Tag: analysis

What’s Left of Condé Nast

“It’s dreadful,” Anna Wintour said in early October, looking out the south-facing windows of her 25th-floor office in 1 World Trade Center, which has been home to Vogue and its publisher, Condé Nast, since 2014. It’s the neighborhood she hates — corporate, sterile, and encumbered by security. She preferred the previous headquarters, in Times Square, which offered the ability to pop out for afternoon matinees on Broadway and, more important, the feeling that Condé Nast was at the center of it all. But the landlord had given the world’s glitziest publishing company a deal to move downtown, and Condé built out 23 sleek, futuristic floors as though magazines were thriving. This proved overly optimistic. 3 years later, in 2017, Condé lost more than $120M; Graydon Carter, who relished his life among the moguls and stars, a player among players, announced his departure after 25 years running Vanity Fair; and Si Newhouse, the company’s Medici-like benefactor, died at 89. Members of the old guard couldn’t help but look around the room during Si’s memorial, at Jazz at Lincoln Center, and see that it was also a funeral for the glory days of the company. As David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, put it to a fellow media executive in 2017, Condé was facing the same daunting challenges as the rest of the media business and seemed to be in “a dignified state of panic” as it belatedly adapted to low-margin, constantly pivoting digital realities, closed and sold titles, and underwent a “restacking” — the chosen euphemism for squeezing everyone onto fewer floors so Condé could sublet some of the fancy real estate it now realized it could no longer afford.

Poker Cheat

But then I start to see things that seem so obvious, but I wonder whether they aren’t just paranoia after hours and hours of digging into the mystery. Like the fact that he starts wearing a hat that has a strange bulge around the brim — one that vanishes after the game when he’s doing an interview in the booth. Is it a bone-conducting headset, as some online have suggested, sending him messages directly to his inner ear by vibrating on his skull? Of course it is! How could it be anything else? It’s so obvious! Or the fact that he keeps his keys in the same place on the table all the time. Could they contain a secret camera that reads electronic sensors on the cards? I can’t see any other possibility! It is all starting to make sense. In the end, though, none of this additional evidence is even necessary. The gaggle of online Jim Garrisons have simply picked up more momentum than is required and they can’t stop themselves. The fact is, the mystery was solved a long time ago. It’s just like De Niro’s Ace Rothstein says in Casino when the yokel slot attendant gets hit for 3 jackpots in a row and tells his boss there was no way for him to know he was being scammed. “Yes there is. An infallible way. They won.” In 69 sessions on Stones Live, Postle has won in 62 of them, for a profit of $250k in 277 hours of play. Given that he plays such a large number of hands, and plays such an erratic and, by his own admission, high-variance style, one would expect to see more, well, variance. His results just aren’t possible even for the best players in the world, which, if he isn’t cheating, he definitely is among.

The China Cultural Clash

I am not particularly excited to write this article. My instinct is towards free trade, my affinity for Asia generally and Greater China specifically, my welfare enhanced by staying off China’s radar. And yet, for all that the idea of being a global citizen is an alluring concept and largely my lived experience, I find in situations like this that I am undoubtedly a child of the West. I do believe in the individual, in free speech, and in democracy, no matter how poorly practiced in the United States or elsewhere. And, in situations like this weekend, when values meet money, I worry just how many companies are capable of choosing the former?

AI New Yorker

Can a machine learn to write for The New Yorker?

On first reading this passage, my brain ignored what AI researchers call “world-modelling failures”—the tiny cow and the puddle of red gravy. Because I had never encountered a prose-writing machine even remotely this fluent before, my brain made an assumption—any human capable of writing this well would know that cows aren’t tiny and red gravy doesn’t puddle in people’s yards. And because GPT-2 was an inspired mimic, expertly capturing The New Yorker’s cadences and narrative rhythms, it sounded like a familiar, trusted voice that I was inclined to believe. In fact, it sounded sort of like my voice.

Airlines gone by 2060

Starting around 2030, SpaceX reusable Starship rockets will start providing a replacement for long international flights. The speed will be increased 20x. It will be anywhere in the world in 1 hour. SpaceX will be able to have 1000 people in reclined seating arrangements. The cost will be about $500-1000 per seat per flight. The key enabling factor is increasing the safety of rockets.

SpaceX success in this area would cripple the main financial strength of existing airlines. Business travel and first-class travel and international flights will be replaced with reusable rockets.

A bit more detail:

The reality of SpaceX mass production rockets is unfolding before our eyes. SpaceX Starships will cost over 10x less than current cargo planes, have over 2x the range and will be 30x faster. These massive advantages will give SpaceX dominance of the cargo business.

Not only that, they may also become price competitive by weight. Air freight is 1-5$ per KG, Starship could get to 10$ / KG to LEO, presumably less for ballistic flights. With airlines struggling in general, this could be a huge opening, and remodel the world economy for true just in time delivery.

