449: Amazon + Anthropic, TSMC AZ, Costco, Xero Shoes, Microsoft + Activision, Bloomberg for Sale, AI Copyright, and The Bear

"History repeats itself"

One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.

—Henry Miller

🏋️‍♂️💪 My journey into strength training continues (albeit slowly).

I’ve only been to the gym about 9 times so far. I could blame being busy and my family vacation and some travel, but I know that if I really had wanted to, I could have figured something out to go a few more times.

As is my habit, I’ve been turning what should be a straightforward “get your ass to the gym” into a research project. 🔬👨‍🔬💻

The first step has been figuring out which adjustable dumbbells to buy so I could do more at home. I ended up going for the Nuobells 580 (from 5 to 80lbs in 5lbs increments):

Of course, I also need an adjustable bench, so after doing a bunch more research, I ended up ordering a REP AB-4100 (it hasn’t arrived yet — here’s a full review, if you’re curious about it).

In the past week, I’ve been learning about squat racks… which is the next step to have a home gym where I can do the four main things I’d like to be able to do:

1. Squats

2. Deadlift/Romanian Deadlifts

3. Bench press

4. Overhead press

(if you’re curious, so far the rack that is at the top of my list is the REP PR-4000)

While I realize that getting obsessed with gear is a distraction from the actual strength training, I justify it with the fact that if I can do a lot of it at home, the friction will be a lot lower and I’ll probably end up doing more of it than if I have to go to the gym.

I know that for many people, going to a separate place is very beneficial, and I also feel some of that when I go, but I know myself and think that over the long-term, I’ll do better if I also have a home setup. Proximity matters.

To be continued…

🛀💭🧼 Random shower thought (literally): For most of humanity’s existence, soap didn’t exist.

It’s an invention that probably dates to around five thousand years ago. Evidence exists for the production of soap-like materials in ancient Babylon around 2800 BC. Maybe it goes farther back, but it’s hard to imagine it happening on a wider scale before the transition to agriculture and larger settlements 10,000 years ago.

Prior to that, forget about that clean feeling when you come out of the shower…

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🏦 💰 Liberty Capital 💳 💴

It’s a deal! 💚 🥃

🛒🤝🤖💰💰💰💰 Amazon to invest $4bn in AI lab Anthropic

I have to admit, if I had to bet on who would become Anthropic’s major partner, I would have guessed Google. They already invested $300m for a 10% stake, and that deal included provisions to use GCP for some of their compute.

But Google has great in-house AI and Amazon is behind, so that probably made them bid more out of desperation 🤔

On top of the “up to $4bn” investment, Anthropic will now use AWS as their “primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads” (however that’s defined...) and use AWS’ Trainium and Inferentia chips “in addition to existing solutions” (read: Nvidia GPUs) for model training & inference.

Anthropic’s Claude model will become available to AWS customers as part of Bedrock, with all kinds of customization and fine-tuning options.

Trivia: $500 million of Anthropic’s original funding came from Alameda Research. Yes, that’s Sam Bankman-Fried. I guess he was better at picking AI labs than at operating cryptocurrency exchanges…

🇹🇼🤝🇺🇸💰💰💰 Arizona trying to get TSMC to add advanced-packaging capabilities to AZ Fabs 🐜