Rami’s Readings

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Rami's Readings #13

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Rami's Readings #13

SVB, Banking Turmoil, ChatGPT Plugins, RIP DPReview and Gordon Moore, 早安, 打工人, SuperPigs, AI Papers, and more.

Rami Sayar
Mar 26, 2023
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Rami's Readings #13

readings.ramisayar.com

Welcome to Rami’s Readings #13 - a weekly digest of interesting articles, videos, Twitter threads from my various sources across the Internet. Expect a list of reads covering technology, business, culture, fashion, travel and more. Learn about what I do at ramisayar.com/about.


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💼 Business Reads - Follow up on SVB

It is time to do a short follow-up on the banking industry. As I said in #11, the contagion risk is not zero. Unfortunately, we are in for further turmoil. Credit Suisse was on the brink before its “acquisition” by UBS. First Republic is not out of the woods yet. Alex Tabarrok and Matt Levine rightly point out a speed mismatch between depositors and traders panicking and regulators coming in to keep calm or shore up a bank. Deutsche Bank credit default swaps rose on Friday - not good. We are living with information moving at Internet speed, and it feels like neither the banking industry nor regulators have adapted to this speed. 

Molly White
wrote a fantastic newsletter about VCs and SVB. Read it.

Rest of World covered the impacts of the SVB collapse on startups outside the US. I highly recommend the read. Immigrant founders already have a hard time opening bank accounts and lines of credit in the US. It is practically only possible to move your money in time if you are physically in the US while your bank collapses. I challenge any of you to open a bank account online within a day, even with a social security number. Case in point, I recently tried to open a checking account with Wells Fargo as a test, and I never got past the application pending status… two weeks went by, no update. To make matters worse, I already have a credit card with them (admittedly not out of choice), so I need help understanding how. Imagine you are in a different time zone without a valid US ID, and your money is in SVB. Non-US founders faced these exact dire circumstances. Horrible.

On a side note, I mentioned in #11 that I have multiple bank accounts to protect my cash assets while still being accessible through retail banking. A reader asked me, what about my stock portfolio? Brokerage accounts benefit from a similar coverage to FDIC, called SIPC. SIPC covers up to $500k in investable assets, but your brokerage may already insure your assets to a higher amount. My brokerage of choice (Fidelity) purchases additional insurance from Lloyd’s of London such that there is no customer dollar limit on the coverage of securities. I am not worried.

Amazon Layoffs Will Shut Down Camera Review Site DPReview After 25 Years

Notes: As an amateur photographer, I am disappointed by Amazon. DPReview is my go-to for the latest camera news and reviews. Their attention to detail and extensive analysis is something that I will dearly miss.

One unexpected casualty: Digital Photography Review, also known as DPReview, is losing its entire editorial staff, and the site will stop publishing on April 10. Founded in November 1998, DPReview is one of the few active review sites as old as Ars Technica.

How Erdogan got back in the money

Notes: Still too early.

Also… from Berlin:

Twitter avatar for @Schuldensuehner
Holger Zschaepitz @Schuldensuehner
Good Morning from Germany, where China is losing importance as export destination. In Feb, exports to China slumped by 12.4%, while exports to US rose 19%. This means that US is by far the most important export market, France is also establishing itself as #2, far ahead of China.
Image
7:39 AM ∙ Mar 21, 2023
2,132Likes604Retweets

🎨 Culture Reads

Intel Co-Founder and Semiconductor Titan Gordon Moore Dies at 94

Notes: Rest in peace, Gordon Moore 🫶. We owe most of the technology industry to Moore. Moore’s law is named after him.

9 viral phrases that explain China’s work culture

Notes: 早安, 打工人 reminds me of a colleague of mine who described our job as “code farmer”. Not wrong.

Freddie deBoer
on Why So Many Elites Feel Like Losers

Travel philosophies for the well-traveled

Notes: #4 is 🔑

These Graphics Show Just How Bad Canada’s Invasive “Super Pig” Problem Really Is

Notes: What is happening 🇨🇦?

Reading the mind in the nose

Notes: Noses really are under appreciated. New paper.

We propose the nose as central to faces and their perception [as eyes and mouths].

🤖 AI Reads - AI Papers Dropping All Week 🔥

First, Snoooooop Dogg! I can’t believe this is > 18 years old now.

Artificial muses: Generative Artificial Intelligence Chatbots Have Risen to Human-Level Creativity

Our findings suggest that GAIs are valuable assistants in the creative process.

Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4

Notes: A bit too close to this one. Per disclaimer, I will not discuss.

GPTs are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of Large Language Models

Notes: A good summary on Twitter.

The Big Non-Microsoft News of the Week 😉 ChatGPT plugins!

Twitter avatar for @thealexbanks
Alex Banks @thealexbanks
OpenAI released plugins for ChatGPT. It will change the future of humanity. Here's how they work and why this is so important:
Image
1:30 PM ∙ Mar 25, 2023
3,481Likes561Retweets

Yet another AI tools roundup - this time for innovation tools

EleutherAI had a few releases this week

It is too early to tell but hard to argue against. AI + Low-Code, No-Code → Productivity 📈

Will invest in AI solutions for elderly loneliness:

Vertigo
Little gods for older people
“Yes, there is joy, fulfilment, and companionship, but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.” — Sylvia Plath “The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.” — Michel de Montaigne…
Read more
2 months ago · 5 likes · Hector Alexander

Prismer: A Vision-Language Model with An Ensemble of Experts

Twitter avatar for @DrJimFan
Jim Fan @DrJimFan
After ChatGPT, the future belongs to multimodal LLMs. What’s even better? Open-sourcing. Announcing Prismer, my team’s latest vision-language AI, empowered by domain-expert models in depth, surface normal, segmentation, etc. No paywall. No forms. shikun.io/projects/prism…… https://t.co/PYHEHzB5ZL
Image
6:56 PM ∙ Mar 7, 2023
3,715Likes745Retweets

That is all for this week. Hope you enjoyed the newsletter!


I wrote a disclosure for this newsletter in #7. Please consider reading it.


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