underscored

@underscored

50 clips · 1 follower

Follow
Tag:innovationClear
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.

Colin Nagy
1d ago

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.

2w ago

We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the remarkable fact that many inventions had their birth as toys.

2w ago

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

4w ago

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.

1mo ago
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."

1mo ago

The biggest risk of all is not taking one. Growth and comfort do not coexist. Every time I see a company protecting its core business rather than cannibalizing it, I know a competitor will do it for them—and far less gently.

1mo ago

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.

1mo ago

Every really new idea looks crazy at first. Every important scientific advance has had to fight its way to acceptance against the prejudice of its age — and the prejudice of its age is simply the common sense of its age.

2mo ago

We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the fact that many inventions had their birth as toys.

2mo ago
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.

2mo ago

Most people think the opposite of success is failure, but that's not true. The opposite of success is quitting. Failure is just a learning event. Companies that never fail are companies that never try anything new.

2mo ago

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.

2mo ago

Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough. The key is to make your mistakes quickly and cheaply, not slowly and expensively.

2mo ago

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.

3mo ago

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.

3mo ago

The best way to think about the future is to invent it. People are often afraid to bet on radical change, so the market systematically underestimates how much the world can improve.

3mo ago

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.

3mo ago

The best way to think about the future is to invent it. If you're unwilling to make mistakes, you're unwilling to try anything new, and you'll never learn.

3mo ago

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

4mo ago

The best way to think about the future is to invent it. Most people don't like to think about the future because they're not sure they can control it, but if you invent it, then you've already thought about it.

4mo ago

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.

4mo ago

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.

4mo ago

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.

4mo ago

The best ideas have some magical quality where one day they seem impossible, and the next day they seem inevitable. The hard part is being in the room when the transition happens.

4mo ago

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.

4mo ago

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?"

4mo ago

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.

4mo ago

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.

5mo ago

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.

5mo ago

The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.

5mo ago

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.

5mo ago

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.

6mo ago

The best ideas have a lifespan. At first, they're attacked viciously. Then they're accepted as obvious. The violence of the attacks is proportional to how good the idea is.

6mo ago

The discoverer of a new scientific truth does not gradually win over his opponents by converting them... What does happen is that his opponents gradually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with the idea from the beginning.

6mo ago

The one thing we ask is that the man who is not thinking should get out of the way of the man who is. The world wants to move forward, and if you're not moving with it, you're holding it back.

6mo ago

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 (translation: blows your got dang socks off).

6mo ago

One rebuttal — which I happily ascribe to — is to reply with an image of Las Vegas Sphere and say, "yes, we definitely do." Look, the latter might not be the Cathedral Notre Dame or La Sagrada Familia…or the Forbidden Palace. But it's still a different kind of marvel and incredible engineering accomplishment.

6mo ago

Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.

Start saving quotes →