. That said, charging stops are an hour rather than five minutes, and every 200 miles rather than say every 500. But I think there is some good here. Travellers must get out and stretch their legs for a longer while. All in all our automotive future looks improved.

I’m excited by the Richard Mille Bonbon watch collection. Just fabulous. Crazy expensive but apparently all have been bought, most popularly in Malaysia.

New business jets for 2019.

On the unstated significance of Apple’s new U1 chip.

I feel rather strongly the Apple U1 Chip, over time will be seen as one of the most important aspect of the September 10th, 2019 Apple Event. We will see it as the start of the HyperLocal world of computing that ultimately will lead to less of a need for the cloud.