Category: What I’m Reading

  • LA child dies from SSPE — (yet) another reason to vaccinate

    Let’s summarize the case for measles vaccination:

    Sadly, a child in LA county died on Thursday from SSPE — while we don’t have a ton of information about the child’s age, it’s likely the child came down with measles prior to vaccination. For us to protect our kids and each other, we should not only get them vaccinated but insure broad enough vaccination so as to insure herd immunity.

    “This case is a painful reminder of how dangerous measles can be, especially for our most vulnerable community members,” L.A. County Health Officer Dr. Muntu Davis said in a statement. “Infants too young to be vaccinated rely on all of us to help protect them through community immunity. Vaccination is not just about protecting yourself-it’s about protecting your family, your neighbors, and especially children who are too young to be vaccinated.”

    Child dies from rare measles-related complication, LA County health officials say
    Amy Powell | ABC 7 News

  • The Surrealism of Authoritarianism

    Among the obvious hallmarks of authoritarianism are:

    1. Arbitrary paranoia from on high — where students singing patriotic songs on bike rides are suddenly viewed to be a threat
    2. Contradiction between reality and what the state wants you to believe — where state media simultaneously can champion “Labubu blind boxes” as signs of cultural & economic success but also frivolous “tools to exploit children’s wallets”

    While every society has its own forms of this, it’s very clear China under Xi Jinping has advanced in troubling directions on both, an alarming sign for anyone who lives in China but also a reminder to free societies that it’s easier than you think to step down this path.

    Labubu appears to be yet another sign of China’s global success. Figurines of the grinning, pointy-eared elf, marketed by a Chinese company called Pop Mart, are so wildly popular that fans around the world go to great lengths to get their hands on them. Many of them come in “blind boxes,” meaning that the consumer gets to see the contents only after purchase. The Chinese state news agency Xinhua boasted in mid-June that the Labubu craze “signals a broader shift in China’s role on the global stage”: The country is becoming a cultural center.

    At home, however, the Chinese Communist Party is working to dampen the enthusiasm. A June article in its main newspaper, the People’s Daily, criticized the “out of control spending” on blind boxes and similar products among minors who are “irrational” in their decisions and called for tighter regulation to prevent such objects from becoming “tools to exploit children’s wallets.”

    Blind boxes are but one cultural trend to incur the party’s ire. In recent years, Chinese authorities have gone after video games and K-pop, comedy clubs and Halloween parties, gay and lesbian activists and women’s-rights advocates, tech entrepreneurs and financial advisers. The incessant crackdowns, and the campaigns of censorship or censoriousness, suggest that the Chinese regime is intent on not just eliminating opposition, but also micromanaging its people’s lifestyles, consumption, and beliefs.

    Life has Gotten Surreal in China
    Michael Schuman | The Atlantic

  • (Finally) The End of Evergrande

    It’s been a long time coming but China Evergrande (which I blogged about nearly 2 years ago!), once China’s largest property developer and who’s debt crisis is widely viewed as the “Lehman Brothers” moment in China’s property crisis, has finally been de-listed, about 18 months after it was ordered to be liquidated.

    What remains to be seen is what China’s government will do as China’s property crisis continues. It’s somewhat ironic given that it was the Chinese government which triggered the property sector’s implosion when it tried to crack down on the property bubble. Only time will tell how much pain the central government is willing for the sector to endure — the US was unable to stomach this pain during the Great Financial Crisis and ultimately made “heroic” moves to save the housing sector.

    The clock started ticking for the delisting in late January last year, when Evergrande received a liquidation order from a Hong Kong court and trading of its shares was suspended. It has remained halted since then, having failed to meet requirements for a resumption of trading. In Hong Kong, a stock can be delisted if suspension lasts 18 months or longer.

    The move will further diminish hopes for any recovery for Evergrande’s shareholders, who have seen the value of their investment evaporate in recent years.

    China’s Once-Biggest Builder Evergrande Booted Out of Stock Market After Collapse
    Bloomberg News

  • New Age Bioprospecting for Antimicrobials

    One of the major contributors to improved healthcare outcomes and reduced mortality in the post-World War II era was the widespread use of antibiotics. Able to treat infection, these miracle drugs literally transformed bacteria from humanity’s primary killer to a manageable problem.

