BC BUSINESS
Saved by @CodyyyGardner

This is an insightful article about what's wrong with Google as compared to Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook.

Which actually reminds me of the difference between organic and engineered designs: https://t.co/JMmSyBvA0J
Organic or biological designs are reusable designs from the ground up. They accommodate the needs of the environment because of the generality of the architecture. They don't pretend to solve just a narrow problem.
Architectures like biology that lead to general intelligence (i.e. like you) are from the ground up built from reusable components that encourage combinatorial mixing opportunities. One can never correctly guess the needs of the environment (i.e. market).
The opposite of generalization is pre-mature optimization. A company that has is genesis as a one-product company has a bias toward optimizing the entire stack. As a consequence, it compromises reusability and thus shuts of future opportunities of evolution.
The opposable thumb is shared by a common ancestor of the great apes and humans. However, apes have optimized for strength and not dexterity. As a consequence, lost this capability and thus further shut themselves off to an evolution path of higher intelligence.
The human jaw is weaker than apes because humans lost an important gene. However, the consequence of a weaker jaw was a jaw that was more flexible. Thus leading eventually to a richness in vocalization.
A key architectural feature for survival in the biological world is the reusability of the underlying components. All biological life shares the same nucleotides (4) and proteins (21). Evolution has somehow consolidated its design into a reduced instruction set (RISC) computer.
A second architectural feature is that biology is continuously testing its components. The above article points to the practice of eating your own dog food. One cannot achieve reusable components if these components are not subject to demanding environmental demands.
What persists in biology are those components that prove to be ubiquitously useful. Those that do not have an evolutionary path that is fragile and can at any time be replaced by a more useful alternative. Biology is continuously error-correcting for reusability.
Darwin's Theory of Evolution is commonly understood as a natural selection for environmental fitness. That is the goal of the species is to survive. However, this interpretation glosses over the fact that survival exists at a multitude of scales.
There is a constant competition of what gets propagated by a species DNA. An organism is engulfed by a multitude of bacteria and viruses that are also propagated to a species offspring. Parts of an organism are in a constant battle against alternative parts from its environment.
Humans lost the ability to produce vitamin C because of the abundance of fruits in the environments of human ancestors. The body does not have to create things that might be readily available in the environment.
Evolution thus is not a constant struggle for survival as a reading of Darwin may have implied. Rather, it is a constant struggle for usefulness. Every part of biology must justify its existence by revealing its usefulness.
Evolution is a story not of fitness, but rather of relevance.
Humanity is a story not of human survival but rather a story of human relevance to the universe.
Relevance is enabled by what David Deutsch @DavidDeutschOxf described as reach. The reach that is available to computation, biology, language and human explanatory capabilities is driven by the universality of it underlying components.
Reach is enabled by the interplay of first principles of modularity.
https://t.co/degRiNt0Oc
The openendedness of the universe, that fact that future has yet to be invented requires a mechanism to invent the unknown. This is a generative model that reformulates what is available from knowledge of the past, to invent an entirely novel future. https://t.co/ilLBULLJEO
@threadreaderapp unroll

More from Carlos E. Perez

Carlos E. Perez
Carlos E. Perez
@IntuitMachine
My attempt to map the research *doctrines* of various groups working on Artificial General Intelligence.


Although one might see names of individuals here as well as organizations, take it just as identification of the organization behind the person and a very narrow slice of their overall research portfolio.

Here is a @swardley map that captures the relationship of doctrine with other individual and organizational processes.


We can capture a party's doctrine by either an explicitly stated agenda or an aggregation of the kind of approach that is pursued. A doctrine is an invariant property of the overall behavior of a party.

In this map one can see the conflict between different parties (compare @garymarcus with the deep learning folks).
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Carlos E. Perez
Carlos E. Perez
@IntuitMachine
We wake up each day with the same attention budget as everyone else. This is the one thing all humans equally share.

Spending that attention budget by doing this is what gives meaning to our lives.

It's is only through doing that we learn. It is only through learning that we find meaning.

Yet many of us waste attention budget exclusively on consumption. Seeking the random dopamine hits that tickle our curiosity. Yet we seek only the convenient things to do.

Activities that are convenient, that takes little effort don't consume a lot of attention. But enough of these small distractions will. But unfortunately, there's little learning taking place.
LIFE
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Carlos E. Perez
Carlos E. Perez
@IntuitMachine
All Biological life on earth is possible because of a discrete digital mechanism of preservation and replication.

The mechanism of signaling between the superorganism we know of as bacteria and its ongoing war against viruses is through a digital mechanism.

