Misc

Miscellaneous is often where the gems are.

Misc

We live at 10 bits/second

  • Fascinating paper on how fast humans throughput information, 10 bits/second, and how this is in stark contrast to our sensory system which does 10^9 bits/second.
  • Why this is and how is still not well understood.
  • “Based on the research reviewed here regarding the rate of human cognition, we predict that Musk’s brain will communicate with the computer at about 10 bits/s. Instead of the bundle of Neuralink electrodes, Musk could just use a telephone, whose data rate has been designed to match human language, which in turn is matched to the speed of perception and cognition.”
Misc

Explaining PE Exit Drought

  • “The exit environment overall is governed by both cyclical and secular factors. Cyclical factors get a lot of airtime. Often mentioned are supportive macro, LP allocations right-sizing, and “animal spirits”. But the incentives facing sponsors get a vote. And sponsors today seeking to maximize their probability of survival face an environment that incentivizes retaining assets, lengthening their liabilities, and avoiding replacement/origination costs. This is the New Exit Game.”
  • Source.
Misc

Jensen Huang

  • “Both Huang’s aunt and uncle were recent immigrants to Washington state; they accidentally enrolled him and his brother in the Oneida Baptist Institute, a religious reform academy in Kentucky for troubled youth,mistakenly believing it to be a prestigious boarding school. Jensen’s parents sold nearly all their possessions in order to afford the academy’s tuition […]
  • “[He] was frequently bullied and beaten. In Oneida, Huang cleaned toilets everyday, learned to play table-tennis, joined the swimming team, and appeared in Sports Illustrated at age 14. He taught his illiterate roommate, a “17-year-old covered in tattoos and knife scars,” how to read in exchange for being taught how to bench press. In 2002, Huang recalled that he remembered his life in Kentucky “more vividly than just about any other”
  • Source.
Misc

Justin Wellby

  • Some people have the most fascinating backgrounds.
  • The outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury lived an interesting life. His mother was Churchill’s personal secretary, married a businessman, had an affair with Churchill’s other secretary, and Justin was the result (he didn’t learn this until he was 60!). He went to Cambridge, had a mystical experience that converted him to Christianity, worked for an oil company in Nigeria for 11 years, then quit to get ordained as a priest. He says he can speak in tongues – “It’s just a routine part of spiritual discipline – you choose to speak and you speak a language that you don’t know, it just comes” – and has written a book called “Can Companies Sin?”. He lost his archbishop position last month for the most stereotypical possible reason – failed to investigate sex abuse by a church leader who was a friend of his.
Misc

North American LNG

  • North American LNG export capacity is about to see another surge over the next 3-5 years as new projects come online.
  • “North America’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) export capacity is on track to more than double between 2024 and 2028, from 11.4 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) in 2023 to 24.4 Bcf/d in 2028, if projects currently under construction begin operations as planned.“
  • Source.
Misc

Prediction Markets as Info Finance

  • Prediction markets continue to develop beyond headline bets like elections.
  • This essay looks at further use cases.
  • For stock investing it could be an interesting addition to start to dissect a single price that captures everything about a company into individual events/risks – from the macro to the micro (CEO change for example).
  • This gives investors more granularity and a way to manage risks.
Misc

Is AI Progress Accelerating?

  • “OpenAI’s new o3 system – trained on the ARC-AGI-1 Public Training set – has scored a breakthrough 75.7% on the Semi-Private Evaluation set at our stated public leaderboard $10k compute limit. A high-compute (172x) o3 configuration scored 87.5%.“
  • “This is a surprising and important step-function increase in AI capabilities, showing novel task adaptation ability never seen before in the GPT-family models. For context, ARC-AGI-1 took 4 years to go from 0% with GPT-3 in 2020 to 5% in 2024 with GPT-4o. All intuition about AI capabilities will need to get updated for o3.“
  • Source.
Misc

Another 52 Things List

  • “AI produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions than humans! Humans emit 27g of CO2 in the time it takes to write three hundred words. ChatGPT, however, performs the same task in 4.4 seconds and produces only 2.2g of CO2. “
  • “On average, spouses in the United States have genetic similarity equivalent to that between 4th and 5th cousins.“
  • “People know whether or not they want to buy a house in just 27 minutes, but it takes 88 minutes to decide on a couch.“
  • Full list here.
Misc

Peak Obesity?

  • The press has been infatuated with the latest CDC mean estimate of obesity prevalence in the US ticking down (here and here).
  • What they miss is this line from the CDC – “Changes in the prevalence of obesity and severe obesity between the two most recent survey cycles, 2017–March 2020 and August 2021–August 2023, were not significant.“
  • In contrast, severe obesity rates continue to climb and this result is significant.
  • Source.
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