by Jordan Gonen
Hey! Hope you had a great weekend.
I changed up the format for this week’s newsletter. As a reminder, the sole goal here is to provide you with as much value as possible and help you become a better thinker — please let me know your feedback!
8.7.2017
Articles to Read.
The Story of Stripe, the $9.2 Billion Rocketship, is quite inspiring:
He condensed what’s normally a two-year test-taking process into a 20-day period in which he aced 30 exams. Then he ran a marathon to celebrate. Patrick enrolled at MIT in 2006 based on an SAT he took at 13; John followed him to America, attending Harvard a couple of years later. In their spare time, they developed iPhone apps. One of their first hits was an $8 version of Wikipedia that people could search offline — the brothers stripped out superfluous coding so the whole thing could fit in a downloadable file. They also helped create a way to manage EBay auctions and sold that company, Auctomatic Inc., for $5 million in 2008.
Icebergs and the Carbon Tax [long read]:
“The world is a multi-headed dragon, with many many different countries wanting a say. But we can’t take any action unless everybody (or mostly everybody) agrees at least on a general direction of where to go. But we’re not sitting on a lawn chair — we’re standing in the middle of a railroad track, with a massive train bearing down on us (which we set into motion, by the way).”
How Buzzfeed’s Tasty Has Conquered Online Food:
“We need to talk about overhead instructional videos of people making food. You know the ones I mean. Open up Facebook or Instagram and you’ll bump into one or two or a billion of them. Tasty’s videos were seen about 1.1 billion times in June. Tasty’s producers work according to what they call a “full-stack” production model. This means that every producer is tasked with creating every part of a video, from recipe conception to shooting to editing. A typical producer will work on one or two 90-second videos a week.”
How Consciousness Has Evolved:
“Yet one of our most important biological traits, consciousness, is rarely studied in the context of evolution.
Even if you’ve turned your back on an object, your cortex can still focus its processing resources on it. To control the head and the eyes efficiently, it constructs something called an internal model, a feature well known to engineers. An internal model is a simulation that keeps track of whatever is being controlled and allows for predictions and planning. The tectum’s internal model is a set of information encoded in the complex pattern of activity of the neurons. That information simulates the current state of the eyes, head, and other major body parts, making predictions about how these body parts will move next and about the consequences of their movement.”
Self Driving Cars Will Affect Everything You Know:
“But here are three less obvious areas that I think will experience secondary effects when we massively adopt AVs:
- Land and Property Use
- Advertising
- Retail”
More:
– AI and Neuroscience: A Virtuous Circle
– 9 Surprising Word Histories of Computer Terms
– How to Fail an Interview, Even If You Are Super Smart
– The Future and The Process
– How Will WikiTribune Work?
– Why School’s Don’t Educate
Companies to Watch.
Mark43 — The New Public Safety Software
Segment — Analytics API
Cool Project: Ten Years Ago — See What the Internet Was Up To
You made it to the end! Thanks for reading 👋
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Want to read more? I write daily, and tweet too!
My Update:
– We built an intelligent bot that matches individuals in your community for weekly conversations. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts! Useful for teams, communities, clubs, and at work: Mesh . Would be awesome if you could sign up and give me your feedback 🙂
– Last Week in San Francisco — then back to school, time flies!