Month: March 2019

Consensus Reality

Physicists have long suspected that quantum mechanics allows 2 observers to experience different, conflicting realities. Now they’ve performed the first experiment that proves it. They use 6 entangled photons to create 2 alternate realities—1 representing Wigner and 1 representing Wigner’s friend. Wigner’s friend measures the polarization of a photon and stores the result. Wigner then performs an interference measurement to determine if the measurement and the photon are in a superposition. The experiment produces an unambiguous result. It turns out that both realities can coexist even though they produce irreconcilable outcomes, just as Wigner predicted. That raises some fascinating questions that are forcing physicists to reconsider the nature of reality.

Warren Wrong

This entire plan gets headlines (duh) because so many people are (perhaps reasonably!) angry at the power of big tech companies. But, very little in the actual plan makes much sense. The “platform utility” idea will lead to massive, wasteful, stupid lawsuits. The unwinding of old mergers will involve interfering with an independent agency, and seem unlikely to do much to change the main “concerns” that Senator Warren raises in the first place.

VR Avatars

The theory underlying Codec Avatars is simple and twofold, what Sheikh calls the “ego test” and the “mom test”: You should love your avatar, and your loved ones should as well. The process enabling the avatars is something far more complicated—as I discovered for myself during 2 different capture procedures. The first takes place in a domelike enclosure called Mugsy, the walls and ceiling of which are studded with 132 off-the-shelf Canon lenses and 350 lights focused toward a chair. Sitting at the center feels like being in a black hole made of paparazzi. “I had awkwardly named it ‘Mugshooter,'” Sheikh admits. “Then we realized it’s a horrible, unfriendly name.” That was a couple of versions ago; Mugsy has increased steadily in both cameras and capability, sending early kludges (like using a ping-pong ball on a string to help participants hold their face in the right place, car garage-style) to deserved obsolescence.

Chongqing Lao Zao

The oil in the broth is important, but so is the oil they serve as a dipping sauce for this style of hot pot. Our group of 6 all found the sesame-based blend that you are supposed to dip in after the broth to be too thick and not of value. They will bring the ingredients for this to the table and serve everyone their own dish automatically, but do note that a $1.95/person charge will show up on the bill. Maybe get 2 made for the table so you can try it and then go from there.

In addition to this sauce presentation, there is an enjoyable theatre to everything they do. It is all very organized. Multi-tiered trays show up beside your table to hold all the small plates of each order before it gets put in the hot pot. They will watch over the progress and move dishes up for you and remove used ones. I found the service excellent. Are you not really a hot pot person? Have you been underwhelmed with it to this point in your life? I think this is the right place to try and see if you can have your mind changed.

Testosterone juicing

Before and after pictures of tech leaders like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Sergey Brin suggest they’re taking supplemental testosterone. And though it may help them keep looking young, Palladium points out that there might be other effects from having some of our most powerful businessmen on a hormone that increases risk-taking and ambition. They ask whether the new availability of testosterone supplements is prolonging Silicon Valley businessmen’s “brash entrepreneur” phase well past the point where they would normally become mature respectable elders. But it also hints at an almost opposite take: average testosterone levels have been falling for decades, so at this point these businessmen would be the only “normal” (by 1950s standards) men out there, and everyone else would be unprecedently risk-averse and boring.

Paging Peter Thiel and everyone else who takes about how things “just worked better” in Eisenhower’s day.

Facebook Privacy Pivot

Ultimately, Zuckerberg doesn’t address the biggest trade-off: Are these changes compatible with Facebook’s fundamental business model, which relies on a steady supply of user data? If these changes are truly implemented, there will be a substantial business cost to bear. Until he fully answers that, Zuckerberg’s vision of privacy will be incomplete.

The move towards privacy seems designed to respond to a number of problems. To some extent, it responds to Facebook’s content-moderation problem: if a conversation that violates the company’s “community guidelines” is encrypted, such that even Facebook’s software can’t read it, then the company can’t be expected to expunge it. It responds to the Ralph Northam-yearbook problem (“People want to know that what they share won’t come back to hurt them later”), since, by default, content will auto-delete. And it responds to the China problem, as Zuckerberg vows “not to build data centers in countries that have a track record of violating human rights like privacy or freedom of expression.” It also attempts to address Facebook’s public-relations problem: after a scandalous year, fewer people trust the network than ever.

Data Incumbency

Open-data requirements could make it clearer who is providing a valuable service and who is primarily exploiting information asymmetries between creators and services. They could help identify the genuine rip-offs that thrive on opacity, such as the chronic underpayment of artists or the role of concert organizers in ticket black markets. They could help answer the perennial question of whether streaming payments and other licensing schemes are fair to artists, based not on a notional “value gap” but on who else is getting a cut.