Fact of the Day: In many countries, Road Traffic Accidents save more lives than they take, once you account for organ donors. Reality be like that sometimes.

In the UK, starting a new company involves clicking through 8 webpages and paying £12. This gives you huge financial protection in the form of limited liability and major tax benefits (pay tax on profits only not income). Yet 92% of people never do this even once, throughout their entire lives? 🤔

Hmmm, having two major wars kick off in relative quick succession tends to break the fourth wall on an awful lot of propaganda. This might sound good whilst actually being very bad, or might sound bad whilst actually being good. 🤷‍♂️ The matrix of who people support in which war can get very messy. This is why Syria dropped off the news (too complicated in terms of theatres and combatants for Western audiences to follow). I expect a lot of people might check out and stop following / caring as the complexity moves up one order of magnitude. On balance probably a bad thing for our allies.

41 years ago today.

Whew, been away for 10 days on a holiday. What did I miss?

OK, this hits different. I think human-human relationships are in deep trouble. Using this two way audio conversation interaction, I can cognitively multiplex and it somehow feels natural when I do it verbally. This is a very new experience.

Seeing the multitude of drones it seems clear that wars are now fought by autonomous machines, meanwhile AI continues to advance. Is Sci-Fi merely predictive, or is it actually instructive?

255 photon quantum computer solves boson sampling problem in 1 millionth of a second. That’s 10^20 times faster than contemporary supercomputers. Quantum computers are essentially ASIC machines, they can solve 1 specific task instantly. They are not general machines like we are used to. Maybe we could complete the room temp superconductor search with a purpose built quantum machine? A journalist said…

The Quantum Insider

China's Photonic JiuZhang Series Sets (Yet Another) Speed Record

The JiuZhang quantum computer series reportedly solved a complex mathematical problem in a mere millionth of a second.

If I said large parts of the West are stuck in a “moral stupor” does that term instantly ring true with anyone?

Just comparing iOS clients and Primal seems to be a lot smoother and slicker than Damus now. Does anyone else get lots of scrolling glitches when using Damus? Or is it just me? It never used to be this bad.

Rural kids move up the income spectrum faster than urban kids. 21st Century cities are just bad.

What do the following people have in common? Philip H. Knight Delbert W. Yocam Mike Markkula Arthur Rock John Sculley Peter O. Crisp

Okay, I am getting much better at controlling GPT4 with custom context. I can get much better utility doing this, I now find the vanilla models to be painfully mainstream, really blunted. But by structuring the responses and how it approaches problems I can work with it much more naturally. Had a weird idea. Giving your AI assistant a name… ? Give it your middle name.

The whole Canadian parliament lionising a WWII vet for fighting against USSR and only LATER ON realise that means he was a Nazi SS vet and that they just crystallised Russia’s entire 2 year propaganda campaign, just blows my mind. Absolutely staggering.