The 5 best things I read on the Internet this week

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The Five Best Things: Oct 10, 2020
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The Five Best Things: Oct 10, 2020

Learning from operators at the top of their game

Aishwarya Nagarajan
Oct 11, 2020
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Hi all, I started a new job this week at Google! I’m now a Product Manager in the Cloud AI group, helping other enterprises scale and serve their machine learning models. My first week at Google felt like the first week at college - there is so much going on and everyone is brilliant and nice at the same time!

I will continue to write these weekly posts, and I will clearly call out when I share something related to work.

In timely news related to my AMD piece last week, there are credible rumors of their $30B buyout of Xilinx. AMD also had their new product launches this week; the TLDR is that their CPU is incredibly strong (19% performance uplift at the same power) and puts Intel severely on the back foot, and their Graphics processor is getting within striking distance of Nvidia’s.

The Five Best Things

  1. Nathan Benaich and Ian Hogarth: The State of AI Report 2020.

    • The 3rd annual state of AI report compiles key developments in the field of AI in the last 12 months, focusing on research, industry, talent and politics, along with predictions for the next 12 months. This year’s report puts a spotlight on the arms-race in large natural language models, domain-specific models that can be performant AND data efficient, and the huge strides being made in AI for biology. For the first time, the report covered ML Operations (or MLOps, i.e. taking models from research to production scale). Nathan and Ian also highlighted the significance of TSMC, which I’ve covered extensively!

    • The State of AI reports are must reads whenever they come out. It is well worth the 20 minutes to skim the headlines of these 170+ slides to get the gist of the state-of-the-art. For those wanting to get deeper, they are good jumping off points.

    • I am super happy that MLOps is covered since that is core to my role at Google! MLOps is the proverbial base of the iceberg - not sexy, but mission critical.

      Source: https://www.logicalclocks.com/blog/feature-store-the-missing-data-layer-in-ml-pipelines

  2. Food Insider: Butter making at Le Beurre Bordier

    Twitter avatar for @InsiderFoodFood Insider @InsiderFood
    We visited a traditional maison du beurre, or butter house, in Brittany, France 🧈
    Image

    October 7th 2020

    7,543 Retweets31,603 Likes
    • Ten minutes of bliss (apologies to the vegans who read this)! What a treat to watch someone who is on top of their game explain the art and science of their work.

  3. The Eavesdrop: Andy Miller interview extract on working with Steve Jobs.

    • In this video podcast excerpt, Andy Miller, ex-VP of mobile advertising at Apple talks about negotiating with Steve Jobs when his company got bought by Apple, being talked into moving to the Bay Area from Boston, and the intensity of working directly for Jobs.

    • An insight into someone else who was top of their game. Holy cow was Steve Jobs capable of boring lasers into your brains and bringing you to your knees, as both a boss and a negotiator.   

  4. ArtNet News: The Swift, Cruel, Incredible Rise of Amoako Boafo: How Feverish Selling and Infighting Built the Buzziest Artist of 2020

    • This story covers the rags-to-riches story of Amoako Boafo, a Ghanaian portrait artist, whose vivid, finger-sculpted portraits of Africans have catapulted him into an overnight sensation in the world of high-art which is thirsty for Black talent. It goes further into the selling and buying shenanigans of the art collection industry. The twist of how Boafo was able to take his power back is awesome! I don’t want to spoil it because I really want you to read this fully - start at The Lemon Bathing Suit painting (below) mid-way through the story.

      Amoako Boafo's The Lemon Bathing Suit (2019) sold for a stunning £675,000 ($881,432) against a £30,000 to £50,000 estimate ($39,130 to $65,217). Courtesy of Phillips.
    • Like a caper movie that is fully representative of our pump-and-dump times. It’s fun to read about someone brilliant and principled, who is able to take their power back from those who seek to exploit them!

  5. Bloomberg: Harvard’s Chetty Finds Economic Carnage in Wealthiest ZIP Codes

    • The article covers the efforts of Raj Chetty - Harvard economist and MacArthur fellow - to understand and highlight the impact of Covid-19 on inequality in America. The result is https://tracktherecovery.org, which provides a zip-code level view of the spending, employment, public health and education trends in America right now. It shows that the recession has essentially ended for high-income individuals; meanwhile, the bottom half of American workers represent ~80% of the jobs still missing. This is devastating, especially when you square it with Chetty’s previous work which found that moving a child from a below-average to above-average neighborhood can boost their lifetime earnings by $200,000.

