511: Zuckerberg Interview, Amazon vs Temu, Lisu Su & AMD, Apple vs Meta, Peter Thiel, Starlink Mini, Sauna, Espresso, and The Killer

"Being in there has a meditative quality,"

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

—Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

Our new backyard sauna 💚 🥃

🥵🌡️🧖‍♀️ My years-long dream of having a backyard sauna has become a reality.

In the first three days since the electrician connected the heater, I must’ve had 5-6 sessions. I love it! It’s very relaxing and I can see how some benefits have nothing to do with the heat — sitting in a box for 15-20 minutes without anything else to do than think or talk to my wife is a wonderful addition to my day.

Being in there has a meditative quality. It forces you to slow down.

I have written about it a few times, but if you haven’t checked it out yet, this page by Rhonda Patrick compiles a lot of the science and best practices on sauna use (a lot of the research comes from studies in Finland, where saunas are very common).

There are benefits for cardiovascular health, inflammation, cognitive & mental health, hormonal and metabolic function, etc. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those benefits came via improved sleep quality 🤔

☕️ Speaking of new toys, I’ve been enjoying the espresso machine.

I still need to get a good grinder since my Baratza Encore wasn’t designed to have fine control on grind size and probably doesn’t grind very evenly, which matters when you’re pushing pressurized water through something and want even flow/extraction.

The only downside of improving the coffee at home is that my wife tells me she’s often disappointed when she gets coffee elsewhere now ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you’re also making espresso, here’s a good guide to proper maintenance of your equipment, which matters in how things taste:

🗣️🗣️🎙️🐜🚨 In case you missed it, I had a fun conversation with my friend MBI (🇧🇩🇺🇸) about semiconductors:

• 🎧 Semiconductors Industry: Going Deep with Mostly Borrowed Ideas (MBI) on TSMC, Texas Instruments, Nvidia, Intel, Hyperscalers, etc

💚 🥃 🚢⚓️ If you’re getting value from this newsletter, it would mean the world to me if you become a supporter to help me to keep writing it.

You’ll get access to paid editions, the private Discord, and get invited to the next supporter-only Zoom Q&As with me.

If you only get one good idea per year, it’ll more than pay for itself. If it makes you curious about new things, that’s priceless.

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🏦 💰 Liberty Capital 💳 💴

🗣️ Interview: Zuck on AI, Social Media, and Meta’s Upcoming Products (Neural Wristbands, Holographic Smart Glasses)

They seem to have interesting stuff brewing. I’m particularly looking forward to the large version of the Llama 3 model (more on that below) and the neural wristband tech.

On the latter, it feels like a new reliable and precise input method would unlock a lot of cool things to be built across everything from PCs to gaming consoles to AR and VR.

h/t my friend MBI (🇧🇩🇺🇸)

🛒🇨🇳 Amazon Planning Discount Section to Fight Temu and Shein

Fight fire with 🔥:

Amazon plans to launch a section on its shopping site featuring cheap items that ship directly to overseas consumers from warehouses in China, according to slides shown to Chinese sellers…

The new marketplace will offer unbranded fashion, home goods and daily necessities, according to the slides, and orders will take 9 to 11 days to get to customers. Amazon told Chinese sellers in a recent closed-door meeting that it would start signing up merchants this summer and begin accepting inventory in the fall.

This wouldn’t be a whole new site or brand, but rather a sub-section on Amazon:

Sellers joining the bargain section can determine their product selection and pricing, and can produce in small batches to test the demand for any new products they plan to launch, the slides show. The model is similar to that of Shein, which prides itself on getting their suppliers to produce trendy goods in small batches in order to minimize unsold inventory. (Source)

Temu and Shein have been growing fast in the US in large part due to a US trade provision that excludes individual packages worth less than $800 from customs duties.

It’s not clear how long that loophole will stick around, but if it disappears, Temu and Shein will be hurt *way* more than Amazon (which would benefit from the reduced competition).

Temu appears worried about that. It’s trying to diversify its merchant base by adding some that have inventory in US warehouses:

Temu is signing up Chinese sellers that already have inventory in U.S. warehouses and can ship to homes from there, as well as U.S. merchants. Some of the sellers that Temu has signed up recently are also big on Amazon’s marketplace.

The new sellers now contribute roughly 20% of the gross merchandise volume on its U.S. site, according to two people close to Temu. Last year, Temu generated $17 billion gross merchandise value globally, about $10 billion of that in the U.S., estimates Bernstein analyst Robin Zhu.

They’re also facing rising air freight rates:

the success of both Shein and Temu has increased air freight fees drastically this year, by massively lifting shipment volumes, raising their costs. That makes the direct import model less appealing.

🍎✋🦙 Apple as AI Aggregator… But Not for Meta (yet?)

When I wrote about Apple’s position in the AI ecosystem, I mentioned that they would act as an aggregator and OpenAI was just the first of many partners.

I even speculated that maybe the relationship between Apple and Meta was improving and Llama may end up in Apple Intelligence.

Well, maybe not…

Apple Inc. rejected overtures by Meta Platforms Inc. to integrate the social networking company’s AI chatbot into the iPhone months ago, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The two companies aren’t in discussions about using Meta’s Llama chatbot in an AI partnership and only held brief talks in March, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the situation is private. The dialogue about a partnership didn’t reach any formal stage, and Apple has no active plans to integrate Llama.

Things may have changed since, but that greatly reduces the odds of a partnership happening soon.

The most likely next ones are probably Google with Gemini and Anthropic with Claude.

My current go-to model is Claude Sonnet 3.5. It’s excellent while being very fast. I’d love to see it available as a built-in option on iOS and MacOS.

🗣️ Interview: Lisa Su, AMD CEO 🐜🏭

I really enjoyed this interview that Ben Thompson (💚 🥃 🎩) did last month:

• 🎧📄 An Interview with AMD CEO Lisa Su About Solving Hard Problems

Jensen gets all the attention these days, but Su has also done a great job at AMD. It’s nice to get to know her a bit better.

Historically, there were very few periods when they were ahead of Intel when it came to CPUs (I still remember the Jim Keller era when x86-64 Athlons and Opterons crushed the Netburst Pentium IV…). But under Su’s leadership, both the tech and the stock at AMD have done great:

AMD vs Intel stocks since Lisa Su became CEO of AMD.

A 44% CAGR over her decade-long tenure is very impressive, especially when you consider the delta with Intel — which, to be fair, has had more problems on the foundry side than the design side, but going fabless was once seen as a sign of defeat for AMD not some kind of unfair advantage… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

🌎 Amazon & Google, Carbon Edition 🔌⚡️🏭

First, Amazon:

Amazon said it had reached its goal of 100 percent clean energy seven years ahead of schedule.

The company said it invested billions of dollars in more than 500 solar and wind projects to achieve its target. The energy generated by those projects is equivalent to the electricity consumed by the company’s data centers, corporate buildings, grocery stores and fulfillment centers in 27 countries. [...]

“We’re really excited about, obviously, the goal that we set five years ago and reaching it seven years early,” said Kara Hurst, vice president of worldwide sustainability at Amazon.

That isn’t *everything* yet:

Amazon aims to reach net-zero carbon emissions from all of its operations, including its delivery vans, planes and other means of transportation, by 2040.

Meanwhile, Google is changing its approach:

Google has ended its mass purchase of cheap carbon offsets and thus stopped claiming that its operations are carbon neutral, according to the tech giant’s latest environmental report. The company now aims to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2030.

The rapid building of AI data centers probably has something to do with that:

The changes to its carbon credits purchase strategy have coincided with Google and Big Tech’s push on artificial intelligence… As a result, Google’s total planet-warming emissions in 2023 are 48% higher than 2019. In that period, its total energy consumption has doubled.

Here comes the broken record: Big Tech has some of the deepest pockets around, they need lots of 24/7/365 power for their data centers, and they have long time horizons and a low-cost of capital. How about building some nuclear reactors? They could be a central element in the revival of nuclear construction capabilities in North America, in partnership with utilities. ⚛️

🗣️ Interview: Peter Thiel 🔭

Extended interviews with Thiel are a relatively rare occurrence.

