noahpinion.blog

A golden age of science is coming

A human scientist takes decades to train, and more years to reach the frontier of their research field by diligent reading and conversation. This is the 'burden of knowledge', and it's commonly believed to be one reason ideas have been getting harder to find — by the time human scientists can get up to speed, they're often so old that their ideas are no longer novel. AI just annihilates this constraint — it can assimilate the entire literature and reach the frontier of research extremely quickly, and it can also tell human scientists where the frontier lies without forcing them to discover that for themselves.

stratechery.com

An Interview with Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar About the AI Religious War

The problem is that innovation is a consequence of productivity, if you stop making the thing, you cede the stimulus required to do the innovation around the thing. The example I always give young computer scientists is, what do you think motivated Google to do the research behind "Attention Is All You Need"? If you talk to that team, they wanted the 3% improvement in Google Translate. You cannot think of something more prosaic leading to something more profound.

whyisthisinteresting

The OSS Playbook Edition

Research published by the Australian Army describes changes in Ukraine's drone warfare methods happening over weeks, compared with the many years Western militaries often take to develop and buy new equipment. It is a tight feedback loop, and being able to change it quickly can matter more than getting it perfect in the first place.

lennysnewsletter.com

How to turn your AI into a world-class designer

Great design, on the other hand, starts with feeling and aims to create an emotional response. It bends the rules and delights users with memorable, unexpected choices. Great design is exactly the opposite of what an LLM does naturally, which is to make the most predictable choice at every step.

25iq.com

A Dozen Things I’ve Learned from Jenny Lee about Investing and Business

customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf.

whyisthisinteresting

The Quartz Crisis Edition

The Swiss, suffering from hubris, didn't appear to realize they were enmeshed in a war with the Japanese at all, even after the Astron debuted. They also seemed to hold Japanese watchmaking in contempt. As one Swiss industrialist said at the time, "[The Japanese] were not even irrelevant, because irrelevant implies that they had been noticed."

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Remy Solomon

Good criminals engage with the present in a way major studios do not; they're constantly experimenting with novel technology, and they love to exploit emergent systems. It also gives me a good temp check on what I should actually be worried about in the endless deluge of things I could be worried about, and what's just a nothingburger.

readtheprofile.com

The Profile: The teenager who took on Meta (and won) & the modern athlete-turned-entrepreneur

Most companies are bolting AI onto old products. Notion did something much harder. It rebuilt itself from the inside out.

whyisthisinteresting

The Measles Uptick Edition

The US built its scientific leadership over eighty years through a simple and elegant idea: the government funds the basic research that no private actor has the time horizon or risk tolerance to fund, and that foundational work eventually becomes the commercial infrastructure that generates returns for everyone. You can't defund the headwaters and then wonder why the river runs dry.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Mary HK Choi

I can't imagine how life changing this was for chronic vertigo sufferers. It's astonishing how effective it is given how simple the steps are and it really goes to show what a difference a person can make by flouting convention and how brave people have to be at certain points in their life.

themarginalian.org

Einstein and the Eagle: How Relativity Is Saving Earth’s Rarest Raptor

But no one, not even Einstein himself, imagined that this purely theoretical revolution would have practical applications that would alter the fabric of human life — relativity was the paragon of "useless knowledge."

25iq.com

A Dozen Things I’ve Learned from Jenny Lee about Investing and Business

customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don't yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf.

notboring.co

Weekly Dose of Optimism #195

Essentially, the drug edits your gene to be like the "population of people in the world that have a genetic mutation that conveys a massive advantage. They have a mutation in their PCSK9 gene, which means they don't produce the PCSK9 protein." We are still a few years away from this miracle drug hitting the market, and there are still trials to be done, but this is a really big deal, not only because it's an assault on LDL cholesterol and therefore heart disease, but also because it's another example of our ability to see an advantageous mutation in a certain population, make a drug to mimic it, and knock more and more diseases off the list.

stratechery.com

The SpaceX IPO and Data Centers in Space

Musk companies at their best don't win the game; they change the rules through scale, such that billionaires buy economy cars because they actually drive themselves (with supervision), and airlines transform the consumer experience on their own dime.

wired.com

Shein Buying Everlane Actually Makes Perfect Sense

The acquisition struck many people as a bizarre mismatch, but it's really a sign of where Chinese ecommerce giants are already going.