    But, in recent decades, the decline in the discovery of novel antibacterials (and other antimicrobials like antifungals) and the rapid rise in antimicrobial resistance has threatened this happy state. This has led many experts to worry about what will happen in a post-antibiotic world. After all, without effective antibiotics, we not only lose the ability to treat life-threatening diseases like tuberculosis (not to mention common ailments which are a nuisance today but may become more serious like strep throat, urinary tract infections, and ear infections), but we will also lose the ability to perform many surgeries safely (as recovery oftentimes counts on antibiotics to prevent and hold at bay infections).

    While we need to get smarter about how and where we use antibiotics (especially in agricultural applications) to slow the rise of resistance, the other half of this problem is in discovering and commercializing new antimicrobials. This is something we’ve largely failed to do since the 1960s, as the figure below from the C&EN article derived from data in a 2019 paper shows.

    The “golden age” of antimicrobial discovery that ended in the 1960s came largely from researchers searching for these miracle chemicals in soil samples (“bioprospecting”), where bacteria and fungi, in order to compete, release them as “chemical weapons” against others. But, having long ago exhausted the “easy” antimicrobials, we were unable to replicate this success in the decades following the 1960s

    But maybe this is about to change. In March, two completely new classes of antimicrobial were published in two weeks (both in Nature) — equaling the total output of the 2010s! Both papers (one by a group from China Pharmaceutical University in Nanjing, China and the other from a collaboration between University of Illinois in Chicago and McMaster University in Canada) were centered around identifying biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) responsible, and with the lower cost of metagenomic sequencing and new computational methods, this may point to a new era of discovering novel antimicrobials to help us innovate our way out of our current antimicrobial resistance dilemma by re-inventing bioprospecting.

    A good reminder that what we need is the political and scientific willpower to keep funding this type of research and the types of genomic and protein databases that make this type of innovation possible!

    In March, the journal Nature published the discoveries of two paradigm-breaking antimicrobial compounds in as many weeks: a polyene macrolide antifungal called mandimycin and a lasso peptide antibiotic called lariocidin.

    Both these compounds, which use never-before-seen antimicrobial mechanisms, were found using techniques that let researchers look deep into the chemical diversity of microbes—much deeper than a typical antibiotic or antifungal screen might go. And it’s not just these two molecules. Scientists are using the new approaches to discover countless other antimicrobial compounds with the potential to become drugs.

    Bioprospectors mine microbial genomes for antibiotic gold
    Max Barnhart | C&EN

  • Google’s New Weapon in AI — Cloudflare

    Tech strategy is difficult AND fascinating because it’s unpredictable. In addition to worrying about the actions of direct competitors (i.e. Samsung vs Apple), companies need to also worry about the actions of ecosystem players (i.e. smartphones and AI vendors) who may make moves that were intended for something else but have far-reaching consequences.

    In the competition between frontier AI models, it is no surprise that Google, where the Transformer architecture virtually all LLMs are based on was created, was caught off-guard by the rapid rise of OpenAI and AI-powered search vendors like Perplexity and Chinese participants like DeepSeek and Alibaba/Qwen. While Google (and its subsidiary DeepMind) have doubled down on their own impressive AI efforts, the general perception in the tech industry has been that Google is on defense.

    But, as I started, tech strategy is not just about your direct competition. It’s also about the ecosystem. Cloudflare, which offers distributed internet security solutions (which protect this blog and let me access my home server remotely) recently announced that it would start blocking the webscrapers that AI companies use due to concerns from publishers of websites that their content is being used without compensation.

    However, because search is still a key source of traffic for most websites, this “default block” is almost certainly not turned on (at least by most website owners) for Google’s own scrapers, giving Google’s internal AI efforts a unique data advantage over it’s non-search-engine rivals.

    Time will tell how the major AI vendors will adapt to this, but judging by the announcement this morning that Cloudflare is now actively flagging AI-powered search engine Perplexity as a bad agent, Cloudflare may have just given Google a powerful new weapon in it’s AI competition.

