426: Apple Vision Pro Redux, Nvidia’s Neuralangelo, Air Quality, GPUs, Robert Caro, Twitter, Dating Apps, and It Always Feels Too Late

"obviously the next interaction paradigm"

Theory becomes infinitely more difficult as soon as it touches the realm of moral values.

—Clausewitz

Prompt: Why does it always feel too late?

⌛️🤷‍♂️ Why does it always feel too late to start project XYZ?

Because it takes a while for things to work, the cohort having success today started 5-10 years ago (or more!).

Many people, when they look at that, conclude that if only they had started back then, they’d also be successful because of external factor X (early mover’s advantage, there was less competition back then, it used to be easier, etc). But *sigh* it’s too late now…

Those who are on their way to being successful 5-10 years in the future are currently under the radar, so you mostly don’t see them unless you really know where to look.

In 5-10 years, you will look back and regret that you did not start 5-10 years ago, but now it’s too late. Again.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

🫁 This week’s very bad smog days on the East Coast of North America were a good reminder for those of us who usually can breathe clean air that it wasn’t always like this in wealthy countries and that it’s still a big problem in many parts of the world.

If you look at this list of countries ranked by air pollution, the top 10 includes many of the most populous countries in the world, with Bangladesh 🇧🇩 at #1, India 🇮🇳 at #2, and China 🇨🇳 at #8.

The Lancet estimates about 4.5 million premature deaths from air pollution in 2019, just from outdoor air. Indoor air pollution — which is a big problem in countries where a lot of cooking is done with poorly ventilated wood or dried biomass stoves — adds another ˜2 million premature deaths.

While my part of Canada had pretty terrible air this week, and the US Eastern seaboard was also hit hard, our countries rank respectively #154 and #143 on the list, so bad air is the exception rather than the norm.

Breathing is a pretty basic human need. Let’s keep working on cleaning the air everywhere.

💚 🥃 You know what would make my day?

If you told *one* curious friend about this newsletter.

I don’t care about the biggest audience, but I do want the *best*, and since you’re great, I assume that you know other great people.

Word of mouth is undefeated!

---

🏦 💰 Liberty Capital 💳 💴

⏱️ Working Hours vs. Salary 💵

Note: Mexico stands out because this is a group of pretty rich countries. If more were included, I suspect the top left corner would be a lot more crowded…

Source.

🥽🍎 An In-Depth, One-Hour+ Hands-on Experience with Apple Vision Pro

This is the best in-depth description of what the Vision Pro is like that I’ve found so far.

Myke Hurley was invited to a fairly exclusive demonstration of the Vision Pro after the Keynote, where he and two Apple engineers spent over an hour going through all kinds of things.

• 🎧 Cortex: #143: Apple Vision Pro: Experiencing the Future

What makes his perspective fairly unique is that he’s been doing real work meetings in VR using the Meta Quest Pro, so he has a lot more VR experience than most.

His comments about eye-tracking (👀) were very interesting. “It’s almost too good… it’s like magic. It’s obviously the next interaction paradigm, like multi-touch was for the iPhone” (I’m paraphrasing a bit).

The Apple people also explained how they got the two 4k+ micro-OLED screens fabricated directly on top of two silicon chips to further reduce latency. Very cool stuff that is hard to do without a lot of vertical integration during the design phase.

🚧🏎️ As fast as AI is moving, it’s gated by GPU capacity

Adam D’Angelo writes:

One reason the AI boom is being underestimated is the GPU/TPU shortage.

This shortage is causing all kinds of limits on product rollouts and model training but these are not visible. Instead all we see is Nvidia spiking in price. 

Things will accelerate once supply meets demand.

I can’t imagine how quickly things would be progressing if anyone could have access to all the GPU compute that they could possibly want at an affordable price… 🤔

🏗️🏭 The U.S. is experiencing a factory-building boom!

Via Noah Smith:

Inflation-adjusted construction spending in the manufacturing industry has absolutely skyrocketed since June 2022, from $90 billion to $189 billion:

That’s an incredible amount. Factory construction spending more than doubled in one year, after being essentially constant for decades. And it perfectly lines up with the passage of the CHIPS Act in July 2022 and the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022. In fact, big investments by companies like Intel and Ford — making chips and EVs — figure prominently in these numbers.

Pendulum swinging back?

🐦 Fidelity marks down its Twitter stake… again 💸