Not Boring by Packy McCormick - Weekly Dose of Optimism #18
Weekly Dose of Optimism #18The Crypto Story, IEA Calling Top, Data Lasers, Schumpeter's Workout Plan, ML-Powered Drug Discovery, Bleeding Edge AICome for the Optimism, stay for the in-depth analyses of tech companies and trends: Hi friends 👋, Happy Friday and welcome to our 18th Weekly Dose of Optimism. Go Phils. The Weekly Dose is brought to you by…Secureframe Answering RFPs and security questionnaires is critical to closing deals and growing revenue. But the manual process can delay deals or stop them cold. Secureframe helps you respond to both fast with machine learning so you can quickly build trust with customers, close more deals, and accelerate speed to revenue. Click here to schedule a demo of AI-powered Secureframe Questionnaires today. (1) The Crypto Story Matt Levine for Bloomberg
When Matt Levine writes, we read. After years of coverage, Levine collected his thoughts on “Crypto” in this 40,000 word super-deep-dive. Levine’s perspective is an important one: he’s neither a crypto shill or arrogant skeptic. He’s a finance nerd. He might be the finance nerd. On crypto, he appreciates the value of trustless systems, calls-out bad behavior and naked speculation, and thinks that whatever is happening — good or bad—is important, or at least illuminating, for the broader financial ecosystem. We won’t attempt to summarize the essay here — it’s 40,000 words and Levine covers a bunch of different topics — but if you have a couple hours over the weekend, we recommend you take the time to read it. Or you can listen to Levine explain the story (and why he wrote it) in this interview with Vox’s Peter Kafka. Levine’s whole piece, culminating in this final image, is a great expression of the brand of optimism we strive for: deep research, a lot of words, a recognition of the challenges, and a belief that it’s worth trying to build better products and systems despite them. From The International Energy Agency
The IEA callin’ the top! This isn’t the first time people have called peak oil: I remember talking about near-term peak oil predictions in my Energy & Economics class in college. But the numbers are compelling. Despite a rise in fossil fuel usage this year, the IEA believes we are near the peak of global fossil fuel usage and embarking on a long, slow, but necessary course towards a cleaner energy future. There’s much work to be done, however. We do not currently have nearly the clean energy capacity to fully replace fossil fuel usage and we’ll likely need breakthrough innovations in some combination of nuclear, solar, wind, fusion, hydrogen, and battery technologies to fully replace fossil fuels on the schedule that we want to. Thankfully, we are just a few desecrated masterpieces away from killing fossil fuels. Potato mashing our way towards a cleaner future. (For the avoidance of doubt: we’re kidding! These protests are unimaginably and embarrassingly dumb.) (3) New data transmission record set using a single laser and a single optical chip Lotte Krull for Phys.Org h/t … Ashton Kutcher?
Kutch from way downtown! A team of researchers achieved record-breaking data transmission speeds, moving more than 1.8 petabits per second using only a single laser and optical chip. That’s a lot of data — nearly 2x the daily global internet traffic. And the team is able to accomplish this using a single optical chip. Without getting too much into the detail on the chip, this is an important breakthrough because one of these chips could replace 1,000s of lasers and when scaled, in aggregate, these chips could replace hundreds of thousands of lasers at internet hubs and data centers across the world. We’re not there yet — commercialization is still a few years out — but this eventual swap could significantly reduce the climate footprint of the internet. (4) Time to Get Fit — an Open Letter from Altimeter to Mark Zuckerberg (and the Meta Board of Directors) Brad Gerstner for Altimeter
Back in the early days of the pandemic, we wrote the first piece that fit the “Optimism” worldview that we hold today. Schumpeter’s Gale was Not Boring’s “optimistic view of unemployment." We wrote it in April 2020, as the first wave of pandemic-related layoffs pulsed through the tech world. Our argument at the time was three-fold:
That could have been written today. It seems inevitable now, with big misses from Alphabet and Meta, growing investor pressure, and rising interest rates, that there will be pretty massive layoffs across big tech over the coming months (although net job growth still may go up in the next year due to hiring.) People will lose their jobs. Some will take a while to find new ones. That sucks, and we’re not trying to minimize it. But in the grand scheme of things, these layoffs will likely be a net positive for society and for those individuals. Smart people will be unleashed on the next generation of important startups that previously couldn’t afford to compete with the giants for top talent. “Curing cancer sounds great, but Meta is offering $600k in total comp.” And those people, despite periods of temporary uncertainty, will land on their feet, working in places where they can make a bigger impact than they could inside of huge companies. We’re looking forward to seeing the magic that happens when many of the “best minds of our generation” are no longer “thinking about how to make people click ads.” (5) Machine learning-powered drug discovery: Now and Tomorrow Ling Ning for An Ounce of Biotechnology (h/t @JocelynnPearl)
Not Boring’s own Elliot Hershberg wrote the definitive piece on techbio in Techbio Taxonomy. This piece, by Valkyrie Fund’s Ling Ning, goes deep on one specific facet of the techbio movement: machine learning in drug discovery. Ning, using slightly different terminology from Elliot, describes the three main characteristics of AI-first biotechs:
If you enjoy reading about major technological breakthroughs, science or how characteristics of tech ultimately seep into other industries, this is a strong read and we’d recommend subscribing to Elliot’s newsletter Century of Biology for weekly updates and analysis. The lines between biology company and technology company continue to blur, and we — as humans — are better off for it. Bonus: bleeding edge ai Solo capitalist Lachy Groom launched a new project this week, bleeding edge ai, which keeps a running list of the latest developments in AI. The cool thing about bleeding edge is that it’s one big list, with links, that’s updated every time something new drops, making it a perfect bookmark to keep coming back to to see all of the progress humans are making in AI in real-time. The latest one is a demo from Daniel Gross for Videobook, which lets you “watch” audiobooks: ![]() Just wanted to share something small I built the other night --
I grew up listening to Will Durant's history books, and now I can watch them! Videobook lets you "watch" audiobooks (sound on): One step closer to the Enchanted Notebook… That’s all for this week. If you enjoyed this week’s email, please share it with a friend or two! We’ll be back in your inbox 9am EST on Monday morning. Enjoy the weekend. Packy If you liked this post from Not Boring by Packy McCormick, why not share it? |
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