    The Internet as we have known it for the past three decades is rapidly changing, but one thing remains constant: it is built on trust. There are clear preferences that crawlers should be transparent, serve a clear purpose, perform a specific activity, and, most importantly, follow website directives and preferences. Based on Perplexity’s observed behavior, which is incompatible with those preferences, we have de-listed them as a verified bot and added heuristics to our managed rules that block this stealth crawling.

    Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade website no-crawl directives
    Gabriel Corral, Vaibhav Singal, Brian Mitchell, Reid Tatoris
    | Cloudflare Blog

  • Helsinki goes a full year without a traffic death

    Helsinki, Finland (population: ~650,000) has not had a single car cash related death in over a year! That is impressive! They believe a combination of lower speed limits, improved pedestrian / cycling infrastructure, public transit improvement, and traffic camera all contributed.

    While Americans love cars (this writer included!), the fact that roughly 40,000 Americans die each year from motor vehicle fatalities (not to mention ~2.6 million emergency department visits related to motor vehicle crashes in 2022 and $470 billion in medical costs) should push us to question if we can do better by learning from the experiences of other places.

    I don’t relish driving even slower in a city, but it’s hard to deny the alternative is even grimmer.

    According to Utriainen, more than half of Helsinki’s streets now have a speed limit of 30 km/h. Fifty years ago, that proportion featured 50 km/h limits.

    Earlier this summer, Helsinki decided to lower speed limits near schools to 30 km/h, a measure that is set to take effect as the academic year begins.

    Street design has also played a key role. Pedestrian and cycling infrastructure has been significantly upgraded in recent years. In addition, cooperation with traffic police has intensified and more traffic cameras and automated enforcement systems have been introduced.

    “Public transport in Helsinki is excellent, which reduces car use, and with it, the number of serious accidents,” Utriainen noted.

    Vehicle technology has also improved, making both cars and other personal transport options safer than ever.

    Helsinki goes a full year without a traffic death
    YLE News

  • LLMs Get Trounced at Chess

    While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated they can do many things well enough, it’s important to remember that these are not “thinking machines” so much as impressively competent “writing machines” (able to figure out what words are likely to follow).

    Case in point: both OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot lost to the chess playing engine of an old Atari game (Video Chess) which takes up a mere 4 KB of memory to work (compared with the billions of parameters and GB’s of specialized accelerator memory needed to make LLMs work).

    It’s a small (yet potent) reminder that (1) different kinds of AI are necessary for different tasks (i.e. Google’s revolutionary AlphaZero probably would’ve made short work of the Atari engine) and (2) don’t underestimate how small but highly specialized algorithms can perform.

    Last month we reported on the somewhat-surprising news that an emulated Atari 2600 running the 1979 software Video Chess had “absolutely wrecked” an overconfident ChatGPT at the game of kings. Fans of schadenfreude rejoice, because Microsoft Copilot thought this was a chance to show its superiority to ChatGPT: And the Atari gave it a beating.

    After conquering ChatGPT, Atari 2600 Video Chess destroys Microsoft Copilot: ‘The vintage silicon mastermind bested me fair and square’
    Rich Stanton | PC Gamer

  • The War on Harvard’s Private Equity/VC Collateral Damage

    Republicans have declared a “war on Harvard” in recent months and one front of that is a request to the SEC to look at how Harvard’s massive endowment values illiquid assets like venture capital and private equity.

    What’s fascinating is that in targeting Harvard in this way the Republicans may have declared war on Private Equity and Venture Capital in general. As their holdings (in privately held companies) are highly illiquid, it is considered accounting “standard practice” to simply ask the investment funds to provide “fair market” valuations of those assets.

    This is a practical necessity, as it is highly difficult to value these companies (which rarely trade and where even highly paid professionals miss the mark). But, it means that investment firms are allowed to “grade their own homework”, pretending that valuations for some companies are much higher than they actually have a right to be, resulting in quite a bit of “grade inflation” across the entire sector.

