Favorites November 22nd 2022

Mado Restaurant, Toronto, March 2022

Reuters @Reuters

Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC is planning to produce chips with advanced 3-nanometer technology at its new $12 billion factory in Arizona, but the plans are not completely finalized yet reut.rs/3AwTtVN

I believe 3 nanometer is a leading edge node, so that's definitely good news

Kevin Kelly @kevin2kelly

News to me: The emerging megacity along Africa's west coast. "By 2100, the Lagos-Abidjan stretch is projected to be the largest zone of continuous, dense habitation on earth, with something in the order of half a billion people." theguardian.com/world/2022/oct…

First of all, that's amazing, but also, wild that it'll stretch through 5 countries!

Caleb Watney @calebwatney

A chart to keep in mind this week as your relatives bring up their political views ☕️

By the way, this is probably undercounting the pre-genX lead exposure.

Alec Stapp @AlecStapp

Let's check in on how the Zero COVID policy is going in China...

Oh dear... maybe they should finally go ahead and use mRNA vaccines?

Threads

• Thread describing details of CICERO, an AI developed to play the board game Diplomacy. It ranked among the top 10% of players over 40 games, where players used a chat interface to communicate. And the whole time, none of the players knew they were playing against an AI. Very impressive, although if you look at it differently, we're training an AI to take over the world. Or, less jokey, we've trained an AI to convince humans to act against their own interest via text message.

• Short thread about a new paper showing that over the last 10 years Private Equity buyouts no longer result in long-term productivity improvements at target firms. TL;DR: they think it's because pension funds have gotten into the game and aren't careful enough.