When you listen to him, he’s a lot more nuanced than how he’s generally portrayed by his fans and detractors. This is a good example of why it’s worth going to primary sources and deciding for yourself what you think.

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🧪🔬 Liberty Labs 🧬 🔭

🐢 TIL: Turtles Have Nerve Endings in their Shells 🌊

They can feel touch almost as easily as elsewhere on their skin:

A tortoise or turtle’s shell is made of modified bone, including the ribs, parts of their pelvis, and other bones found in almost all reptiles. The bone of a turtle’s shell contains not only skeletal bone but also dermal bone. The top of the shell is known as the carapace, and the bottom is known as the plastron.

Over the shell are plates called scutes, which are made from the same material as your fingernails, keratin. The origin of a turtle’s bone seems to be an evolutionary adaptation. The shell forms during the embryonic stage of a turtle’s life and is, in the simplest terms, a modification of the rib cage.

A turtle’s shell has nerve endings that enable it to transmit stimuli information to the central nervous system. Through this mechanism, the animal can feel their shell. 

In addition, they can, to an extent, “hear” via their shell, as sound vibrations on their shell can be picked up by their ears. This gives turtles greater spatial awareness.

They can even hear through their shells!

A website written by a veterinarian mentions that: “the shells of tortoises and turtles are incredibly sensitive. If, for example, you scratch their shell, a turtle will sense the scratching as easily as if you were scratching their bare skin. In effect, their shells are highly sensitive to touch.”

They also mention that the shells of turtles shouldn’t be painted — apparently, that’s a popular activity for kids with pet turtles — as that blocks UV and could lead to vitamin D deficiency.

☕️ “Let’s put cup handles on nuclear cooling towers so people remember that isn't smoke, it's steam...” ⚛️

Fun tweet by Louis Anslow of Pessimists Archive.

🦙🤖 Meta’s Largest Llama 3 (405bn parameters) is coming next week (July 23, 2024)

The 8 and 70 billion parameter versions are already available, but it’s this large one that has me most curious.

According to what Zuck said in a recent interview, it’s supposed to be a dense model (as opposed to a Mixture of Experts model, which puts together a bunch of specialized smaller models, each specializing in different aspects of the input space or tasks).

What I’m curious about is how it compares to the state of the art and whether it becomes the top model for a while — and whether it can beat Claude 3.5 Opus, which should also come out in the next few months.

Starlink Mini Can Roam the U.S. 🚶🏻‍♂️📡🛰️🛰️🛰️🛰️🛰️🛰️

Starlink keeps innovating and improving its system at a rapid pace.

It was just a few weeks ago that it unveiled the Mini dish, which is portable with an average power draw of 25-40 watts, and now it is available for Roaming across the whole US:

The Starlink Mini hardware costs $599 and is available with both Regional and Mini Roam services. Regional costs $150 per month for unlimited portable data in North America, with an option to pay per GB for in-motion use. Mini Roam is just $50 per month but is limited to 50GB of portable or in-motion data on the continent, with additional data priced per GB.

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🎨 🎭 Liberty Studio 👩‍🎨 🎥

🪑 ‘The Killer’ (David Fincher, 2024) 🎬

*I’ll keep this as spoiler-free as I can and mostly just share my opinion*

I’m generally a fan of Fincher’s work. While this wasn’t one of his best, I enjoyed it.

But I think expectations matter a lot for this one: If you go in thinking this will be an action-thriller in the style of John Wick, you will be disappointed.

There are action scenes, and they are quite well executed, but the heart of the film is elsewhere. A lot of the meat is in the internal monologue of the main character, and whether he’s a reliable narrator about himself — does he truly believe all those things or is he trying to convince himself? How good is he really at his job?

There’s also an argument that Fincher is making an analogy with how he makes films. Trying to plan everything, control everything, be precise… And yet sometimes you take a big swing and miss. Is he seeing himself in that character, just doing a different job? How autobiographical is it?

A lot of what I liked about it had to do with how it looks: The precision of the composition, the colors, the details, the sounds, the locations.

It’s a very self-contained story, structured as a series of vignettes. A different filmmaker could’ve rushed through a lot of the plot points and tried to cram in more action, but Fincher clearly cares more about the small moments and details.

I give it a “B+”