deepfakes are fun (like this video) but also a billion-dollar problem.

rigging elections, blackmailing, corporate scams are on the rise.

understanding how deepfakes work can give us clues about how to control them.

everything on deepfakes and how to tackle them 🧵 I mean the memes are funny but we need to figure this problem out.

https://x.com/BrivaelLp/status/1772752077057364226/video/1

just stumbled on sequoia's 2005 investment memo for youtube

when I was on google's M&A team, we considered it the best acquisition in the history of the company

It's 41 pages of juicy details on why they invested (thanks for the lawsuit, Viacom)

I obviously had to dig in🧵 it's one of the best investments in their portfolio

they made a ~44x return ($504M) on their $11.5M investment ($3.5M in Series A and $8M in Series B)

I was reading into e/acc

and fell down a much deeper rabbit hole - the history of accelerationism

humans on the moon, the atomic bomb, and AI are all outcomes of choosing progress over fear

how humanity has benefited from these movements & why we need them:🧵 ok so what's e/acc?

e/acc, effective accelerationism (a portmanteau of effective altruism and accelerationism) is a fundamentally techno-optimist movement

@GillVerd (aka @basedbeffjezos) introduced this philosophy a couple of years ago with @creatine_cycle & @bayeslord

this room temperature superconductor stuff is absolutely insane

I dug around to find out how they work and how the world is on the verge of a complete transformation because of them

read on 🧵 look a this curve

for the last 100 years, we've been finding superconductors with higher critical temperatures -> the temp at which the electrical resistivity of a metal drops to zero i.e it shows superconducting qualities)

the race is to find one that works at room temp (300K)

Sora's video quality seems impossible so I dug into how it works under the hood

it uses both diffusion (starting with noise, refining towards a desired video) and transformer architectures (handling sequential video frames)

read on 🧵 here's an example:

prompt: "a stop-motion animation of a flower growing out of the windowsill of a suburban house."

Sora doesn't directly translate text to video frames. instead, it works on spacetime patches.

I had a project while I was on the Google M&A team to understand everything about a founder's life after acquisition.

here are some crazy things I learned 👇 acquired founders only stick around for ~2.5 years on average REGARDLESS of their package.

there's no difference between $100M and $100K on the table when you want to get out.

Join us for 🏆Countdown at 8:30p PST!

Special guests include: @ljin18, @nbashaw, @danshipper, @anneleeskates, @john_c_palmer, @patel0phone, @iam_preethi

Topics:
- cohort based courses like Li (new!) and Preethi's
- the future of writing (@every and $ESSAY)
- Elon Musk + GME Here's the event!
joinclubhouse.com/event/PD4wYdlR

Today is the 161st anniversary of the Darwin publishing On the Origin of Species.

This book is still wildly underrated in business - virtually every point Darwin makes about ecological systems can be made about markets.

It's also an underrated drinking game 😜

quick thread 👇 1/ Study science long enough, you start seeing fractals everywhere.

- Atoms look like solar systems
- Blood vessels look like freeways
- Biological ecosystems look like business ecosystems

Understand this, and you will never need to read another business book again.

How to polarize humanity in 6 steps

-- Thread --

1/ Give people with extreme ideas a platform to find each other.

- Meeting others with similar views validates and energizes them. They would have otherwise given up on their cause. 2/ Engineer humans to be lazy if things are alright and energized if they're disenfranchised.

- Extreme minorities will make a ton of noise
- People "in the middle" won't care enough about anything to take to the streets

Uber used its signature psychological weapon to save 100,000 jobs last week.

Quick thread on the psychology of the Uber shutdown 👇 Much of Uber's success expanding to new cities can be attributed to its strategy arming riders/drivers against regulators when Uber would invariably get shut down.

When regulators tried to ban Uber, users would protest every single time.

socialstudies.substack.com/p/-how-ubers-s…

A lot of people agree that remote work sucks for a few things:

- high stakes decisions
- creativity
- serendipity

A quick thread about why 👇 When stakes are high (exec hires, enterprise deals), collaborating in person lowers risk:

- Gives us more data on people to base trust on
- Effort to appear in person shows commitment
- Enables intimacy or even mutual blackmail 😈

1/

https://twitter.com/andrewchen/status/1292609433969647616?s=20

GPT-3 turned out to be a bit overhyped just like "it is what it is."

Why do we keep doing this to ourselves?

Thread 👇 1/ The Pygmalion Effect:

High expectations lead to better performance and are thus evolutionarily advantageous.

We have high expectations for GPT-3 (we hype it to ourselves) because we are predisposed to!

I read through a bunch of @nbashaw's tweets and essays and have concluded

Nathan is the most industrious thinker in tech.