    If Harvard is forced to re-value these according to a more objective standard — like the valuations of these assets according to a 409a valuation or a secondary transaction (where shares are sold without the company being involved) both of which artificially deflate prices — then it wouldn’t be a surprise to see significant “grade deflation” which could have major consequences for private capital:

    • Less capital for private equity / venture capital: Many institutional investors (LPs) like private equity / venture capital in part because the “grade inflation” buffers the price turbulence that more liquid assets (like stocks) experience (so long as the long-term returns are good). Those investors will find private equity and venture capital less attractive if the current practices are replaced with something more like “grade deflation”
    • A shift in investments from higher risk companies to more mature ones: If Private Equity / Venture Capital investments need to be graded on a harsher scale, they will be less likely to invest in higher risk companies (which are more likely to experience valuation changes under stricter methodologies) and more likely to invest in more mature companies with more predictable financials (ones that are closer to acting like publicly traded companies). This would be a blow to smaller and earlier stage companies.

    The problem is investors are often allowed to keep using the reported NAV figures even if they know they are out of date or weren’t measured properly. In those scenarios, the accounting rules say an investor “shall consider whether an adjustment” is necessary. But the rules don’t require an investor to do anything more than consider it. There’s no outright prohibition on using the reported NAV even if the investor knows it’s completely unreasonable.

    Private Equity Caught in Crosshairs of Elise Stefanik’s Attack on Harvard
    Jonathan Weil | Wall Street Journal

  • CAR-T Bests Solid Tumors

    The promise of immune cell therapies is to direct the incredible sophistication of the immune system to the medical targets we want to hit. In the case of CAR-T cells, we take a patient’s own immune T-cells and “program” them through genetic modification to go after cancer cells. While the process of the genetic modification to create those cells is still incredibly expensive and challenging, we’ve seen amazing progress with CAR-T in liquid tumors (e.g., leukemias, lymphomas, etc).

    But, when it comes to solid tumors, it’s been far more challenging. Enter this Phase II clinical trial from China (summarized in Nature News). The researchers performed a random controlled trial on 266 patients with gastric or gastro-esophageal cancer who resisted previous treatment and assigned 2/3 to receive CAR-T or best-medical-care (the control) otherwise. The results (see the survival curve below) are impressive — while the median progression-free survival is only about 1.5 months different, it’s very clear that by month 8 there are no progression-free patients in the control group but something like ~25% of the CAR-T group.

    The side effect profile is still challenging (with 99% of patients in CAR-T group experiencing moderately severe side effects) but this is (sadly) to be expected with CAR-T treatments.

    While it remains to be seen how this scales up in a Phase III study with a larger population, this is incredibly promising finding — giving clinicians a new tool in their arsenal for dealing with a wider range of cancer targets as well as suggesting that cell therapies still have more tricks up their sleeves

    The phase II clinical trial in China tested chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells in people with advanced gastric cancer or gastro-oesophageal junction cancer, which are solid tumours. To create CAR-T-cell therapies, T cells are collected from a person with cancer and tweaked to produce proteins that target cancer cells. The T cells are then infused back into the same person. CAR-T-cell therapy has revolutionized cancer treatment but has been most successful against blood cancers.

    “Solid tumours generally don’t respond well to CAR-T-cell therapy,” says Lisa Mielke, a cancer researcher at the Olivia Newton John Cancer Research Institute in Heidelberg, Australia. The trials are among the first in which CAR-T-cell therapy has had promising results against solid tumours. They provide “evidence that there is potential for CAR T cells to be further optimized for future treatment of patients with solid tumours”, adds Mielke.

    Cancer-fighting CAR T cells show promising results for hard-to-treat tumours
    Rachel Fieldhouse | Nature News

  • Great Expectations

    This is an old piece from Morgan Housel from May 2023. It highlights how optimistic expectations can serve as a “debt” that needs to be “paid off”.

    To illustrate this, he gives a fascinating example — the Japanese stock market. From 1965 to 2022, both the Japanese stock market and the S&P500 (a basket of mostly American large companies) had similar returns. As most people know, Japan has had a miserable 3 “lost decades” of growth and stock performance. But Housel presents this fact in an interesting light: it wasn’t that Japan did poorly, it just did all of its growth in a 25 year run between 1965-1990 and then spent the following two decades “paying off” that “expectations debt”.

    Housel concludes, as he oftentimes does, with wisdom for all of us: “An asset you don’t deserve can quickly become a liability … reality eventually catches up, and demands repayment in equal proportion to your delusions – plus interest”.

    Manage your great expectations.

    There’s a stoic saying: “Misfortune weighs most heavily on those who expect nothing but good fortune.”