    • Raj Chetty is the Indian golden child who puts other Indian golden children to shame. I became aware of his work on economic inequality and the fading ‘American Dream’ in a freakonomics episode a few years ago. He cites that his goal is to “Bring economic measurement into the age of Big Data”, which can provide unprecedented visibility for policy makers seeking to alleviate inequality. These policies include inclusive college admissions, housing desegregation and providing structural support to young families.

Honorable Mentions

  1. A banner year for female Nobel prize winners! Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier won the prize in Chemistry for their CRISPR discovery, Louise Gluck in Literature for her poetry, and Andrea Ghez in Physics for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the center of our galaxy.

    Twitter avatar for @NobelPrizeThe Nobel Prize @NobelPrize
    “I hope I can inspire other young women into the field. It’s a field that has so many pleasures, and if you are passionate about the science, there’s so much that can be done.” - Andrea Ghez speaking at today’s press conference where her #NobelPrize in Physics was announced.
    Image

    October 6th 2020

    5,009 Retweets12,729 Likes
    Twitter avatar for @Kasey_BucklesKasey Buckles @Kasey_Buckles
    This pic of the Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry is giving me life.
    2 Scientists Awarded Nobel Prize In Chemistry For Genome Editing ResearchThe 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded for research into “rewriting the code of life.” Emmanuelle Charpentier of France and Jennifer Doudna of the U.S. are the laureates.npr.org

    October 7th 2020

    209 Retweets1,609 Likes
    Twitter avatar for @NobelPrizeThe Nobel Prize @NobelPrize
    "You have to live your life if you’re going to do original work. Your work will come out of an authentic life ..." - Louise Glück, awarded this year's #NobelPrize in Literature. Read more in this Q&A with the poet:
    pw.org/content/intern…
    Image

    October 8th 2020

    593 Retweets1,681 Likes
  2. Today is world mental health day; this thread on the importance of spending time with and loving one’s own self is timely.

    Twitter avatar for @nickcammarataNick Cammarata @nickcammarata
    Heuristic for if you have self-love (that I’ve seen a bunch of people reach!): walking around alone feels kind of like walking with someone you have a crush on

    October 5th 2020

    22 Retweets275 Likes
  3. I can’t really top this caption.

    Twitter avatar for @BradfordPearsonBradford Pearson @BradfordPearson
    RIP to Eddie Van Halen, whose innovation led to the greatest illustration ever filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office:
    patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Pa…
    Image

    October 6th 2020

    4,465 Retweets15,280 Likes
  4. BBC: India's new paper Covid-19 test could be a ‘game changer’. Scientists in India have come up with a pregnancy-test like test for Covid-19 and are working to scale it up.

  5. Indian Uncles for the win.

    Twitter avatar for @CBSNewsCBS News @CBSNews
    Kamala Harris' uncle in India calls Mike Pence a "poor fellow" for going up against his niece in the VP debate
    cbsn.ws/33Egaar
    Image

    October 8th 2020

    1,572 Retweets7,926 Likes
  6. Reuters: SoftBank brings food service robot to labour-strapped Japan. Please just read the headline and then the very last line in this article.

  7. Bjorn Jeffery: The double edged sword of success: Understanding Naspers and their Tencent investment. I’m a tiny bit obsessed with Tencent, and so this was a fun read about Naspers, Tencent’s largest investor and a huge company in their own right. So few people in the U.S. know about them, but they are HUGE in fintech, classifieds and food delivery in Europe, Asia and their home continent of Africa.

  8. There’s technical debt, and then there is this equivalent of the bridge collapsing in Minneapolis.

    Twitter avatar for @MaxCRoserMax Roser @MaxCRoser
    In the UK the number of cases rose rapidly. But the public – and authorities – are only learning this now because these cases were only published now as a backlog. The reason was apparently that the database is managed in Excel and the number of columns had reached the maximum.
    Image

    October 5th 2020

    9,556 Retweets19,943 Likes
  9. Do take this poll so the representation isn’t biased towards Silicon Valley.

  10. Probably one of the best data visualizations I have come across in recent times.

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