sari

Recycling can be worse for the environment too. By the time someone has picked up that plastic container of peanut butter, driven it to a recycling facility, separated it into its plastic type, taken off the lid, fully washed it out in hot water, and melted it down in a specialised facility, we might have used less energy and produced less pollutio... See more

What Innis feared—as his biographer Alexander John Watson puts it—is that “our culture was becoming so saturated with new instantaneous media that there was no longer a hinterland to which refugee intellectuals could retreat to develop a new paradigm that would allow us to tackle the new problems we are facing.”

We need a ranking algorithm that cannot be easily gamed. This paper describes MarketRank, a ranking algorithm that is immune to SEO and simple to compute. We discuss the advantages and limitations of MarketRank, and show how it compares to Google’s rankings.

Transformers and NLP more generally are still nascent in application today but will likely be a crucial wave over the next 5 years. As the models scale and natural language understanding grows stronger one can expect the enterprise to be transformed. Much of the world of an enterprise is effectively pushing around bits of language - legal contracts... See more

Covid-19 presents a rare opportunity for change in education. The pandemic is accelerating two major shifts: (1) Education is increasingly being delivered direct-to-learner, and (2) Learning is increasingly lifelong.

Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare

To the public intellectual, one must ask: if your ideas are so good, why aren't you executing on them? It is much easier (and less impactful) to write about the importance of “green tech” than to build Tesla. Moreover, many self-titled public intellectuals are not even particularly intellectual. They are just... public.