Rami's Readings #28

The latest on Threads, LLMs, Stanford, France, Japan, Harvard, Dim Sum, India Lettering, and more.

Jul 09, 2023

Welcome to Rami’s Readings #28 - 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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Vacation Notice: Today’s newsletter is the last one until August 20th. Have a great summer!

Threads! Facebook’s Twitter competitor launched earlier this week. I am on Threads with a public profile - feel free to follow me. You will notice no “tweets” because I haven’t decided what to do with my profile yet. Currently, the platform seems to prioritize existing celebrities, influencers, and popular accounts from Instagram. My Instagram has been private for a few years. I will wait and see how the algorithm evolves before investing time and energy. One exciting signal is how quickly my tech-inclined social network adopted threads. Reads to catch up on Threads: John Gruber from Daring Fireball, Alex Heath from The Verge, and Max Tani from Semafor.

🤖 AI Reads

hegelai/prompttools

Notes: Open-source tools for testing and experimenting with prompts.

Introducing NSQL: Open-source SQL Copilot Foundation Models

Notes: Not a Microsoft company or product despite the Copilot name. This company also recently raised venture funding from Madrona (Seattle-based VC firm).

How elite schools like Stanford became fixated on the AI apocalypse

Notes: Paywalled.

💼 Business Reads

France set to allow police to spy through phones

Notes: Good luck with that… I don’t see how they will be able to get Apple or any other Tech company to comply. Either way, it is a troubling development.

Harvard Legacy Admissions Targeted After Supreme Court Ruling on Affirmative Action

Notes: More lawsuits after SCOTUS’s affirmative action ruling. MIT is already on the right side:

Massachusetts Institute of Technology has had a longstanding policy against legacy admissions, only a handful of other selective colleges have adopted such practices, including Amherst College and Johns Hopkins University.