    Expecting nothing but good feels like such a good mindset – you’re optimistic, happy, and winning. But whether you know it or not you’re very likely piling up a hidden debt that must eventually be repaid.

    Expectations Debt
    Morgan Housel

  • Why Self-Hosting is Having a Moment

    I am a selfhoster (as anyone who’s read many of my more recent blog posts knows). I’m also a fan of the selfh.st site (which documents a lot of news & relevant interviews from the self-host world) so I was delighted to see the owner of selfh.st get interviewed in Ars Technica.

    Nothing earth-shattering but I appreciated (and agreed with) his breakdown of why self-hosting is flourishing today (excerpt below). For me, personally, the ease with which Docker makes setting up selfhosted services and the low cost of storage and mini-PCs turned this from an impractical idea into one that I’ve come to rely on for my own “personal tech stack”.

    What gave rise to self-hosting’s relative recent popularity? That led Sholly to a few answers, many of them directly relating to the corporate cloud services people typically use instead of self-hosting:

    • Privacy for photos, files, and other data
    • Cost of cloud hosting and storage
    • Accessibility of services, through GitHub, Reddit, and sites like his
    • Installation with Docker (“a game-changer for lots of people”) and Unraid
    • Single-board computers (SBCs) like the Raspberry Pi
    • NUCS, mini-PCs, workstations, and other pandemic-popular hardware

    Finally, there’s the elephant in any self-hosting discussion: piracy.

    Self-hosting is having a moment. Ethan Sholly knows why
    Kevin Purdy | Ars Technica

  • I’m just a Medical Guideline

    Medical Guidelines are incredibly important — they impact everything from your doctor’s recommendations and insurance coverage to the medications your insurance covers — but are somewhat shrouded in mystery.

    This piece from Emily Oster’s ParentData is a good overview of what they are (and aren’t) — and give a pretty good explanation of why a headline from the popular press is probably not capturing the nuance and review of clinical evidence that goes into them.

    (and yes, that title is a Schoolhouse Rock reference)

    The headlines almost always simplify or distort these complexities. Sometimes those simplifications are necessary, other times…well, less so. Why should you care? Guidelines often impact health insurance coverage, influence standards of care, and play a role in how health policy is developed. Understanding what goes into them empowers you to engage more thoughtfully when talking to your doctor. You’ll be more aware of when those sensationalized headlines really mean anything, which is hopefully most of the time nothing at all.

    Where Do Official Medical Guidelines Come From?
    Gillian Goddard | ParentData

  • On (Stock Market) Bubbles

    I spotted this memo from Oaktree Capital founder Howard Marks and thought it was a sobering and grounded take on what makes a stock market bubble and reasons to be alarmed about the current concentration of market capitalization in the so-called “Magnificent Seven” and how eerily similar this was to the “Nifty Fifty” or the “Dot Com Bubble” eras of irrational exuberance. Whether you agree with him or not, it’s a worthwhile piece of wisdom to remember.

    This graph that Marks borrowed from JP Morgan is also quite intriguing (terrifying?)

    There’s usually a grain of truth that underlies every mania and bubble. It just gets taken too far. It’s clear that the internet absolutely did change the world – in fact, we can’t imagine a world without it. But the vast majority of internet and e-commerce companies that soared in the late ’90s bubble ended up worthless. When a bubble burst in my early investing days, The Wall Street Journal would run a box on the front page listing stocks that were down by 90%. In the aftermath of the TMT Bubble, they’d lost 99%.

    When something is on the pedestal of popularity, the risk of a decline is high. When people assume – and price in – an expectation that things can only get better, the damage done by negative surprises is profound. When something is new, the competitors and disruptive technologies have yet to arrive. The merit may be there, but if it’s overestimated it can be overpriced, only to evaporate when reality sets in. In the real world, trees don’t grow to the sky.

    On Bubble Watch
    Howard Marks

  • Pivoting from Consumer to Utility: Span

    As a Span customer, I’ve always appreciated their vision: to make home electrification cleaner, simpler, and more efficient through beautifully designed, tech-enabled electrical panels. But, let’s be honest, selling a product like this directly to consumers is tough. Electrical panels are not top-of-mind for most people until there’s a problem — and explaining the value proposition of “a smarter electrical panel” to justify the high price tag can be a real challenge. That’s why I’m unsurprised by their recent shift in strategy towards utilities.

