Interesting Stuff from the Internet
The Pentium as a Navajo weaving (righto.com)
Ken Shirriff's blog post discusses two Navajo weavings replicating integrated circuits, highlighting the intersection of Navajo art and semiconductor technology. The first weaving depicts an Intel Pentium P54C processor and was created by Marilou Schultz in 1994. The rug, commissioned by Intel, accurately reproduces the chip's complex design, albeit mirrored. The post details the weaving process, materials used, and the chip's architecture. It also explores Intel's history in New Mexico, including its Rio Rancho fabrication plants and associated environmental concerns.
The second weaving, also by Schultz, features a Fairchild 9040 chip, historically significant because it was manufactured by Navajo workers in Shiprock, New Mexico. The post recounts Fairchild's Shiprock venture, initially lauded as a successful integration of Navajo craftsmanship and semiconductor manufacturing but ultimately ending in an armed takeover and plant closure. The complexities of this partnership, including cultural clashes, economic motivations, and gendered labor dynamics, are analyzed. Finally, the technical details of the 9040 chip are described, contrasting its simplicity with the Pentium's complexity and illustrating Moore's Law.
Gianmatteo Costanza on X: "Visitor foot traffic is down by 75% in Downtown San Francisco since pre-pandemic, but this is never mentioned when reporting “crime is down”. Crime is not down. Your likelihood to become a victim in SF is higher than ever. https://t.co/eB8to8rYey" / X
Here's a cautionary tale of how the Wealth Tax in Norway has made it a real life Atlas Shrugged story
Many countries in Europe have taxed unrealized gains, but later removed it because all of its harmfull side effects. Norway is one of the few countries that still has a wealth tax, and it has been a total disaster.
Since the left wing government increased the wealth tax to ~1,1% and dividend rates to 37,8% two years ago ~80 of the top 400 tax payers have left the country. Representing ~40% of the wealth of those top 400. And it's *not* because of high marginal taxes in general, it's basically only because of taxes on unrealized gains.
Earlier stage entrepreneurs are now also preemptively moving or considering moving even *before* they start companies. I left Norway after we had raised a Series B and I was about to got a wealth tax bill many times my net salary, with no other options for dividend or liquidity on my startup shares.
Outside of oil the Norwegian economy is now stagnating with no productivity growth.
Norway is now very close to Ayn Rand's dystopian Atlas Shrugged society. Anyone that wants to innovate or start a company should obviously do it outside of Norway because you get an impossible tax bill on your lottery ticket startup "wealth".
Politicians and left wingers do not engage in intellectually honest debate when one points how this tax is impossible in practice but simply comes with hand-wavy general "inequality is bad" and "the rich should pay their taxes" arguments.
America is an amazing story of entrepreneurship and also admirable productivity growth over the last few decades. I hope the Politicians don't shoot everybody's wellbeing in the foot by introducing taxes on unrealized gains. Look to Norway if you want evidence on how bad of an idea this is.
Some thoughts on the YubiKey EUCLEAK Vulnerability – Terence Eden’s Blog (shkspr.mobi)
Terence Eden's blog post discusses the YubiKey EUCLEAK vulnerability, emphasizing that while concerning, it's not an immediate cause for panic. The attack requires physical access to the YubiKey, the victim's login credentials, and expensive equipment. Additionally, opening the YubiKey leaves physical traces. Eden suggests using glittery nail polish on the device's seam to detect tampering. He then highlights the broader issue of FIDO token management: their physical security and the inability to revoke them from all accounts at once. He recommends keeping the token secure, verifying its integrity, recording which sites use it, and avoiding publicizing one's security practices.
Snippets from the Newsletters/ Newspapers/ Books
Psychologist and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman on optimism:
"If you are allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism. Optimists are normally cheerful and happy, and therefore popular; they are resilient in adapting to failures and hardships, their chances of clinical depression are reduced, their immune system is stronger, they take better care of their health, they feel healthier than others and are in fact likely to live longer.
Optimistic individuals play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are the inventors, the entrepreneurs, the political and military leaders – not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks. They are talented and they have been lucky, almost certainly luckier than they acknowledge... the people who have the greatest influence on the lives of others are likely to be optimistic and overconfident, and to take more risks than they realize."WSJ:
Fifty-two ETFs are linked to the returns of only one stock, according to FactSet , including 10 tied to Tesla and nine based on Nvidia . One ETF seeks to deliver twice the opposite of each day’s return on small gold-mining companies. Another aims to double the daily gains and losses from a bundle of cannabis stocks.
The bureau said that inflation-adjusted median household income was $80,610 in 2023, up 4% from the 2022 estimate of $77,540 in its annual report card on households’ financial well-being. This move returned incomes to about where they were in 2019, the peak that was hit just before the pandemic.
The Apple Intelligence tools have faced numerous delays, and many key features won’t arrive until next year. For now, the technology is focused on summarizing messages and notifications rather than matching the gee-whiz capabilities of rival systems.
CNN:
For an event built around unveiling Apple’s first AI-powered iPhone, there was one striking absence over the two-hour presentation: the words “artificial intelligence.”
Instead, CEO Tim Cook and other company spokespeople referred only to their “intelligent” features.
To be clear: “Apple Intelligence” is Apple’s proprietary AI. But Apple — the most brand-conscious company on the planet — understands something that often gets lost in the bot-pilled bubble of Silicon Valley: Regular people don’t trust AI.
Zoos’ New Dilemma: Gorillas and Screen Time
Great apes have become interested in watching videos of themselves on visitors' phones.