The source of innovation in biology is in this milieu of microbiome and viromes that are ubiquitous in every complex multicellular organism on earth. Humans are walking ecologies and cannot survive stripped of these ecologies.

We can picture this as a cloud of digital interaction that surrounds all of us.

The cells of multicellular creatures however do not communicate in the same way as bacteria. The DNA of mammals are sequestered from daily activity so as to prevent wear and tear.
SCIENCE
Carlos E. Perez
Carlos E. Perez
@IntuitMachine
Damasio in his book 'The Strange Order of Things' argues that the core of condition lies in homeostasis. I agree with this generalization. But let me work out in a tweet storm how consciousness relates to homeostasis.

Human consciousness is related to awareness of surprising or threatening observations. It's an error-correcting mechanism that lends attention to discrepancies of our expectations of the world.

The mind is composed of many layers of cognition. Also, its massive parallelism implies reducing the conditional checks required for error correction.

To do this, consciousness is engaged only in a time-sliced manner in a periodic manner. The majority of time spent is in unconscious activity with only periodic activation of the conscious error-correcting process.

The system 1 unconscious intuitive mechanism minimizes the effort of performing error correction. It is automated and driven by habit. It is like a river flowing without obstructions.
CULTURE
Carlos E. Perez
Carlos E. Perez
@IntuitMachine
Interesting to realize that the living things that lay the foundation of the biosphere are extremely robust as compared to the humans that are destroying the biosphere.

Seed can remain dry and dormant for ages only to reborn when provided the proper nutrients. In contrast, most animals require a continual living vessel to reconstruct itself from its DNA.

Evolution appears to constantly perform tradeoffs between robust organisms and organisms that are adaptable. Co-evolution makes possible the development of complex species as a consequence of robust organisms.

We exist as a consequence of the multitude of less complex individuals that make up our biosphere. We are in fact symbionts that are in constant cooperation with our microbiome. Absent our individual ecologies leads to death.

We are inseparable from our microbiome, we are inseparable from our societies, and we are inseparable from our biosphere. The biggest lie we are told is that as individuals, we are independent of our world.
WORLD

More from Business

Nandini Jammi
Nandini Jammi
@nandoodles
The biggest story in tech no one’s talking about is Uber discovering they’d been defrauded out of $100M - or 2/3 of their ad spend.

And all bc Sleeping Giants kept bugging them to block their ads on Breitbart.


I was so surprised when Kevin Frisch, Uber’s ex-Head of Acquisition reached out to me one day on LinkedIn to tell me he found this epic fraud bc they actually DID block their Breitbart ads but somehow the ads were still slipping thru. 🧐

Uber was in deep shit in 2017 because Sleeping Giants was on their case for their Breitbart ads, followed by #DeleteUber.

Kevin said in an interview last year that we were a pain in their ass and he wished we’d get hit by a bus

Uber DID actually quietly block their Breitbart ads early on, but our followers kept seeing them and so we kept tweeting @ CEO Travis.

Travis was seeing our tweets and would ping Kevin saying “WTF. Have you not handled this yet?”


So Kevin - who is embarrassed bc he had instructed all vendors to block Breitbart (!!) - figures out which ones are letting the ads slip thru & pauses them. It’s ~10% of their total budget, $150M.

A significant % when they’ve already lost so many riders due to #DeleteUber.
BUSINESS
George Yury Revutsky
George Yury Revutsky
@george_revutsky
1/An interesting thing happened tonight. I was scrolling through clubhouse and found WileyCEO, Godfather of Grime (kicked off Twitter in July for antisemitic tweets) speaking. So I tweeted this (and included a screen shot, later deleted as I found out TOS don't allow it ...


2/ ... and several folks also asked me to remove it which I promptly did afterwards).... Coming into the CH room, I fully intended to confront him about how hurtful his comments in July were. But as I listened to the folks in the room, I decided to go a different direction ....

3/ the conversation jumped around, covered many topics and there were between 8-14 people up on stage. But a recurring thread was discussion of racism, bigotry, comparison of it in the US vs UK vs elsewhere.

4/ when I got a chance to speak, I had 5 bullets written down: a) we should harness technology and capitalism to make reparations for what America did to Black people. I gave https://t.co/SlrW8zCd58 (a project a couple friends co-started) as an example) ...

