PicoBlog

In September, OpenAI released Whisper, a new multi-purpose model for speech recognition. It is trained on larger datasets than previous work and is especially good at zero-shot tasks, i.e., tasks for which it has not been trained for. The research paper released (but not peer-reviewed) along the model describes, evaluates, and analyzes the performance of Whisper in various tasks. In my opinion, the paper is very well-written, and the motivation behind this work is very intuitive, e.

In the 1990’s a young man asked Charlie Munger at the Berkshire Hathaway meeting what his best advice was for someone trying to create wealth. Charlie’s famous response was: “ The first $100,000 is a bitch, but you gotta do it. I don’t care what you have to do - if it means walking everywhere and not eating anything that wasn’t purchased with a coupon, find a way to get your hands on $100,000.

Ever notice the yellow Energy Star tags on all appliances sold in the US? The Energy for Growth Hub, the nonprofit I started, was born out of one of these tags that caught my eye during a shopping trip to buy a new refrigerator in 2013. For the first time ever, I read the tag and was immediately struck that my new fridge would use 459 kWh per year. Normally, I would’ve ignored this abstract number, but I just happened to have been messing around with energy data that morning and realized – 💡moment!

Have you all been following the drama out of Denmark? The Danish Royal Family has made a lot of headlines in recent years but the most surprising — and consequential — news came on New Year’s Eve, when Queen Margrethe II announced her plans to abdicate on Jan. 14. “Fifty-two years after succeeding my beloved father, I will step down as the queen of Denmark,” the 83-year-old monarch said in a live television address.

In my long journalism career, I only wrote one pure sports story – about baseball’s dwindling batch of knuckleball practitioners. It appeared in USA Today on July 2, 1998, under the headline, “Knuckleball blues.” It’s one of my favorite stories, and I can draw a lesson from it for my work these days helping startups create market categories. As in: Even if a product works really well, it will fail if there is no real market for it.

In the hustle and bustle of Cairo’s Railway Station in December 1913, passing travellers might have been more than a little bemused to find an eccentrically dressed woman preparing to do her business on the floor of the ladies waiting room. They might have been even more confused had they known that this was the famous composer Ethel Smyth, newly arrived from England. She had a reputation for being forthright and outspoken, true, but soiling train platforms was a little outlandish, even for her.

We often talk about how student-athletes earning money off their name, image, and likeness (NIL) has changed college sports. Some say for the better, others say for the worse. However, that’s only part of the equation, and we don’t spend nearly enough time discussing the impact that these policies can have on professional sports too. Take Caleb Williams, for instance. Williams was drafted first overall by the Chicago Bears last week.

We like to think of Johannes Gutenberg as inventor of the printing press and movable type in 1450. Yet, the first movable type got invented in China around 1040 by Bi Sheng. The types were made from porcelain material. Later wooden movable types were developed by Wang Zhen around 1297. Koreans evolved the movable type technology further. In 1234 the first books known to have been printed using metallic types was published in Korea.

Humans spend a lot of energy thinking about other people’s thinking. This is called mentalizing, and it’s our greatest superpower as a species. We spend our entire lives developing and editing theories about how people will react in a given circumstance. For example, I’d guess that someone will be unhappy if they step in dog poop, or thrilled if they win a million dollars. By anticipating what others will want, or how they will react, we create groups that run more efficiently.