Nature:
Scientists need more time to consider that e-mails and instant messaging are core to research but also a distraction. Researchers should study their impact on science and how they can claw back time to concentrate. Video calls, instant messaging, voice calls, e-mails, social media, smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops—more digital devices equal less time to concentrate and think.
Stop, drop, and think. Thinking time - the time needed to concentrate without
interruptions have always been central to scholarly work. It is essential to designing experiments, compiling data, assessing results, reviewing literature, and writing. Yet, thinking time is often undervalued; it is rarely, if ever, quantified in employment practices. One way to think about juggling research with email and instant messaging is to visualize someone working next to a physical letterbox. Imagine opening and reading every letter as soon as it arrives and starting to compose a reply, even as more letters drop through the box - all the while trying to do your main job. Researchers say that their to-do lists tend to lengthen, in part because colleagues can contact them instantly, often for good reasons. Researchers also often have to choose what to prioritize, which can cause them to feel overwhelmed. Newport suggests reclaiming thinking time, including limiting the number of items on to-do lists and project teams setting aside time to complete tasks.
“Thinking time is often undervalued; it is rarely, if ever, quantified in employment practices." requires all members, thus preventing individual members from sending e-mails to each other. For institutions, Newport recommends a transparent workload management system - a way for managers to see everything a colleague is expected to do - and then to adjust the workload if there are more tasks than available. Undoubtedly, this is good advice; this might be easier to implement in industrial settings than academic ones. Researchers in many academic research laboratories report to the principal investigator with little management structure. This is partly because it is hard to justify academic funders’ budgets for paying for management and administration roles. But Felicity Mellor, a science-communication researcher at Imperial College London, is sceptical about giving man- agers a role in thinkingtime.
In many cases, researchers are already feeling the weight of their institution's monitoring and evaluation systems. Mellor argues that including another boxing evaluation form might not go down well. She also thinks that institutions will not accept this. "Can you imagine the response if a scientist filled out a timesheet where it says 'eight hours spent thinking'?" Ultimately, she says, creating a more supportive research culture needs fundamental change. That suggests an even more radical rethink of the current funding model for academic research, as we wrote last month (see Nature 630, 793; 2024), along with changes to other aspects of academic science.
Quality check Newport's thesis raises a much more fundamental question: what is the impact of lost concentration time on science - not just on the structure and process of science, but also on the content and quality of research? In 2014, Mellor co-led a research project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council called The Silences of Science, published as a book two years later.
Researchers discussed this question and others in workshops, but the work did not continue after the grant expired. Such explorations need to be revived, but they also need to incorporate the impact of artificial intelligence technologies. These tools are being implemented at pace around the world to automate many routine administrative tasks. Researchers need to evaluate whether such tools can free up more thinking time for researchers or whether they could have the opposite effect. Communication technologies will evolve further out of that all-important space and time to think and continue distracting researchers from their work. More studies investigating the effect of technology on science are needed urgently, as are studies on how thinking time can be protected in a world of instant communication. This knowledge will help researchers and institutional leaders make better decisions about the technologies* deployment - and, hopefully, allow researchers to carve this on researchers in his latest book, Slow Productivity'. The book's title challenges the idea common to many workplaces: productivity must always increase. A study has shown that science is becoming less disruptive, even though more papers are being published and grants awarded than ever before. Newport, who studies technology in the workplace at Georgetown University in Washington DC, says that researchers and other knowledge workers need to slow down and spend more time thinking to focus on maintaining and improving the quality of their work. Newport does the research community a service by shining a spotlight on an overburdened workforce. Institutions should already be accessing the expertise within their walls in the search for answers but they are not doing so. Newer communications technologies have enormous benefits, including speeding up research, as was necessary during the COVID-19 pandemic. But they are also squeezing out thinking time.
Landlords for offices, apartment complexes, and other commercial real estate have $1.5 trillion of debt due by the end of next year, and about a quarter of that borrowing could be hard to refinance, according to Jones Lang LaSalle Inc.
Not relentlessly pursuing money.
A small amount of time thinking every day
Adapting to life as it came
Being honest
Helping people without expectation of a return.
fs.blog
Reciprocity
"Reciprocity underlies everything from basic human kindness to the most complex trade systems. At its core, reciprocity is the simple idea of treating others as they treat us—giving what we get. From this simple principle grows a vast web of social interactions and expectations that shapes nearly every aspect of our lives.
Many people seem to expect the world to hand them things without effort. This is a poor strategy because it doesn’t align with the human behavior you can observe around you every day. Reciprocation teaches us that if you give people cynicism and curtness or nothing at all, you are likely to receive the same. But if you give people an opportunity and the benefit of the doubt, you will often be on the receiving end of the same behavior.
Become what you want to see in the world, and the world will return it to you. If you want an amazing relationship with your partner, be an amazing partner. If you want people to be thoughtful and kind to you, be thoughtful and kind to them. If you want people to listen to you, listen to them. The best way to achieve success is to deserve success. Small changes in your actions change your entire world.
One of the biggest misperceptions about reciprocity is that people should sit around waiting for others to go first rather than unlocking the power of reciprocity in their favor by going positive and going first without expectation.
Reciprocity reminds us that our actions tend to come back on us. It’s an important reminder that we are part of the world, and thus our actions do not happen in isolation but are instead part of an interconnected web of effects.”
— Source: The *Updated* Great Mental Models v2: Physics, Chemistry, and Biology