    This pivot to partnering with utility companies makes a lot of sense. Instead of trying to convince individual homeowners to upgrade, Span can now work directly with those who can impact community-scale electrification.

    While the value proposition of avoiding costly service upgrades is undeniably beneficial for utilities, understanding precisely how that translates into financial savings for the utilities needs much more nuance. That, along with the fact that rebates & policy will vary wildly by locality, raises many uncertainties about pricing strategy (not to mention that there are other, larger smart electric panel companies like Leviton and Schneider Electric, albeit with less functional and less well-designed offerings).

    I wish the company well. We need better electrical infrastructure in the US (and especially California, where I live) and one way to achieve that is for companies like Span to find a successful path to market.

    Span’s panel costs $3,500, and accessories involve separate $700-plus purchases. It’s unavoidably pricey, though tax rebates and other incentives can bring the cost down, but the premise is that they offer buyers costs saving through avoiding expensive upgrades. The pitch to utility companies is also one of cost avoidance, just at a much larger scale. Span’s target utility customer is one at the intersection of load growth, the energy transition, and existing regulatory restrictions, especially in places with aggressive decarbonization timelines like California.

    Span’s quiet turn toward utilities
    Lisa Martine Jenkins | Latitude Media

  • RISC-V in Computers

    One of the most exciting technological developments from the semiconductor side of things is the rapid development of the ecosystem around the open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA). One landmark in its rise is that the architecture appears to be moving beyond just behind-the-scenes projects to challenging Intel/AMD’s x86 architecture and ARM (used by Apple and Qualcomm) in customer-facing applications.

    This article highlights this crucial development by reporting on early adopters embracing RISC-V to move into higher-end devices like laptops. Companies like Framework and DeepComputing have just launched or are planning to launch RISC-V laptops. While RISC-V-powered hardware still have a steep mountain to climb of software and performance challenges (as evidenced by the amount of time it’s taken for the ARM ecosystem to be credible in PCs), Intel’s recent setbacks and ARM’s legal battles with Qualcomm over licensing (pretty much guaranteeing every company that uses ARM is now going to work on RISC-V) coupled with the open source nature of RISC-V potentially allowing for a lot more innovation in form factors and functionality may have created an opening here for enterprising companies willing to make the investment.

    “If we look at a couple of generations down the [software] stack, we’re starting to see a line of sight to consumer-ready RISC-V in something like a laptop, or even a phone,” said Nirav Patel, CEO of laptop maker Framework. Patel’s company plans to release a laptop that can support a RISC-V mainboard in 2025. Though still intended for early adopters and developers, it will be the most accessible and polished RISC-V laptop yet, and it will ship to users with the same look and feel as the Framework laptops that use x86 chips.

    This Year, RISC-V Laptops Really Arrive
    Matthew S. Smith | IEEE Spectrum

  • Revenge of the Plug-In Hybrid

    While growing vehicle electrification is inevitable, it always surprised me that US automakers would drop past plug-in hybrid (PHEV) technology to only embrace all-electric. While many have attacked Toyota’s more deliberate “slow-and-steady” approach to vehicle electrification, it always seemed to me that, until we had broadly available, high quality electric vehicle charging infrastructure and until all-electric vehicles were broadly available at the price point of a non-luxury family car (i.e. a Camry or RAV4), that electric vehicles were going to be more of a upper middle class/wealthy phenomena. Considering their success in the Chinese automotive market (and growing faster than all-electric vehicles!), it always felt odd that the category wouldn’t make its way into the US market as the natural next step in vehicle electrification.

    It sounds like Dodge Ram (a division of Stellantis) agrees. It intends to delay its all-electric version of its Ram 1500 in favor of starting with its extended range plug-in hybrid version, the Ramcharger. Extended range electric vehicles (EREVs) are plug-in hybrids similar to the Chevy Volt. They employ an electric powertrain and a generator which can run on gasoline to supply additional range when the battery runs low.

    Interestingly, Nissan, Hyundai, Mazda, and GM’s Buick have made similar announcements as well.

