Sad to say that I broke a previous 12-week streak with (Re)Share, thus giving truth to the subtitle. I spent a week in Mexico, which was just delightful. CDMX is such a win - weather, food, art all good but perhaps the most impressive thing is the dirt cheap Ubers. ~$6 for a 35 minute ride?! Incredible.
Stuff worth sharing
Robotic overlord control systems - Frequent readers will know I have an ongoing investment hunt for content moderation and safety. AI Safety has come in vogue lately with the surge in generative AI models. I found this blog post from Google on their safety and accuracy measures LaMDA model quite interesting - especially against the backdrop of their bungled Bard unveiling.
Related - Midjourney elected to completely ban certain words for image generation. Not just the standard explicit phrases but basic, medical terms like “gynecological exam” are being used for off-putting art. People are gross.
An actual gold standard - Jordan Peterson discusses financial investing, specifically commodities and rare Earth metals, with Roy Sebag. Like many Peterson podcasts, the conversation can get a little political and long winded, but if you keep to the first half you’re good. The most interesting idea for me was crustal abundance - the idea that commodity value will broadly match the physical prevalence of said metal / compound within the ground. E.g., copper is ~5,000x more prevalent than gold and is ~5,000x less valuable per ounce.
If you build it, they will charge - The Inflation Reduction Act has attached a string for EV charging networks, which is forcing the adherence of the CCS connection standard. Tl;dr - chargers should not be proprietary to the auto OEM and many late model entrants will be able to leverage the already built Tesla network.
Friends of inconvenience - This was a great deep dive on the working relationship of Biden and Zelensky. Some political positioning and relationship storming, but the bulk of the tension is financial. Friday marked the one year anniversary of the Ukraine invasion and sadly there is little hope of a quick solution. If you can spare it a donation can go a long way.
Book review - Over break I finished Live from New York, which I LOVED. Over 40 years of Saturday Night Live is told through an oral history for cast, crew and NBC execs. At 745 pages this is not a light read, but if you consider yourself a sketch nerd I highly recommend.
Silent but deadly - Another of my investment focus areas, and certainly my least popular, is geo-engineering. This article covers the iron salt aerosol method (and startups pursuing it), which shoots chemicals in the air in order to convert methane into CO2. Creating CO2 may sounds crazy but the short term impact of methane is significantly more impactful to temperature increase, so this actually could be a true quick win. Standard outrage applies.
Developer doping - Nearly half of all developers are leveraging Github Copilot, which is an astoniishing stat if true. Quick, thought provoking blog post on how Copilot has been improved recently in both its generative capacities and embedded vulnerability detection.
Shameless plug
Medically approved second base: Kheiron Medical (angel investment) CTO and co-founder Tobias Rijken provides a fascinating explanation of how his team has developed a truly superhuman radiologist. AI can provide massive improvement to medical care, but building in a highly sensitive, highly regulation space is no easy task. Tobias covers vertical integration and feedback loops, acquiring reliable data and the limits of generative models.
Job Drop
Every Tuesday I share cool new job postings from early stage startups I know. Find the jobs board here. This week’s from Pear Bio:
🎯 Target Discovery Scientist