as you get older you realize that the hardest problem we all face in life is what to eat for dinner this time. like we just had dinner last night why do we have to make this decision again
What we find is that those individuals who score highly on just self-reported questionnaires for motivation, if they score highly for apathy, they have twice the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease than people who don't.
Second of all is I hope you worked on your personal brand and on visibility because in this day and age there's so much noise out there that your hardest problem is not the tech, it's not the software, not even the people. The hardest problem now is like getting eyeballs.
there are meta analyses of these interventions in older adults showing that ballroom and line dancing have the greatest effect on cognitive function. And so both of those require other people as well as learning you know various sets of of movements.
However, there's an increasing body of literature that shows that by engaging older adults in novel cognitive activities, you see improvements in function. So that can be language learning. Uh that can be uh complex like coordinative movement or exercise. You see the same things with um like musical training like people learning a new musical instrument or learning um musical theory trying to identify different patterns in music. And you see in randomized control trials improvements particularly in executive function that seems to be most common across those different interventions.
potentially one of the reasons why we lose lose cognitive function as we get older is because we stop giving our brain novel inputs or complex inputs that help maintain function, drive neuroplasticity. And I think one of the reasons that that happens is because adults hate being bad at things, right?
but as you get older that tends to decline with age which I thought was kind of perplexing because I you know a lot of curious people but we found that levels of state curiosity when I give you some interesting bit of information but I don't give you the answer if it's something you care about that actually increases with age your level of curiosity and learning.
But her work has shown that when you give people different time perspectives, they make different choices. So if you unfortunately tell someone who's younger that they only have 5 to 10 years left to live, they're going to make choices very much like older adults too.
And I think, you know, most people when they talk about aging, they're so worried about dementia and, you know, Alzheimer's disease as a specific form, but balance is even more important, I think. And most people aren't even aware of their balance.
But in the walking group the group that was randomly assigned to walk three four times a week for 40 minutes compared to a stretching group who's still engaging in exercise but not cardiovascular exercise. The walking group their you know hippocamp is actually increased in volume by 1%. So you're changing the the brain, but you're also changing the behavior. Their memory was much better a year later.
you've got these other generalists doing design, you've got engineers doing design, product staff doing design, but I'm actually pretty long on design or designers because they tend to have taste and I think that is something that is much more difficult to imagine being automated away.
there's a consistent theme where Gen Z (and millennials, to some extent) are rejecting the AI hype while older generations are optimistic and coincidentally in a position to benefit from it.
Doing "the hard thing" means pursuing the highest-value problem you can find that still sits inside your zone of expertise; the hardest problem you're personally in a position to win.
So you have a lot of smart Googlers. These people are brilliant. I mean extremely brilliant to the point where the hardest problem Google had in my opinion was what to build. Not how to build it, what to build.
we're trying to crack the next frontier which is how we get that level of productivity increase and output building new features on top of a code base that are older,
Um so yeah, the the the um the core of what I do, like actually solving um the most difficult part of of a math problem, that hasn't changed too much. I still use pen and paper for that.
So when you look at inference at let's say 100 tokens a second for deepseek and kimk 2.5 hopper versus blackwell the performance difference is on the order of 20x
One is at every moment of this exponential, the extent to which the world outside it didn't understand it. This is This is a bias that's often present in history where anything that actually happened looks inevitable in retrospect.
There are obvious pricing problems in this scenario. With a new fab, a company can’t turn a profit selling a lagging-edge chip at the price that was previously dictated by a fully depreciated fab. Prices have to go up.
Their words now
The COVID super-cycle, plus a new China supply line that does not care about capacity economics, points to a forever glut.
Industrial policy was heavily criticized and again, if I talk to my Harvard professors, they’ll be very, very, very skeptical about the role of the state, especially in such a major way. But if you look at the Chinese experience, the evidence for success is all there. The cities that have pushed the most on supporting that particular sector ultimately did the best in terms of production, but also in terms of innovation, measured by patents. It’s all in the data.
So picking the right question is the hardest part of science and making the right hypothesis. And that's what today's systems definitely they can't do. So I often say it's harder to come up with a conjecture, a really good conjecture than it is to solve it.
I would say, multicellularity which is strictly an energy problem, I think. Again, it’s just like can electrons flow the right way. And is it energetically favorable for multicellularity to exist because if it’s energetically expensive, it’s not going to succeed.
But what I do suggest is that there were very low platforms on the Giza Plateau that are much older and that when we look at the three Great Pyramids, we are looking at a renovation and a restoration and a enhancement of much older structures that had existed on the Giza Plateau for a much longer period before that.
when you send someone a link to a post, they can't read it without loading the entire Mastodon frontend app into their browser, which will is a monster React codebase that will break if they have scripting disabled and also can take up to 30 seconds on older hardware.
One of the hardest things about debugging is running a program backward: there's a data structure with a bad value, or the control flow has zigged instead of zagged, and it's very difficult to understand how it could have gotten into that state.
It’s less about access to a model’s weights, it’s more access to compute that is putting the world in more concentration of power and few individuals. Because not everyone’s going to be able to afford this much amount of compute to answer the hardest questions.
about this idea that really when you’re older in most societies, your job is no longer to form new episodic memories, it’s to pass on the memories that you already have, this knowledge about the world, what we call semantic memory, to pass on that semantic memory to the younger generations, pass on the culture.
The most difficult analysis to do as an investor is that, is kind of figuring out how wide is the moat, how much at risk is the business to disruption? And we're in, I would say, the greatest period of disruptability in history.
But while I have seen no evidence (and Chris provides none) that higher food prices alleviate global hunger, there is a wealth of evidence that they exacerbate it.
This is older, but it's still a really good book about the Italian Futurists. Indeed I can't think of a better one for a general audience with some background knowledge of modern art. The chapters on Futurist painting and sculpture, on music and performance, on women, and on politics are especially good.
And we get to this point, these are the hardest decisions people ever wrestle with. And the paradox is if the advantages and disadvantages of the two options are almost perfectly balanced, it doesn't matter which one we pick. And yet we will spend days and weeks going around in a funk, which one am I going to choose?
In hindsight, the hardest comparisons are in fact the least useful - if I do the fourth most important task before the third most important, that's no big deal, but doing the tenth before the first is a screw-up!
as you age, you just naturally build up all of this all of this sort of psychic scar tissue and you have all these cautionary lessons in your in your head all the time. And you just you and and therefore as a consequence, right? Your your aperture of what you're willing to explore as you get older just shrinks.
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