    While it still remains to be seen how well these EREVs/PHEVs are adopted — the price points that are being discussed still feel too high to me — seeing broader adoption of plug-in hybrid technology (supplemented with gas-powered range extension) feels like the natural next step on our path to vehicle electrification.

    Consumers are still looking for electrified rides, just not the ones that many industry pundits predicted. In China, Europe, and the United States, buyers are converging on hybrids, whose sales growth is outpacing that of pure EVs. “It’s almost been a religion that it’s EVs or bust, so let’s not fool around with hybrids or hydrogen,” says Michael Dunne, CEO of Dunne Insights, a leading analyst of China’s auto industry. “But even in the world’s largest market, almost half of electrified vehicle sales are hybrids.”

    As EV Sales Stall, Plug-In Hybrids Get a Reboot
    Lawrence Ulrich | IEEE Spectrum

  • Decarbonizing Shipping with Wind

    The shipping industry is known for being fairly dirty environmentally due largely to the fact that the most common fuel used in shipping — bunker fuel — contributes both to carbon emissions, significant air pollution, and water pollution (from spills and due to the common practice of dumping the byproduct of sulphur scrubbing to curtail air pollution).

    While much of the effort to green shipping has focused on the use of alternative fuels like hydrogen, ammonia and methanol as replacements for bunker fuel, I recently saw an article on the use of automated & highly durable sail technology to le ships leverage wind as a means to reduce fuel consumption.

    I don’t have any inside information on what the cost / speed tradeoffs are for the technology, nor whether or not there’s a credible path to scaling to handle the massive container ships that dominate global shipping, but it’s a fascinating technology vector, and a direct result of the growing realization by the shipping industry that it needs to green itself.

    Wind, on the other hand, is abundant. With the U.N.’s International Maritime Organization poised to negotiate stricter climate policies next year, including a new carbon pricing mechanism and global fuel standard, more shipping companies are seriously considering the renewable resource as an immediate answer. While sails aren’t likely to outright replace the enormous engines that drive huge cargo ships, wind power could still make a meaningful dent in the industry’s overall emissions, experts say.

    Cargo ships turn to ancient tech to curb modern pollution: wind
    Maria Gallucci | Canary Media

  • Google’s Quantum Error Correction Breakthrough

    One of the most exciting areas of technology development, but that doesn’t get a ton of mainstream media coverage, is the race to build a working quantum computer that exhibits “below threshold quantum computing” — the ability to do calculations utilizing quantum mechanics accurately.

    One of the key limitations to achieving this has been the sensitivity of quantum computing systems — in particular the qubits that capture the superposition of multiple states that allow quantum computers to exploit quantum mechanics for computation — to the world around them. Imagine if your computer’s accuracy would change every time someone walked in the room — even if it was capable of amazing things, it would not be especially practical. As a result, much research to date has been around novel ways of creating physical systems that can protect these quantum states.

    Google has (in a pre-print in Nature) demonstrated their new Willow quantum computing chip which demonstrates a quantum error correction method that spreads the quantum state information of a single “logical” qubit across multiple entangled “physical” qubits to create a more robust system. Beyond proving that their quantum error correction method worked, what is most remarkable to me, is that they’re able to extrapolate a scaling law for their error correction — a way of guessing how much better their system is at avoiding loss of quantum state as they increase the number of physical qubits per logical qubit — which could suggest a “scale up” path towards building functional, practical quantum computers.

    I will confess that quantum mechanics was never my strong suit (beyond needing it for a class on statistical mechanics eons ago in college), and my understanding of the core physics underlying what they’ve done in the paper is limited, but this is an incredibly exciting feat on our way towards practical quantum computing systems!

    The company’s new chip, called Willow, is a larger, improved version of that technology, with 105 physical qubits. It was developed in a fabrication laboratory that Google built at its quantum-computing campus in Santa Barbara, California, in 2021.

    As a first demonstration of Willow’s power, the researchers showed that it could perform, in roughly 5 minutes, a task that would take the world’s largest supercomputer an estimated 1025 years, says Hartmut Neven, who heads Google’s quantum-computing division. This is the latest salvo in the race to show that quantum computers have an advantage over classical ones.

