What’s Next — Science, Musk, Computingby Jordan Gonen
by Jordan Gonen
Hi! Time is moving super quickly for me lately. What have you been thinking about?
Let me know what you think of this week’s newsletters — hopefully gets your brain turning.
10.16.2017
Articles to Read.
Richard Feynman Teaches You The Scientific Method:
“If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong.
In that simple statement is the key to science.”
— Richard Feynman
Interview with Elon Musk in 2008:
If it’s an all-or-nothing proposition then we’ve failed. But it’s not all or nothing. We must get to orbit eventually, and we will. It might take us one, two or three more tries, but we will. We will make it work.
Supreme is Now A Billion Dollar Company:
Somehow both of these things are true at the same time: Supreme sells $40 graphic T-shirts to hyped-up teenagers, and Supreme is worth one billion dollars.
To put that $1 billion number into context, you almost have to look outside the fashion industry. The Wall Street Journal keeps track of other companies in this ballpark with something it calls the Billion Dollar Club. It’s a valuation only 168 companies, as of September 2017, have reached. The number puts Supreme in the same neighborhood as Shazam, Eventbrite, and Warby Parker, all of which were valued between $1 and $1.1 billion. What does it take for a cult streetwear brand to be as valuable as those household names?
What It Will Take for Quantum Computers to Turbocharge Machine Learning:
Quantum computers could give the machine learning algorithms at the heart of modern artificial intelligence a dramatic speed up, but how far off are we? An international group of researchers has outlined the barriers that still need to be overcome.
If we are to learn from the past, does the account of it have to be true? One would like to think so. Otherwise you might be preparing for the wrong battle. There you are, geared up for mountains, and instead you find swamps. You’ve done a bunch of reading, trying to understand the terrain you are about to enter, only to find it useless. The books must have been written by crazy people. You are upset and confused. Surely there must be some reliable, objective account of the past. How are you supposed to prepare for the possibilities of the future if you can’t trust the accuracy of the reports on anything that has come before?
History is more than just factoids, but its complexity makes it difficult for us to learn exactly why things happened the way they did.
What’s even more apparent than it was five years ago, is this: The dominant media ecosystem — in other words, how we get the words (and images) we consume — is no longer serving the needs of people. There’s more “content” than ever. But it’s also harder than ever to find signal amongst the noise and facts amongst the fiction — let alone inspiring ideas and high-level discourse, which is what the internet was meant to be.
Cryptocurrency Incentives and Corporate Structure:
The cryptocurrency world faces a tragedy of the commons and free rider issue: there is little ongoing economic incentive to contribute to an existing, major crypto project versus to launch your own token [1]. Some projects such as Tezos are helping to rectify this by thinking about developer bounties for work done, a venture fund, and other incentive mechanisms. However, the corporate structures and token distributions used by many other crypto projects today tend to exacerbate a lack of ongoing incentives. In this post I review common crypto corporate structures and brainstorm an alternative approach to try.
[video] If Flexport Succeeds, Everything You Buy Will Cost Less
The Story of Segment on IndieHackers [podcast/interview]:
Why is it so difficult to recognize product-market fit before you find it? And how do you find it, anyway? Learn about the struggles the team behind Segment faced, and how everything changed after they built a product that people wanted.
More:
– Dorm Room Fund 5 Year Report
– [guide] How to Get What You Want Professionally
– Hoarders Who Never Clean Their Desktops
– The Story of Park.io
– Voyage’s first self-driving car deployment
– Text Analysis with MonkeyLearnSee My Full Reading List
You made it to the end! Thanks for reading 👋
If you enjoyed, would really appreciate if you shared this link!
Want to read more? I write daily, and tweet too!
My Update:
– Big things coming 🙂 Will share a lot next week!
– 600 daily blog posts in a row!!
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Thanks for reading! Really hope you enjoyed! (If you did, would be really awesome if you could share this link with 5 friends)
– Jordan
Personal Website
By jordangonen on October 17, 2017.
Exported from Medium on February 17, 2018.