5/ b) capitalism and product know-how and technology can be harnessed for social justice c) historically oppressed minorities need to stick together and lastly, d) "Wiley, how could you say such hurtful things about Jews as a people?" That's what I had ready to say, anyway.
BUSINESS
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Robert Sasu
Robert Sasu
@SasuRobert
Thanks to the growing number of people who @getMaiar & engage with the @ElrondNetwork ecosystem, the number of accounts doubled to over 320k & we’re over 2.5M TXs, an unprecedented adoption level for a 6 months-young mainnet.
#hypergrowth100 Day 40
Weekly #elrondtech ⬇️


1/ The Delegation Manager toolset has been released for testnet integrations, ahead of our imminent mainnet upgrade. It enables staking providers to set up & manage staking pools, nodes, fees & other parameters for their

2/ We updated the libp2p libraries to the latest release & found out that they work seamlessly with their old counterparts. Congrats @libp2p team for the effort put in backward compatibility. We know how complex that is.

3/ Redesigned the async call & token transfer syntax in our Arwen WASM VM. Interactions between contracts are now “return types”, which makes execution flow more intuitive. Callbacks have also been

4/ Arwen WASM VM updates continued:
- Integrated new Arwen and new features of Arwen into elrond-go. Added a set of integration tests for different scenarios.
- Fixed a bug in Arwen VM which did not let one contract to deploy multiple contracts.
BUSINESS
Anurag Singh
Anurag Singh
@anuragsingh_as
#PolicybazaarIPO Long thread: There is monetary printing by RBI, there is lending by banks & finally there is the Indian IPO. “Foreign owned” company with ~1 Bn investment is selling “Indian” unicorn to “savvy” Indians for $ 6.2 Bn. Want to know how this printing works? Let’s go-

The basics: Rs 6017 Cr being raised by new shares (Rs 3750) & re-selling (Rs 2267). Face value Rs 2 offered at Rs ~1000 per share is one of a kind. Who decides the price? Examine the valuation ladder below.
With ~$ 150 Mn invested till 2017, we see $ 525 Mn rushes in after 2018


So, a company valued $1 Bn in 2018 & $ 1.5 Bn in 2019 by key investors like Tencent, suddenly “needs money” in March 2021. Falcon Edge “invests” all of $ 75 Mn in March at valuation of $ 2.65 Bn.
Enter IPO bankers a couple of months later & they value the company at $ 6.2 Bn

Why does PolicyBazaar need $ 75 Mn just 6 months before IPO & give away 2.5 times in returns? And it doesn’t even use that money as the B/S reflects appx Rs 1000 Cr in cash lying around.
What kind of a favor is that? Why do they need US investment bank for this just before IPO?

Notice 50% rise in shareholding of promotors here & a 1: 500 bonus share issue. After all, how do you print money & still keep share price at “reasonable” Rs 1000?
Without bonus issue in June 2021, each share would have costed Rs 50,000. Heard of circular valuation?
BUSINESS , POLICYBAZAAR
Sahil Bloom
Sahil Bloom
@SahilBloom
THREAD: The story of the week in finance is how a group of retail traders at @wallstreetbets, with assists from @ElonMusk and @Chamath, took down the establishment short sellers at GameStop.

A thread on the underlying mechanics of the $GME saga...


1/ First, for those unfamiliar with the business, GameStop is a videogame and merchandise retailer.

It has >5,000 stores, primarily in malls, across North America, Europe, and Australia.

The business has struggled to modernize, hurting its financial and stock performance.


2/ For a variety of business reasons, a bull (i.e. optimistic) case regarding its future performance has formed.

It really came to the forefront after RC Ventures, an entity managed by Chewy founder @ryancohen, disclosed a large position and assumed three board seats.


3/ @ryancohen summarized his case, stating:

"We are excited to bring our customer-obsessed mindset and technology experience to GameStop and its strategic assets...expanding the ways in which it delights customers and by becoming the ultimate destination for gamers."

4/ At the time of that statement on January 11, $GME stock was trading at about ~$20 per share.

Since then, the stock has surged to ~$200 per share and captured the public imagination.

But how did it happen?

There are two dynamics at play: a short squeeze and a gamma squeeze.
BUSINESS

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Ｌａｄｙ Ｂｌａｚｅｓ...
@Lady_Blazes
Oh my Goodness!!!

I might have a panic attack due to excitement!!

Read this thread to the end...I just had an epiphany and my mind is blown. Actually, more than blown. More like OBLITERATED! This is the thing! This is the thing that will blow the entire thing out of the water!


Has this man been concealing his true identity?

Is this man a supposed 'dead' Seal Team Six soldier?

Witness protection to be kept safe until the right moment when all will be revealed?!

Who ELSE is alive that may have faked their death/gone into witness protection?


Were "golden tickets" inside the envelopes??


Are these "golden tickets" going to lead to their ultimate undoing?

