In 1997 IBM made headlines worldwide after its supercomputer, Deep Blue, beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in a 6-game match. In 2006 IBM researcher David Ferrucci created Watson, as a successor to Deep Blue, who had high hopes Watson would revolutionize healthcare, but like Deep Blue, it was a sort of solution looking for a… Continue reading Don’t beat yourself up for missing out on AI or Nvidia hype

It looks like ‘go woke go broke’ has come for Google now. Even I was not expecting the PR fallout from the woke Gemini chatbot and the consequent decline of Google stock to be so bad, which is still ongoing. To recap, Google’s Gemini chatbot went haywire and produced historically implausible or impossible images in… Continue reading ‘Go Woke Go Broke’ Comes for Google

Bitcoin crash is resuming, down from a high of $69k to $63k as of writing this. Anyone can see that Bitcoin has a long history of suddenly crashing, like in May 2021 and all of 2022. Was I wrong earlier this year, yes, but 10 months remain for 2024, which is an eternity in the… Continue reading Bitcoin Update: Crash Resumes at 69k. 2021 all over again?

The topic of delayed family formation often comes up in the news, but especially on online discussions such as Reddit: Why are so many Americans delaying having children, or not having any at all? I posit workaholism is at the root of this problem. Rather than ‘amusing ourselves to death’, it’s more like we’re working… Continue reading Blame Incentives for Delayed Family Formation

Item #1: Given that this fact coexists with relatively low obesity rates in Africa, this should serve as a reminder of how unhealthy being fat is and how much medical care has made a difference for the survival of obese people. pic.twitter.com/YzBzitbA4S — Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil) March 1, 2024 Africa has a higher all-cause mortality, as… Continue reading The Daily View, 3/1/2024: Twitter Edition

From the NYTs: How the Media Industry Keeps Losing the Future. I take the opposite view: legacy media has thrived, especially post-Trump, whereas smaller companies are struggling, like Vice Media, which was valued at $4 billion in 2018 and is now worthless. Legacy media is booming due to a fixed supply of established outlets and… Continue reading Why legacy media is thriving

Just two full months into 2024 has witnessed the following: 1. Major plagiarism scandals and resignations at top universities 2. Biden’s age and declining competency becoming a focal issue that can no longer be ignored 3. Boeing and air traffic controller DEI and door malfunction scandals 4. Google’s Gemini ‘goes woke’ to widespread critcism and… Continue reading The defection, part 3: The next shoe drops: Google’s Gemini ‘goes woke’

Charles Murray and Steve Sailer discuss how to make the SATs ‘tiger mom proof’: More precisely, it rewarded systematic test prep, period, and it turns out that the people who work the hardest on test prep are Asian students and the white children of the affluent who want to get into elite schools. Want to… Continue reading There are no good solutions to the SATs and coaching

Last week I wrote post reconciling the existence of skilled traders with the efficient market hypothesis (EMH). By far the most skilled trader is someone going by “Fausterion18”, who in his most recent Reddit post (archive.is) “make $1.8M in a single trade and $18 million for the year”. But for the past two years he… Continue reading Efficient Markets and Skill, Part 2: Reading the Future by Decoding Systems

Shut up About Race and IQ: Why HBD is just white nationalism, by Richard Hanania. This is another Richard Hanania article in which the headline and sub-headline are somewhat misleading. It’s more like, “Don’t talk about HBD if you use it to justify ingroup preferences.” It’s not that he wants people to stop talking about… Continue reading Don’t Talk About HBD?