Best of Twitter - August 22-Sep 11, 2022
Reminded of what John Carmack said recently -- if no Elon, we won't get to Mars anytime soon, because SpaceX's existing business is lucrative and scalable and the Mars thing won't make financial sense for a very long time. It's only going to happen because he's pushing for it
^ thread
Remember the copywriting Apple used to get consumers to opt out of ad tracking?
Well, their own ask to track you reads quite different (h/t @sethmills21).
Bonus points for the highlighted “Turn on personalized ads” 🙄
Why the outperformance?
Because of a quirk with iOS 14.5.
The update prevents sharing of data between different parties (i.e. Facebook accessing data from other apps).
It does not prevent the exchange of data within a single platform.
Apple is that single platform.
I don’t blame Apple. Their ad network will be a $10B+ rev stream.
But it’s important to understand the tradeoffs. Apple:
• Weaponized a narrative to harm competitors
• Crushed small businesses in the process
• Bolstered their ad biz
And yes, they’re still using your data.
^ thread
New post: Q&A with my high school self: helping 14-16 year old Alexey to deal with his emotions, to ask for help, to talk to people (and his dad), to learn, to get things done.
Ribosomes can make more ribosomes outside of a living cell. There are 54 genes that encode the myriad parts to build a ribosome. Now, each of them can be mutated in vitro to quickly build ribosomes with "enhanced functionality." biorxiv.org/content/10.110…
The shift to WFH is the largest shock to labor markets in decades. Pre-pandemic WFH was trending towards 5% of days by 2022. Now WFH is now stabilizing at 30%, a 6-fold jump.
In America alone this is saving about 200 million hours and 6 billion miles of commuting a week.
I’ve tweeted about this before, but when we made the original iPhone, we didn’t have product managers. We had directly responsible individuals (DRIs). Each important piece of work had a single person charged with seeing to it that the work got done. 1/
If you haven't been following this, quite interesting.
Replacing/diluting your blood plasma seems to make mice (and in this paper 3 people) younger. Obviously caution is warranted. But a line of research to worth paying attention to.
link.springer.com/article/10.100…
I broadly think this is true. There are also some interesting mostly unacknowledged filters on particular health statuses.
(Some things which are diagnosable and treatable are actually selected *for* at certain margins; many others are brutally selected against.)
keith @keithwhor
^ thread
the 4chan post on how sub 90 iq people can't compute counterfactuals is probably the most important thing written in the past 100 years
^ is this real????
seriously, is it real?