The week that was
November 20, 2022
Hi everyone,
I’ve been wearily eyeing the dumpster fire over on Twitter and putting the pieces in place to jump ship if necessary. I requested an archive of my tweets (which go all the way back to 2006) then added a profile on Mastodon so people can follow me there (if you’re curious on the how & why, here’s my post).
This email is the next step. Instead of using Twitter’s newsletter platform Revue, I’ve moved the list over to Substack which is why this week’s email is from there. Tell your friends and, as always, TWTW can always be found on my site at everwas.com.
Onto the highlights of the week prior.
Jeff Bezos, founder and former CEO of Amazon, announced that he plans to give away most of his fortune. Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and former CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, lost 94 percent of his net worth in a single day. If you need a refresher on what happened at FTX, this 90-second Tik-Tok is all you need.
Steve Jobs’ worn out Birkenstock sandals sold for $218,000 at an auction.
The head of Amazon’s hardware division, Mr. Limp, announced business was softening so there would be layoffs.
San Francisco opened up its long awaited Central Subway line that will take you from the 4th Street CalTrain terminal straight up to the Moscone Center, Market Street and all the way into Chinatown. The project kicked off in 2010 and was four years behind schedule.
The global population ticked over to 8 billion souls this past week. The last billion were born in the last eleven years, the same time it took to build SF’s Central Subway line.
Tens of thousands of weasels were liberated from a fur farm in Ohio.
Researchers at the University of Tokyo discovered that when you play Lady Gaga, lab rats will bop their heads to the beat with an “innate ability to groove.”
Meta mothballed its large-scale AI model after just three days in the wild as it had trouble distinguishing between fact and fiction. Galactica was trained on 48 million scientific papers and was supposed to “summarize academic papers, solve math problems, generate Wiki articles, write scientific code, annotate molecules and proteins, and more.” Instead it was used to write convincingly about Space Bears and other “hallucinations.”
Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of The Play which put the UC Berkeley Bears over their rival Stanford in what was “The most amazing, sensational, dramatic, heartrending, exciting, thrilling finish in the history of college football.” More on the backstory of Joe Starkey’s famous narration and, yes, Cal beat Stanford yesterday as well in the 125th playing of The Big Game.