living close to friends, big sailing ships & more from the AI rabbit hole
CC#60 - Bank Failures, Good News from Medicine & the Quantum Computing Revolution
Hey there and welcome to ✨ CuratedCuriosity - a bi-weekly newsletter delivering inspiration from all over the internet to the notoriously curious.
Things I Enjoyed Reading.
⛵️ Gases from the Arctic and sailing tall ships ft. Sam Faucherre [🎧]
Some shameless self-promotion here: I just launched ‘The PhD Pod’ together with some friends - a podcast featuring PhD students from the University of Copenhagen. The first episode features Sam Faucherre - an inspiring geo-scientist who salvaged an almost century-old, huge, wooden sailing ship from the at the start of his PhD. If you listen to it, I’d be super happy if you take a minute to send some feedback over.
What happens to arctic soils when it is getting warmer? While Sam did his research on that topic he also bought and old freighter from 1932 and started renovating it. Learn about why the arctic matters to all of us and what plans Sam has for his ship.
👯 You'd Be Happier Living Closer to Friends. Why Don't You?
Being someone who lives quite far from most of her closest friends and families, this article has been a bit triggering (but also reassuring in some ways). While I think some of the situations described might paint a bit of an overly rosy picture, I think it brings an important message across.
So the vast majority of Americans actually live pretty close to their parents — either because the kids haven’t moved far from home, or because parents have moved closer to their kids, either because they need more support, or because they want to be close to their grandkids and provide support.
But you know what? Parents aren’t the same as friends. And while many people couldn’t conceive of how they’d handle or pay for childcare without them, there are many reasons why parents might not be able (or willing, or the right choice) to provide that sort of support. Parental proximity is not a guaranteed safety net (in many cases, it might mean that you’re providing sandwich-generation care for your kids and your parents). (…)
So again: for people who crave this, who may be close to their parents or even a whole lot of their family members but really wish they could be close to their friends — and not just the parent friends they’ve made, or the casual work friends they’ve made, but their best friends — why isn’t it happening? What is keeping us from the quasi-communes of our dreams?
No CC edition without a pinch of AI. Interesting conversation with the person who probably has the most insight in the potential future developments of AI at this very moment.
It's the same question as asking how long until AGI. It's a hard question to answer. I hesitate to give you a number. Also because there is this effect where optimistic people who are working on the technology tend to underestimate the time it takes to get there. But the way I ground myself is by thinking about the self-driving car. In particular, there is an analogy where if you look at the size of a Tesla, and if you look at its self-driving behavior, it looks like it does everything. But it's also clear that there is still a long way to go in terms of reliability. And we might be in a similar place with respect to our models where it also looks like we can do everything, and at the same time, we will need to do some more work until we really iron out all the issues and make it really good and really reliable and robust and well behaved.
Food for Thought.
💸 Ahm… yes… This shows the size of bank failures each year. What does this say about our financial system?
💉Its truly impressive at what speed advances in medicine are currently happening. How long until we can cure cancer and parkinson? Some good news to brighten up your day!
📊 Some more AI things - check out the thread for more. It’s just mind-blowing.
Random Stuff.
⚛️ Super cool visual article on quantum computing and the implications that a stable quantum computer would have.
〰️ Totally agree - its a fine line to walk…
🇳🇴 Impressive number - go Norway!
Personal Update.
Well obviously the podcast 🎧 - stay tuned we’ve got 5 more episodes lined up for the coming weeks.
Falling more and more into the AI rabbit hole. I genuinely think that there is just such a huge potential of building on top of models like OpenAI (or its open source alternative) to automatize research and data gathering processes. Currently trying to figure out how to get started in order to avoid being jobless in just a few years - who will need data scientist if they have got GPT code interpreter? :P
I am on Bluesky now - find met at jae1.bsky.social. Anyone else already there?
Also (virtually) volunteered at this years Outlier Data Viz conference - still waiting for the talks to be publicly available so I can share some of my favourites with you…