Om Malik

Om Malik is a San Francisco based writer, photographer and investor. Read More

A December Note

 

How did it get so late so soon? 
It’s night before it’s afternoon. 
December is here before it’s June. 
My goodness how the time has flown. 
How did it get so late so soon?
– Dr. Seuss

It has been a few weeks since I sent one of these updates. I thought I would write one last month. Like all writers, I, too, have developed a penchant for procrastination. It is a deadly affliction, especially if your think in words and write to bring order to your inner self. So this morning, when a 4.0 Earthquake woke me up, I knew I couldn’t go back to sleep, and I took it as a cue to sit down and write this quick note. 

Over the past few weeks, I have been busy playing with new technologies and jotting down ideas for future (longer) pieces. It is a much better use of time and a good

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A Letter From Om
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Will ChatGPT kill search & software + a few good reads

Short-selling giant Jim Chanos in a Twitter Spaces conversation, had some choice words for Silicon Valley investors when it comes to due-diligence failings, as demonstrated by the FTX blowup shows. 

“Look at the texts that were released in conjunction with people wanting to invest in Elon’s Twitter deal. You know, ‘I’ll send you a couple billion dollars in effect, no due diligence necessary.’ This is the ultimate FOMO [fear of missing out] type market, and people are investing in personalities, not businesses.”

Silicon Valley does indeed do a poor job of diligence, and deal fever trumps everything. 

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Will ChatGPT upend Google and the ad-based search model? 

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If you can put the shiny new toy aspect of ChatGPT aside and take a bigger picture, the impact of these new prompts on software programming will be very profound, as Ankur and Alana Goyal outline.

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Seed Money: Michael Goguen (yes,

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My Reading Picks
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Sometimes an ATV isn’t an ATV

Cake kibb 7

Cake, a company known for making electric bikes, just announced The Kibb is an all-electric ATV.

“The modular body of the Kibb will have different attachment points to allow for compatibility with a wide variety of ATV accessories. The Kibb will be a multifunctional battery-powered ATV capable of operating with or without a human driver,” the company announced. The Kibb electric quad was conceptualized by Fanny Jonsson, a Swedish transportation designer from the Umeå Institute of Design. Jonsson who interned with CAKE.

Now that is a very cool-looking vehicle and proof that modern design can be applied to improve even the most basic of things.

Technology
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The (Positive) Energy of Fusion

We live in stranger times, when the day there is good news is now a red letter day. Today happens to be one of those days. I woke up to the news that a very close friend had a healthy baby boy. What a delight it is to be an uncle again. A few minutes later, I learned about the pending arrest and extradition of a con man and sociopath, Sam Bankman-Fried. And to cap it all, the Laurence Livermore Laboratory announced that it had achieved a breakthrough that makes fusion energy a reality. 

On Dec. 5, a team at LLNL’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) conducted the first controlled fusion experiment in history to reach this milestone, also known as scientific energy breakeven, meaning it produced more energy from fusion than the laser energy used to drive it. 

LLNL’s experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to

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Technology
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Bully doing bullying

Watching Musk torment Fauci is a warning to all of us. Never mind why he’s doing it, it doesn’t matter. What matters is he’s doing it. Organizing insurrection aimed at random individuals and their families. When it’s your turn, there’s nowhere to run. Keep your head down little citizen. It doesn’t matter if you’re Speaker Pelosi or a highly respected medical man. He’s the man with all the power, you could be next.

Dave Winer on King Elon

Let’s file this in the “the told you so” file. If you are a regular reader, then you might remember I wrote about why Musk would want to buy Twitter. It gives him a bully pulpit. “He needs his bully pulpit to have enough people believe in his way of thinking so that hundreds of millions flow into his projects and thus enable his vision of the future,” I wrote. “It seems

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Technology
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Why Context Matters

Daily Show with Trevor Noah

I have always enjoyed Trevor Noah, who hosted “The Daily Show,” a faux news show originally made famous by Jon Stewart. About seven years ago, Noah, a South African comic took over from Stewart. He and brought an outsider’s viewpoint to this quintissential American socio-politican and cultural show. He wasn’t always liked or appreciated. However, an outsider who grew up in a world of grays, I respected Noah’s erudite approach to humor and the human condition. Noah ended his seven year run yesterday. And in his parting commentary, he said something that I feel needs worth amplifying – context matters.

Never forget how much context matters. I feel like we live in an age of limitless information right now. But we never seem to acknowledge that there’s a shortage of context. We don’t realize that we have a lot of information but we don’t have the context that is so necessary

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Musings
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Winter is coming

It is winter, or as I like to say: the season for me to take photos. I am already dreaming of visits to Alaska and Wyoming, along with short stops in Idaho and Montana. One of the favorite things to snap during winter: “powerlines.” I don’t know why, but I love the networks, cables, and symmetry of power/telegraph poles. Here are two photos from Wyoming from a few years ago.

December 8, 2022. San Francsico

On Photography
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Disney Minus

It is no secret that I am a big fan of BBC/National Geographic’s reality TV show, Life Below Zero. It is now in its twentieth season. As someone who didn’t have a cable television account, I used to buy the season from Apple’s iTunes store. I paid for the first fourteen seasons. I didn’t mind because it is a guilty pleasure and allows me to get my “Alaska fix.” 

However, things have become harder since it is no longer feasible to buy the “season passes” or watch the most recent episodes. You can buy one season at a time, and even then, you can’t watch the 19th or the 20th season. Frustrated, I decided to sign-up for Disney+ with Hulu (without Ads) and ESPN+. I canceled my ESPN+ account and signed up for the whole enchilada. Given that one of the perks of my American Express credit card is a

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Technology
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Goodbye Spotify

Way back In 1935, genius musician Duke Ellington in an effort to placate two ladies, placed each of them on two sides of his piano, he composed and played a song — In a Sentimental Mood. Such is the magic of the song that nine decades later I can’t stop listening to it — in fact, it was the second most listened to song on my list of the 2,492 songs I listened to on Spotify in 2022, according to their annual musical data story — Wrapped 2022.

There are quite a few nuggets from the story — that are kind cool and amazing to be made aware of — for instance, the artist I listened to the most in 2022 is Eric Hilton, the one half of Thievery Corporation, which has been my most listened to bands for a few years. I guess, I know what I like. In

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Technology
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