Through the Everything bundle, he's productized his brain better than anyone I can think of. And it's a very good brain🧠

Thread 👇
socialstudies.substack.com/p/-nathan-basc… Some of @nbashaw's thoughts on writing:
- keep writing, no one cares if you're bad to start!
- use the ABCD framework for feedback (what's awesome, boring, confusing, didn't believe)
- " reading is actually magical" - writing won't ever go away despite what people may think

1/n

The societal implications of GPT-3 are massively understated.

- labor will be upended (even in tech)
- trust will be destroyed
- what it means to be human will be redefined

- ... and we'll finally admit we're all just cyborgs

Thread👇

socialstudies.substack.com/p/-gpt-3-cybor… Every technological revolution destroyed jobs before creating many many more by enabling single individuals to do the work of many.

- Printing press
- Spreadsheets
- AWS

but GPT-3 may do this on a scale we've never seen before.

(1/n)

https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/562320316412608513?s=20

BIG DAY for Tech Twitter TLDR:
- 1 year old today
- Launched on Product Hunt
- Fancy new landing page

ANDDDD... I've rebranded to ✨𝕊𝚘𝚌𝚒𝚊𝚕 𝕊𝚝𝚞𝚍𝚒𝚎𝚜✨

Go check it out on Product Hunt then come back and I'll explain the rebrand.

Thread 👇 Over the last year,
- Tech Twitter TLDR has grown to 1500+ readers organically
- @andrewchen said it was one of his favorite newsletters and many others have said the same.

But hasn't been easy to grow (news isn't viral) and curating tweets is obviously limiting creatively

Like all content, the future of music is tied to the future of how it is created and consumed.

1/ Music is modularizing (thanks to @tiktok_us and @splice). Unbundling of albums to songs (2010s) to samples/loops (2020+) means we can now personalize songs like we do playlists. 2/ There is a constant trend of abstraction.

- DAWs like @Ableton abstracted away the studio.
- Tools like @iZotopeInc Nectar abstracts vocal processing
- @splice abstracts away entire instrumental tracks (via samples)
- Arrangement is the next level of abstraction

Them - You'll never use your Cognitive Science degree for anything
Me - Hold my beer

1/ 👉 Merely building futuristic products isn’t enough for getting them adopted. Crypto people, where you at!

✨Conceptual metaphor theory is the key✨

techtwittertldr.substack.com/p/metaphors-we… 2/ Conceptual metaphor (by @GeorgeLakoff) says all thought is based on metaphors for personal experiences.

Doing Business (abstract) -> Eating (IRL)
∙ “Software is eating the world”
∙ "cannibalize the core product"

Also explains diagrams' popularity

https://twitter.com/nwilliams030/status/1278008507044937728?s=20

Feeling bullish on @Snapchat's position in the AR platform wars after today's announcements.

👇Thread

1/ AR voice control - essential to be able to use AR glasses. Google & Apple are the only major players with voice assistants - not anymore. 2/ Snap ML - there are still a lot of difficult ML problems to solve to get AR right.

Allowing outside devs to upload their models to Snapchat exponentially increases their speed to execute compared to others using internal teams. Genius move.

https://twitter.com/Snapchat/status/1271191380027564032?s=20

Interesting hearing @jmj + @eriktorenberg chat about the future of dating apps. Some thoughts:
🔥 fidelity + latency of interactions will be improved by video + VR
👯‍♀️people will always try new dating apps
🌼dating vs lifestyle brands will blur
🙈these emojis are arbitrary

More: Dating:

1950s - high fidelity / high latency. You have to physically meet through family or out and about

2010s - low f / low l. You can chat with lots of people but can only see their photos

2020+ - higher f / low l. Video and later VR will allow near-IRL dating at scale

Just released the first edition of ✨Tech Twitter TLDR✨, a newsletter that pulls together highlights from Tech Twitter every two weeks!

👇 THREAD👇

techtwittertldr.substack.com/p/tech-twitter… Twitter is so important for our industry. As @briannekimmel points out, this is where all the action happens:
- vibrant debates
- amazing practical advice
- detailed analysis
- hilarious memes

all from the smartest people in our industry

https://twitter.com/briannekimmel/status/1135674314924027904?s=12

I'm a @splice power user, and I can tell you that it has had the biggest impact on my creativity, productivity, and output quality of any tool I've used since I started producing music.

The praise is well deserved, but there's so much more exciting work ahead for the company.

https://twitter.com/JoshConstine/status/1108397189342982144

Instagram revolutionized photography by giving consumers easy creation tools.

Splice is uniquely poised to do the same for music.
🎸 millions of samples tagged by genre
🎼 thousands of arrangements using these samples tagged by genre
🤖 Smart generative AI researchers

⬇️⬇️