tvural

Learning new languages in-depth is an incredibly taxing thing, because there are whole jigsaw pieces of syntax you have to learn at once. But worth doing the right way if you have time.

It's worth reading the Ray Dalio debt crisis book to see how this might end - the most likely scenario is the US, Japan, and EU all encountering cash flow problems in the next recession that they resolve by devaluing their currency. In that sense people have less money today than they believe. If all the major currencies and stock markets crash at the same time, there's no safe place for everyone to keep their money.

I think the decline of Silicon Valley will have much more to do with the end of Moore's Law than any kind of social or political trend. The name is very predictive - if there will be nothing left to do with Silicon, maybe there will be nothing left to do in Silicon Valley, and the computer industry generally.

Dropbox Paper has worked quite well for me.

Financial projections will undervalue Tesla because they are very different from other car companies - they are a monopoly with gigantic barriers to entry on many fronts. Other carmakers could copy some features of Tesla's cars, but they can't easily copy the multi-billion-dollar factories that make other features possible. They have better engineers than other car companies and a culture that works them harder. They avoided the dealership system and built their own stores. Elon Musk's PR stunts and Twitter feed are a much more effective method of advertising than the TV and Internet ads other car companies use.

True, but it can be a significant problem for legitimate companies. After going public Tesla had the highest short interest of any major stock at 72%. The other companies that were in the top 5 at the time are all bankrupt or close to it now. Short sellers perceived it as an unrealistic joke, and tried to convince everyone else of that, which could easily have become self-fulfilling.

I would also point out that short sellers and "activist investors" are a significant downside to being public. Essentially you give investors focused on these strategies a financial incentive to destroy the company's long-term value. Activism has been a big problem for drug companies where investors will try to fire all the scientists so that profits will go up for a few years.

Healthcare is a much bigger problem for the government than student loans. The federal government spends about 1 trillion per year on healthcare, while the total of all student debt in the U.S. is around 1 trillion. This is true on a societal level too. U.S. healthcare spending is 17% of GDP, up from 5% in the 1960s. The problem with student loans is that the burden falls mostly on the least financially secure people. This is as opposed to Medicare/Medicaid where the government tries to foot the bill rather than allow people to get in massive debt.

I predict that BMIs are going to suffer from the same problem as AI, where the applications that are working in the short-term get very overestimated because they are confused with the long-term where you create a singularity. If you had a BMI that could read/write the entire brain on neuron-level resolution, you could create computer back-ups of people, and if hardware were fast enough you could create superhuman intelligence. If you just have cochlear implants and prosthetics, the best case is a world where nobody is impaired, which is good, but still very far from a singularity. The Neuralink version is that if you can do telepathy, that might be valuable in some situations, but it will probably just be like faster email until the computers become smarter than us.

I think it's unclear how much progress has been made on the superhuman AI problem. We haven't pinned down a good definition of intelligence, or figured out what it is that makes monkeys smarter than mice and us smarter than monkeys. We do have a lot of progress in specific domains, like image/speech recognition, but it's hard to tell whether they're on the critical path to superhuman AI because we don't know what the critical path is yet. That makes the timeline unpredictable, but biased a priori towards "far away". It's possible that better hardware will accelerate progress, but with CPU clock speeds flattening out, significantly better hardware is not guaranteed in the future.

$200M usually isn't enough for even one drug - $500M is on the low end, and not all drug development works out. So it's plausible that the money is better allocated here than in treatments.

But also, from the article: "Based on some of 23andMe’s newer hires, we wouldn’t be shocked to see the company dive into drug development, either."

There are likely some ulterior motives behind the way cryptocurrency is currently being covered. If you have sway in a news organization, it would be quite lucrative to invest in some crypto-related companies, and then encourage all stories written about cryptocurrency to take a positive view. The persuasion works best when it's hidden, like a story about a teenager becoming rich by buying into bitcoin early. This is fine, but only if all such stories come with a disclosure. Otherwise it's an ethically challenging position to be in, like the rating agencies who kept quiet to avoid losing their clients during 2008.