Review crumbs on the board re: 'gold'.


#SEALTeam6 Trump re-tweeted this.
GOVERNMENT
Jonathan Ware
Jonathan Ware
@ReassessHistory
So when it first appeared in Normandy, the Sherman Firefly and it's meaty 17 pounder represented an ideal combo of reliable chassis, great gun and devastating firepower right?

Ummm...

Truth is a bit more complex. /1
#WW2 #SWW #History


Deliveries of Firefly to units only commenced in April 1944,
just a few weeks before Overlord & left minimal time for familiarisation.

Armoured Regiments mostly utilised Fireflies on a basis of 1 per troop of 4 tanks. /2


Finally each armoured regiment troop had access to integral, meaty, anti-tank firepower capable of dealing serious damage to any German AFV likely to be encountered. /3


The dual purpose 75mm gun was quite capable of laying down a reasonable HE shell or AP round for dealing with Panzer III or IV.

Firefly's 17 Pounder had.... problems with HE, but excelled at tank killing. So Tigers and Panthers would need to be wary. /4


Firefly's design history dated back to March 1943 when the General Staff published "Policy on Tanks" which effectively stated the majority of tanks should have a good HE weapon and...

[See image below] /5
HISTORY
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Raman Shalupau
Raman Shalupau
@ksaitor
Maker movement is doing to startups what startups did to corporations.

Here is why 👇

Startups fixed the problem of innovation, that corporations lack.

In big, slow corporations, innovation is a RISK and distraction from the core $$$ profitable business.

Agile startups could launch, iterate fast and eventually stumble upon new growing market opportunities.

However,

When a startup reaches product-market-fit, it has to 🚀 "grow at all costs" and reach market dominance before some giant corporation can replicate their new product and distribute it to their existing giant customer base.

Startup's "growth at all costs" often means growth at the expense of charging customers $$$ money.

Hence, to be sustainable, startups have to constantly chase investor money.

Startup teams spend more time finding and pleasing investors, than finding and pleasing customers.

95% of startups die because they run out of (investor) money + no business model + crazy investor expectations.

Same way corporations die, when unable to adjust to new technology and market shifts.
MAKERS
Roger Grosse
Roger Grosse
@RogerGrosse
Important paper from Google on large batch optimization. They do impressively careful experiments measuring # iterations needed to achieve target validation error at various batch sizes. The main "surprise" is the lack of surprises. [thread]

https://t.co/7QIx5CFdfJ


The paper is a good example of lots of elements of good experimental design. They validate their metric by showing lots of variants give consistent results. They tune hyperparamters separately for each condition, check that optimum isn't at the endpoints, and measure sensitivity.

They have separate experiments where the hold fixed # iterations and # epochs, which (as they explain) measure very different things. They avoid confounds, such as batch norm's artificial dependence between batch size and regularization strength.

When the experiments are done carefully enough, the results are remarkably consistent between different datasets and architectures. Qualitatively, MNIST behaves just like ImageNet.

Importantly, they don't find any evidence for a "sharp/flat optima" effect whereby better optimization leads to worse final results. They have a good discussion of experimental artifacts/confounds in past papers where such effects were reported.
MACHINE LEARNING
Anshul Pandey
Anshul Pandey
@Anshulspiritual
IMPORTANCE OF SATYA NARAYAN KATHA AND ITS ORIGIN.

We all have heard and read the Satyanarayan katha. But none of us dont know the original stories that Shatanand or Sadhu or Kalavati must have heard. Also, as a habit we hear or read this katha


but dont know the proper way it should be conducted.

We find its mention in Skanda puraan(Reva khand) and Bhavishya Puraan(Pratisarg parva).
Both Bhagwatam and Gita call Bhagwan Narayan as Satv or Truth. So Satyanarayan denotes this name as the one which is Truth incarnate.

The story began in Naimisharanya when Vyasji asked Sutji about a way to eliminate all the sorrows and fulfill all the desires and about who is the devta who can grant these at the same time.

So Suutji first prayed to Bhagwan Satyanarayan who is no one else but Vishnu ji.

Then he remembered all his avatars.After that he narrated the story of Narad. Once while visiting Mrityulok, Naradji was pained to see the sufferings of People around. He was deeply moved by these sufferings and wanted to know the means by which we could rid ourselves from these.

So he went to Vishnu ji and after paying his respects stood in front of him. Naradji narrated the purpose of his visit.

So Bhagwan Vishnu said to him that in Satyug and Tretayug, Bhagwan eliminates sorrow in Vishnuswarup. In Dwapar he assumes different forms to help people.
RELIGION