    And, by creating logical qubits inside Willow, the Google team has shown that each successive increase in the size of a logical qubit cuts the error rate in half.

    “This is a very impressive demonstration of solidly being below threshold,” says Barbara Terhal, a specialist in quantum error correction at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. Mikhail Lukin, a physicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, adds, “It clearly shows that the idea works.”

    ‘A truly remarkable breakthrough’: Google’s new quantum chip achieves accuracy milestone
    Davide Castelvecchi | Nature News

  • Cynefin

    I had never heard of this framework for thinking about how to address problems before. Shout-out to my friend Chris Yiu and his new Substack Secret Weapon about improving productivity for teaching me about this. It’s surprisingly insightful about when to think about something as a process problem vs an expertise problem vs experimentation vs direction.

    [The Cynefin framework] organises problems into four primary domains:

    Clear. Cause and effect are obvious; categorise the situation and apply best practice. Example: baking a cake. Rewards process.

    Complicated. Cause and effect are knowable but not immediately apparent; analyse the situation carefully to find a solution. Example: coaching a sports team. Rewards expertise.

    Complex. Cause and effect are only apparent with hindsight; focus on spotting and exploiting patterns as they emerge. Example: playing poker. Rewards [experimentation — Chris’s original term was entrepreneurship, I think experimentation is more clear & actionable].

    Chaotic. Cause and effect are impossible to parse; act on instinct, in the hope of imposing some order on the immediate situation. Example: novel crisis response. Rewards direction.

    Problems come in many forms
    Chris Yiu | Secret Weapon

  • The Hits Business — Games Edition

    The best return on investment in terms of hours of deep engagement per dollar in entertainment is with games. When done right, they blend stunning visuals and sounds, earworm-like musical scores, compelling story and acting, and a sense of progression that are second to none.

    Case in point: I bought the complete edition of the award-winning The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for $10 during a Steam sale in 2021. According to Steam, I’ve logged over 200 hours (I had to doublecheck that number!) playing the game, between two playthroughs and the amazing expansions Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine — an amazing 20 hours/dollar spent. Even paying full freight (as of this writing, the complete edition including both expansions costs $50), that would still be a remarkable 4 hours/dollar. Compare that with the price of admission to a movie or theater or concert.

    The Witcher 3 has now surpassed 50 million sales — comfortably earning over $1 billion in revenue which is an amazing feat for any media property.

    But as amazing and as lucrative as these games can be, these games cannot escape the cruel hit-driven basis of their industry, where a small number of games generate the majority of financial returns. This has resulted in studios chasing ever more expensive games with familiar intellectual property (i.e. Star Wars) that has, to many game players, cut the soul from the games and has led to financial instability in even popular game studios.

    This article from IGN summarizes the state of the industry well — with so-called AAA games now costing $200 million to create, not to mention $100’s of millions to market, more and more studios have to wind down as few games can generate enough revenue to cover the cost of development and marketing.

    The article predicts — and I hope it’s right — that the games industry will learn some lessons that many studios in Hollywood/the film industry have been forced to: embrace more small budget games to experiment with new forms and IP. Blockbusters will have their place but going all-in on blockbusters is a recipe for a hollowing out of the industry and a cutting off of the creativity that it needs.

    Or, as the author so nicely puts it: “Maybe studios can remember that we used to play video games because they were fun – not because of their bigger-than-last-year maps carpeted by denser, higher-resolution grass that you walk across to finish another piece of side content that pushes you one digit closer to 100% completion.”

    Just five years ago, AAA projects’ average budget ranged $50 – $150 million. Today, the minimum average is $200 million. Call of Duty’s new benchmark is $300 million, with Activision admitting in the Competition & Market Authority’s report on AAA development that it now takes the efforts of one-and-a-half studios just to complete the annual Call of Duty title.

    It’s far from just Call of Duty facing ballooning costs. In the same CMA report, an anonymous publisher admits that development costs for one of its franchises reached $660 million. With $550 million of marketing costs on top, that is a $1.2 billion game. To put that into perspective, Minecraft – the world’s best-selling video game of all time – has of last year only achieved $3 billion. It took 12 years to reach that figure, having launched in 2011.

    The Blockbuster Games Bubble Has Burst
    Sab Astley | IGN