ai-supremacy.com

How to use Claude AI for Investing

2026 has been the year of Anthropic. They are the creator of the large language model Claude, which has taken the world by storm: The company was founded by a group of ex-OpenAI executives, who purportedly set out to create a more ethical generative AI tool.

wired.com

Old Oil and Gas Wells Could Find Second Life Producing Clean Energy

States across the US are looking to take major sources of pollution and use them to generate much-needed power.

notboring.co

Cowboy Space Corporation

turning Robinhood money into sci-fi energy and compute moonshots is exactly how you should billionaire.

wired.com

Venom and Hot Peppers Offer a Key to Killing Resistant Bacteria

Researchers have developed three new antibiotics from scorpion venom and habanero peppers to combat tuberculosis and other drug-resistant pathogens.

ai-supremacy.com

What JFK can teach us about AI job loss

A core part of JFK's message was that innovation without inclusion is not progress; it is a slow-motion eviction of the American worker from their own economy.

3quarksdaily.com

Business Leaders Say Adapting to AI Is Essential to Survival

As AI tools become more widely used and increasingly specialized, many business leaders are trying to think quickly and creatively about how to best utilize this technology at nearly every level of their operations.

wired.com

‘Saros’ Shows Off the PS5’s DualSense Tricks

The new game from the creators of Returnal goes all-in on the PlayStation's haptics and 3D audio.

notboring.co

Weekly Dose of Optimism #190

The belief for years has been that pancreatic tumors were an immune desert because it has too few mutations to flag and too dense a stromal wall to penetrate. This trial suggests the wall can be climbed, if you give the immune system the right map: a personalized neoantigen set, manufactured in weeks, and delivered as mRNA.

lennysnewsletter.com

How Anthropic’s product team moves faster than anyone else | Cat Wu (Head of Product, Claude Code)

Why you need to build products that don't yet fully work, so you're ready when the next model closes the gap

stratechery.com

Tim Cook’s Impeccable Timing

We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us. We believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollination of our groups, which allow us to innovate in a way that others cannot.

upstartsmedia.com

Would You Try This AI-Powered Email App?

So much money and attention is focused on re-thinking our work tools and processes today, Gavini notes, with many of tech's smartest people bringing AI to verticals like legal or healthcare. "My workflow changes every three months now," he says. "So why are the apps that I use on my phone every day still the same?"

3quarksdaily.com

The AI Revolution in Math Has Arrived

Those early adopters found, to their surprise, not only that the models were good at puzzles, but that they could help break genuinely new ground. Soon, mathematicians were using AI to discover and prove new results, accomplishing in a day what would have once taken them weeks or months.

upstartsmedia.com

Robots! Drones! How DoorDash Is Building In Autonomous Delivery

A trap a lot of these kinds of research labs or hard tech labs fall into is they start with the technology first, build that in a vacuum, and then they try to figure out what use cases to try to fit it into later. Whenever that happens, it always feels like the product isn't quite the right fit.

notboring.co

Weekly Dose of Optimism #188

What Arc and the OpenAI Foundation are doing is what private capital and motivated foundations can do that institutional science usually can't: pick a hard problem, fund a full-stack experimental-and-AI engine, and run the loop fast enough that we might actually get somewhere by the time it matters to my family.

readtrung.com

The Sphere's $4B Business, explained

The exterior of the Las Vegas Sphere, known as the Exosphere, is a 580,000-square-foot LED display wrapping a 366-foot-tall, 516-foot-wide spherical structure. This colossal screen is composed of 1.2 million individual "LED pucks," each containing 48 LEDs, to create a dynamic and high-resolution visual experience.

upstartsmedia.com

Star Catcher’s Andrew Rush: Harnessing The Sun To Build The First Energy Grid In Space

Our daily lives are based on and enriched by space, regardless of who we are. So providing more power ultimately enriches humanity.

3quarksdaily.com

A Big Night Light in the Sky? Start-Up Wants to Launch a Space Mirror

A start-up company wants to light up the night with 50,000 big mirrors orbiting Earth, bouncing sunlight to the night side of the planet to power solar farms after sunset, provide lighting for rescue workers and illuminate city streets, among other things.

upstartsmedia.com

Synthesia's Victor Riparbelli On AI Video, Fringe Ideas, And Startup Lies

The problem with fringe ideas is that most of them are wrong, but the few that are right are very, very valuable. For me, it was always thinking about, 'am I crazy, or is there something here?'