607: Sam Altman vs Demis Hassabis, Fairfax, USA Electricity Bottleneck Overstated?, Gemini 3 Flash, 160 Days on a Submarine, and Tony Hawk

"That’s pretty bad and makes me trust it a lot less"

The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes…

— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles

🎞️💀🚂🛤️🚶‍♂️🚶‍♂️🚶‍♂️🚶‍♂️🧢 My oldest boy is finally old enough for us to watch ‘Stand by Me’ together 🤔

He’s close enough to the boys’ age that I’m hoping it lands for him the way it landed for me the first time I saw it.

Gordie, the film's narrator, says it best:

“I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12. Jesus, does anyone?”

🎧🎶💬📃🎵 In last Edition’s intro, I wrote about learning and education. Here’s one more trick to memorize things that I’ve started experimenting with:

• Use Suno to generate a catchy song, with whatever you want to learn as the lyrics

My boy has been learning his times tables. But it’s tedious, and he’s fast at mental math, so he has a tendency to memorize a few and derive the rest on the fly instead.

I explained to him that while this works fine for now, as the problems get harder, this approach will increase his error rate and waste time and working memory that he needs when doing higher-level math later.

He appears convinced, so he’s been doing flash cards and writing out his times tables by hand to learn them… But that’s boring!

So I generated Suno songs where the lyrics are times tables (Nine times seven is sixty-three! Four times seven is twenty-eight!), specifically asking for “catchy pop”. Then I generated a bunch and selected the most memorable ones.

He loves music, so we’ll see if listening to these over and over is a more fun AND effective way to do rote memorization.

I could see this working well with the periodic table of elements, too 🤔 but it’s probably even better with material that is more narrative, like history. How many people have learned about early U.S. history from Hamilton?

🎹🎸 I’m still playing guitar almost every day, slowly improving and having fun.

I enjoyed this video of Nahre Sol, a classically trained pianist and composer, trying to learn guitar for the first time, documenting 30 days of her initial learning curve:

Hopefully, it inspires you to pick up an instrument! It’s so much fun, even if you suck at it like I do.

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🏦 💰 Business & Investing 💳 💴

🗣️ Interview: David Thomas on Fairfax Financial Holdings 📘

Fairfax is one of the first companies I ever studied.

I first got into investing by learning about low-cost, passive index investing via John Bogle and his disciples. Then I read a biography of Warren Buffett, and it resonated deeply with me, so I started studying Berkshire Hathaway and all the companies that Buffett had ever invested in.

Then I started looking at “mini-Berkshires”, which at the time were companies like Leucadia, Markel, Loews… and of course, Fairfax.

In my early investing days, I found the Corner of Berkshire & Fairfax forum and read thousands of posts from the archives, which was a great learning experience. In 2012, I went to the Fairfax AGM in Toronto and met a bunch of internet friends in person for the first time. A few of us hung out in a bar, and part of the Hamblin Watsa investment team joined us and talked to maybe a dozen of us for a while (I remember that Brian Bradstreet and Francis Chou were there).

I haven’t followed the company closely the whole time, and lost track of them for a few years when they were making big bearish macro bets and investing in lower quality businesses, which didn’t quite fit with my style. But I was happy to see them evolve into a higher quality operational business in the past few years, and upgrade their portfolio while staying true to the spirit of their style.

I’m looking forward to reading The Fairfax Way 📕 by David, and I enjoyed Andrew Walker’s interview. If you’re curious about Fairfax, this is a good primer on their history and model.

🚫🔌 Is America’s AI Power Bottleneck Overstated? 🤔

Everyone seems to agree that power is the gating factor on AI progress for the next few years, and that the U.S. is at a disadvantage versus China when it comes to building new generation quickly.

So it’s refreshing to see a more nuanced take on this: