Cool things I found on the Internet this week:
The next technology revolution might be in the biotech space
(YC Partners With Atomwise to Fund More Bio Companies)Reading the above linked Y Combinator announcement got me thinking that after personal computing, worldwide connectivity with the Web and mobile smartphones, the next tech revolution might be in biotech. Brain machine interfaces, clean meat, CRISPR, and now this - a drug discovery service that uses computer simulation to find new compounds - all of these seem to point to the direction.
How I came across it:
Y Combinator’s weekly newsletterGoogle’s Season of Docs - GSoD is here!
Google’s famous internship program for college students, Google Summer of Code, has a new spin-off - Google Season of Documentation! Like GSoC, this will also span 3 months starting 2nd September but will focus solely on projects that aim to improve the documentation of the participating organisations.
How I came across it:
A post by Kharagpur Open Source Society (KOSS) page on FacebookOpen AI’s MuseNet, a music generator based on the same tech that gave us GPT-2
Open AI has used the Transformer architecture that it used for GPT-2, to create a model that can generate 4-minute musical compositions with 10 different instruments, and can combine styles from country to Mozart to the Beatles.
How I came across it:
This article was mentioned in both Y Combinator’s weekly newsletter and Import AI by Jack Clark.This article arguing that Uber and other ride-hailing services will probably never be profitable (The Economist)
The same Uber that has become a ubiquity in our day-to-day lives has failed to make a profit since its inception. Uber says it has lost $7.9bn since 2009. Lyft, which listed last month, lost $2.9bn in seven years. Every other ride-hailing startups throughout the world - Ola in India, Go-Jek in Indonesia, Didi in China - probably show similar results.
This article makes some compelling arguments as to why they never will be able to make profits. And even if they do, it will be for a very short period of time which won’t be enough to recoup for the losses that they would have incurred upto that point.
How I came across it:
Y Combinator’s weekly newsletter, again.
This week I discovered:
The case for vegetarianism (and how the Internet brings the world closer :))
It started when I came across this story on my Medium wall - The Ethical Dilemma of Teaching Kids How Sausage Gets Made (a Medium starred story). I found the cover picture really stimulating and I decided to read it.
This is a long, fascinating read with the theme of how meat-eating people live in denial of the cruelty that needs to be inflicted upon the animals to produce the meat and of the environmental effects of those eating habits and how that denial is passed on to their young ones.
Imagine walking through the poultry aisle of your local supermarket. For each chicken you see, envision more than one thousand single-gallon jugs of water sitting next to it. Then imagine systematically, one by one, twisting the cap off each jug and pouring them all down the drain. That’s about how much water it takes to bring a single chicken from shell to shelf. In other words, you’d save more water skipping one family chicken dinner than by skipping six months of showers.
On the cruelty,
Kids her age play Fortnite — the first-person shooter game where players entertain themselves by killing puppies with guns and axes. I’m sorry, did I say puppies? I meant people. (Puppies being shot in the head with an AR-15 wouldn’t fly. Parents would be outraged.)
Another one,
We teach kids to identify vegetables — this is a carrot, this is an onion. But with animal bodies, we mask the truth: we say ham, hotdog, steak, salami, burger. We do not say, “Finish eating the pig’s belly and then you can have dessert.” There are no picture books that teach toddlers to identify animals by their carcass names. Eating a pig is easy, but knowing it got punched in the head before it died — is not so easy.
Then, I went to the author - Anastasia Basil’s Medium profile. The author has written a few more REALLY popular articles, some of them garnering north of 50k claps. I also saw that Ev Williams follows her.
Hence, I decided to
follow her on Medium
bookmark her popular article for later reading
Then, I went on to this really long piece on Rolling Stone linked to in the previous article - In the Belly of The Beast:
“A small band of animal right activists infiltrated the farms where animals are turned into meat under the most horrific circumstances. Now the agribusiness giants are trying to crush them.”
The article is a detailed account of what they witnessed in those farms. Anastasia said that, “Most parents won’t make it through this Rolling Stone article about animal factories. The truth is hard to stomach.” I, now, understand what she meant.
I shared the Medium article with a friend and she liked it so much that she drew a comic based on it. What happened next made her cry tears of joy.
I decided to tweet the comic to the author of the article,
And she responded!
WITH THIS:
My friend couldn’t believe that the author who inspired her loves her comic! And that was the first time I saw someone cry tears of happiness IRL.
I find this absolutely amazing how the Internet enabled us to get through to the author whom we admired so much. It is in these moments when it becomes clear how close the Internet has brought the world. :)