Hi friends,
This is Congxing Cai. Greetings from Mountain View. It’s hard to believe that we are already at the middle of the year. There have been so much happening and yet to happen. Here is a short summary of what I have read besides all the startup works. 😂
Happening Now
Technology saves the world. The progress technology has made throughout the pandemic is amazing when looking back 15 months after it started. While we are celebrating this achievement of the technology industry, it is important to realize the bigger opportunity is the “civilization shift” that has happened. Life in developed countries has been stable and gradually improved by technology over the decades. But, if we look at China, and other fast growing developing economies in Asia, the main force that has powered their growth in the past decades was the constant civilization shift. We have the technology available; what we need is a society that is open to them. And, here we are. It “is perhaps the most important thing that’s happened in my lifetime”.
$5B Roth IRA of Peter Thiel. This piece from ProPublica is full of accusation. There is a lot of discussions online and strong defense for Peter Thiel. But, if you are ok to put this debate aside and focus on the idea of investing out of IRA, it is impressive that IRA as an investment tool can be leveraged to this extent.
WWDC 21 New Features Apple has held its annual developer conference this year. Besides some cool new features, it is also an event for releasing the next set of engineering building blocks for the future, including AR glasses. It is easy to overlook those incremental changes on the phone, but it would be a step function change once all the dots are connected, and for all glasses. Meanwhile, this is what my team is working on right now.
Learnings of the Week
Today We’re Eating the Winners of the 1948 Chicken of Tomorrow Contest It’s hard to imagine the pain that industrial process has brought to chicken over the past century. “They have insatiable appetites, which leaves them stressed, as evidenced in their poor reproduction capabilities, cardiovascular failure and skeletal problems. They’ve been pumped with so many antibiotics, they’ve developed resistances.” If chicken have any consciousness, sapiens have done the most unbearable crime to them.
The Tyranny Of Time Humans are really good at inventing things that in return rule ourselves. We invented the standard of best chicken, so we all eat the same kind of chicken. We developed the idea of email, so we have all become machines that are busy with receiving and sending emails. We also created this shared definition of time, that comes to dominate our life. On one side, it greatly boosts productivity; on the other end, we have departed from the nature. As we have learned to take the definition of time as granted, it is fascinating to review the history how it has been invented by monks, been rebelled against by the indigenous societies, and gradually colonized the world.
The Relativity of Wrong In this 1988 essay of Issac Asimov, he elaborates on the continuum between right and wrong. The simplification of viewing right or wrong as absolutes is “merely an efficiency of memory”. Science continuously make small refinements to existing theories. Sometimes the changes may be a step function that can make the old understandings outdated. Through each revolution, we just become less wrong than before. “Since the refinements in theory grow smaller and smaller, even quite ancient theories must have been sufficiently right to allow advances to be made; advances that were not wiped out by subsequent refinements.” Though we may know we will never get to the real truth, we should celebrate our understandings nowadays and keep pursuing the goal of being less wrong.
Quote
“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.” ― Isaac Asimov
Thanks for reading!
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