25 Things I Learned In 2018
A collection of interesting headlines from (mostly) reputable sources.
- Elon Musk is sending Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa into orbit, and he’s bringing 8 artists with him in a project called #dearMoon.
- The average age in Uganda is 15 years old. In Japan, it’s 46.
- Uber is exploring an autonomous flying car service.
- A computer generated artwork sold at a Christie’s auction for $432,000. The only problem: the artists used borrowed code.
generative Adversarial Network
5. The Chinese territory of Xinjiang is quickly becoming a testing ground for the securitization of facial recognition technology under the “One Belt, One Road” initiative. The border is over 5,000 kilometers long and is being secured to “ensure all aspects of security for the majority of Muslims.”
6. Hospitals are reporting a spike in emergency room visits caused by electric scooters.
7. An analysis of unusual Twitter activity has uncovered a massive network of coordinated spam bots. The bots have unique roles including: publishing bots, hub accounts to inflate follower count, and amplification bots to promote activity.
8. Thanks to Fortnite, Twitch streaming hours in June surpassed 800 million hours. This translates to 9 billion hours annually; for comparison, the NFL gathers 6 billion hours viewed annually.
9. A cultural phenomenon of sending “good morning” messages in India was discovered to be causing massive network congestion and smartphone freezing.
10. Alphabet’s DeepMind made a foray into pharmaceuticals as their AlphaFold network handily outperformed incumbents with billions in funding to generate accurate 3d protein models.
11. SpaceX was approved to deploy 11,000+ satellites into orbit for a “planetary network of super-speed internet access.” This is roughly 5x the number of active satellites currently in orbit.
12. Waymo’s self driving cars have been the subject of vandalism and road rage from Arizona residents since their commercial launch in early December.
13. A robot hand has been trained to manipulate real world objects using only simulated data.
14. Google announced Duplex, a voice assistant that can call restaurants to make a reservation on your behalf.
15. A research paper from Oxford Research Center announced a unifying theory of “dark fluid”: a phenomenon with negative mass that makes up the majority of the observable universe. Among the many implications, a suggestion for faster than light travel is included.
16. Ant colonies retain memories that outlast the lifespans of individuals.
17. The Boring Company is planning to build a second Boring Test Tunnel underneath Los Angeles. The cost per mile is under $10M; typical public projects cost ~$200M per mile.
18. CTRL labs has created a brain computer interface that allows researchers to control an on-screen keyboard by tapping into nervous signals from the spinal cord.
19. Google employees are taking a stand against a censored search engine designed for the Chinese government.
20. Marriott’s customer database was hacked and everyone forgot about it. Going forward, it’s probably safe to assume any information you give to companies will be leaked.
21. OpenAI Five defeated the world’s best DOTA2 players in a 5v5 match. The secret: optimizing the networks for a global variable that represented “teamwork.”
22. A Stanford professor created a vest to translate sound into vibration to assist deaf individuals. It can also be tuned into the stock market to create a 6th sense.
23. A Chinese scientist went under fire after creating genetically modified babies using CRISPR technology. He Jiankui altered the genes of twin girls to make them more resistant to HIV.
24. Bloomberg reported that China inserted spying chips into motherboards used by Apple and Amazon. Except they didn’t, and Bloomberg refused to retract the story.
25. The average age of startup founders in Silicon Valley is 42.
