432: China Chip Ban Redux, Oracle + ARM, SpaceX, Brookfield Asset Management, Canada vs USA, StableDiffusion, and Vince Gilligan

"the kid will ace his biology classes"

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days.

—Annie Dillard

👨🏻‍🏫🔺 The Learning Pyramid (h/t Gurwinder):

How well you retain info depends on the way you learned it. 

People remember 5% of what they hear, 10% of what they read, 50% of what they discuss, 75% of what they do, and 90% of what they teach.

The more interactive your learning, the more you learn.

I have learned so much by teaching my kids about the world… (see below ⬇️)

🫀🫁🩻🧬🔬🛏️😴👦🏼 A couple of days ago, I was putting my five-year-old to bed and he had lots of questions...

I ended up explaining white blood cells, kidneys, blood vessels and the heart, stomach acids, intestines, the bladder, the brain and nervous system, what is a cell, etc, for about 15-20 minutes.

It was totally worth the later bedtime, the kid will ace his biology classes! 👨🏻‍🎓

It's so neat to be able to pull out my phone and look up "kidney diagram" or "blood vessels diagram" or "human cell diagram" and show him. If I had that as a kid, I’d know a lot more stuff today!

Now imagine taking this to the next level with an AI tutor where you can ask “explain this to me like I’m 5” or “explain to me like I’m 12” or “like I’m an expert in the field”.

The ability to dial up and down the level of detail and the complexity of the analogies is what the best teachers do intuitively. Now it’s available on command from a machine that never gets tired of answering questions, doesn’t consider any question stupid, and has expert knowledge in almost every field. 🤯

🛀💭🎥🎬🐭 Is it weird that there has never been a big animated, Pixar-style film with Mickey Mouse as the main character?

Has he been relegated to mascot/icon/logo because he’s too bland and boring to be used in a big-budget film as a character? 🤔

📘📸🎞️🤖 I’ve been working on a new project lately.

It’s still early, but I think I want to select a batch of my favorite generative AI images (that I made, not from others) and get them printed out in a nice glossy photo book.

I think it’ll be really nice to have something tangible to hold onto, to keep around so that once in a while I’m reminded it exists and I can enjoy these images that have a special meaning to me because I made them and picked them out of hundreds and hundreds of discarded iterations and works in progress.

If they’re just digital files on some drive somewhere, I’ll probably forget them…

I’ve been looking at printing options. Shutterfly is a big one, but Blurb is at the top of my list right now. I’ll let you know how it goes if I decide to do this. If you have experience printing photo books, let me know your ‘best practices’ in the comments or via email (you can just reply to the newsletter email).

Here’s a portrait I made yesterday that I like. It’s going in the book:

Medieval maiden in a wheat field 💚 🥃

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🏦 💰 Liberty Capital 💳 💴

🤖🇨🇳👀🇺🇸 U.S. Gov’t Considering Additional AI Chip Restrictions on China

The Commerce Department could move as soon as early next month to stop the shipments of chips made by Nvidia and other chip makers to customers in China and other countries of concern without first obtaining a license [...]

The move could further crimp China’s ability to build its AI capabilities after restrictions last year that cut off the most advanced AI chips made by Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices. [...]

The new restrictions being contemplated by the department would ban the sale of even A800 chips without a license, according to the people familiar with the matter. [...]

The administration is also considering restricting leasing of cloud services to Chinese AI companies, which have used such arrangements to skirt the export bans on advanced chips (Source)

Would Bytedance get a license under this new tighter regime? How about Alibaba and Tencent?

How does the US know that chips sent to Bytedance — who has been buying a crapload of them, as I wrote about in Edition #430 — won’t be ending up somewhere else in China, or maybe even stay in the Bytedance data-center but used for something else than Bytedance’s commercial products..?

Of course, Nvidia’s CFO isn’t exactly happy about this:

"Over the long term, restrictions prohibiting the sale of our datacenter graphic processing units to China, if implemented, would result in a permanent loss of opportunities for the U.S. industry to compete and lead in one of the world’s largest markets and impact on our future business and financial results," Nvidia's Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said.

It’s a tough situation to navigate…

Meanwhile, the EU is also looking to tighten things up when it comes to exporting certain technology.

🌱📈 Even if we talk about compound growth all the time, most of us still don’t *really* understand it 🚀

My friend David Senra (📚🎙️) posted this tweet about Estée Lauder (btw, also check out his episode on her autobiography):