America’s aerospace industry is regenerating:

If there ever was an example of Schumpeter’s creative destruction, this is it. Traditional aerospace companies have a hoard of capital and talent, providing poor returns to customers. Startups are siphoning the best talent and raising money. Market potential and technology are converging to create an ecosystem that looks more like the aerospace industry pre-1970, including the exploding prototypes, crazy ideas, and swarms of new companies. That aerospace industry took us from the first flight to the moon in ~65 years. The latest batch yearns to take us further.

2022-04-15: If airlines survive, here’s a look at the state of hypersonic flight.

High-speed flight is no longer a game of national prestige, subject to the whims of politics. It’s become the domain of private industry, where the technology is mature enough that entrepreneurs can focus on designs that reduce business risk. In the next decade we anticipate commercial high-speed flight will return to the market, regulations around overland sonic boom will be changed thanks to NASA’s X-59 program, and hypersonic technologies will transition from military to civilian flight. The future is faster!

Seeing The End Of Oil

The end of petroleum is in sight. The reason is simple: the black goo that powered and built the 20th century is now losing economically to other technologies. Petroleum is facing competition at both ends of the barrel, from low value, high volume commodities such as fuel, up through high value, low volume chemicals. Electric vehicles and renewable energy will be the most visible threats to commodity transportation fuel demand in the short term, gradually outcompeting petroleum via both energy efficiency and capital efficiency. Biotechnology will then deliver the coup de grace, first by displacing high value petrochemicals with products that have lower energy and CO2 costs, and then by delivering new CO2 negative biochemicals and biomaterials that cannot be manufactured easily or economically, if at all, from petrochemical feedstocks.

2021-11-22: Here’s one approach:

Biologists have devised a way to engineer yeast to produce itaconic acid—a valuable commodity chemical—using data integration and supercomputing power as a guide. Yeasts and other microbes are commonly used to produce useful chemicals. While it is easy to get them to produce some chemicals in high yields, like ethanol, other chemicals may provide more of a challenge. Kumar hopes that this system of combining machine learning with metabolic modeling and multiomics datasets will help overcome these production challenges. “Though we still need more testing on this model, there is an amazing potential to expand this computationally guided bioengineering to other systems. This strategy could open up a new era in biosystem design for the production of eco-friendly chemicals.”

Future Of Work stories

The future of work is likely to be complicated

The Nole Edge Economy: I’ve been talking a lot about protocols over platforms lately, and wanted to explore such a world in a fictional context — and combined 2 other elements: the incredible wealth of DIY info found totally free online such as on YouTube (I was inspired to write this after learning how to rebuild a carburetor via YouTube videos) and also the odd dependencies created by shareable, reusable code. Also, there’s a little nod towards SLAPP suits as well. In short, this is a story that hits on a lot of regular Techdirt points.

eMotion: by our very own Timothy Geigner. He kept telling me he was too busy to write something, and then at the last minute delivered this wonderful story exploring what the world might look like when artificial intelligence is granted its own rights — and starts to require what probably can’t be called “human” resources any more when dealing with job changes and transitions. But, in such a world, certainly the line begins to blur between who gets to make decisions for whom. And, I mean, how do you let a military artificial intelligence know that its services are no longer needed.

Genetic Changelings: by Keyan Bowes was one of the few stories we received that didn’t focus on artificial intelligence, but rather started exploring a world where genetic engineering has taken off to fairly spectacular levels. It’s a world that will seem quite familiar to today’s… but with a few potentially startling differences. I mean, when a story starts out in its first line discussing a child’s tail, you know it’s going to be a bit different.

Automated Discovery

To what extent can scientific discovery be automated? Where are the areas where automation can make the biggest contribution to human efforts? These questions and a number of others are addressed in a very interesting 2-part review article on “Automated Discovery in the Chemical Sciences”. As the authors say, “The prospect of a robotic scientist has long been an object of curiosity, optimism, skepticism, and job-loss fear, depending on who is asked” I know that when I’ve written about such topics here, the comments and emails I receive cover all those viewpoints and more. Most of us are fine with having automated help for the “grunt work” of research – the autosamplers, image-processing and data-analysis software, the plate handlers and assay readers, etc. But the 2 things that really seem to set off uneasiness are (1) the idea that the output such machinery might be usefully fed into software that can then reach its own conclusions about the experimental outcomes, and (2) the enablement of discovery through “rapid random” mechanized experimental setups, which (to judge from the comments I’ve gotten) is regarded by a number of people as a lazy or even dishonorable way to do science.

Mesh networks

Over the last 10 years, communities seeking more resilient and responsive infrastructures that are more closely aligned with their commitment to common resources and mutual aid have chosen to build their own networks. Greta Byrum tells the story of their efforts — from Brooklyn to Detroit, Tennessee, and the Hudson Valley — and the lessons learned on the way to a People’s Internet. The process has not been seamless: Their builders must navigate bureaucracy and neighborly tensions, and the connectivity these networks ultimately provide isn’t of the lightning-speed frictionless sort promised by the major commercial providers. Yet local networks — owned, operated, and governed by those who use them — don’t simply link devices together into a mesh; they also link people together into a community of stewardship and self-governance.