Who stays. Who goes. The Microsoft 27% workforce cuts give an excellent guide for young people which sectors to focus on for future jobs. In - Cyber/Security - Sales / Marketing - Critical Core Network Eng - Datacenter Build Team Out - Xbox/Gaming - AI Product Application Layers - HR - Finance - Windows Gives a pretty good guide to what MSFT think they can automate with AI and which human roles are crucial in the future. Ie - your ability to communicate and persuade other humans is pretty high up there Internal admin functions aren’t.

A high school girl in Mexico just won a gold medal for putting out fires with a speaker. It plays one deep, low hum and the flames die in about 5 seconds. DARPA tried the same idea back in 2012 with a rig so big and clunky they never took it any further, and hers runs on a 12-volt battery and a speaker she can carry around. Sound is just air being pushed back and forth. A low note at 30 hertz means the air around the flame is flipping direction 30 times every second. Flames only exist in a thin layer where fuel vapor mixes with oxygen. Shake that layer hard enough and it keeps getting stretched thinner, the heat gets pulled away faster than the flame can make more, and eventually the flame rips right off the fuel. Whatever tears off is too cool to keep burning, so it just goes out. DARPA's report put a number on how little it takes. Once the air at the flame is moving about half a meter per second, which is barely a breeze, the flame goes out, and pretty much any pitch can get there if you crank the power high enough. Low notes just get you there way cheaper, because a speaker moves a lot more air on each push when the pitch is low. Two engineering students at George Mason figured this out by trial and error in 2015. They started with super high pitches, 20,000 to 30,000 hertz, and all the flames did was shiver. It only worked once they dropped down to 30 to 60 hertz, which is basically the bass on a hip-hop track. Ángela Karime's build is a 12-volt battery, a frequency generator, an amplifier and a speaker, tuned to 30 hertz. She named it Vortex Tech and talks about it shooting out little rings of air, and that's real physics. When loud, low sound gets pushed through a narrow opening, the air curls up into rings like a smoke ring, and those rings carry a puff of air way farther than the sound would get on its own. In her tests it put out small flames from about 2 meters away. She went through five prototypes and over 100 tests in about a year, and she says it's put out burning wood, flammable liquids, electronics and cooking oil. The cooking oil one is a big deal. Throw water on a grease fire and it flashes into steam and flings burning oil all over your kitchen, which is exactly the kind of fire where you'd want something that doesn't put anything into the pan. Now, sound can't cool anything down, so a big fire sitting on red-hot fuel can come right back the second the speaker shuts off. The George Mason guys worried about the same thing in 2015, and it's why this is still a prototype for small flames and the red extinguisher under your sink isn't going anywhere yet. Space might end up being where this matters first. Up there water floats off in blobs, while sound works the same with or without gravity, and acoustics researchers have already published experiments on fighting fires with sound on spacecraft. She's still in high school, and she's already working on a version that spots a fire and puts it out by itself. The gold in Indonesia also came with a special award that gets her into another international competition.

Hospitals using AI are seeing better healthcare outcomes. In 2023, health systems with high and low AI use had the same death rate: ~1,600 per 100,000 patients. By 2026, the systems using AI the most dropped to ~1,000 deaths per 100,000. That's a decline of nearly 40% in just 3 years. Meanwhile, hospitals with lower AI adoption have seen significantly smaller improvements. The gap in patient outcomes is widening as AI adoption accelerates. AI is rapidly transforming healthcare.

From 2011 - 2014, the Thiel Fellowship gave out 40 $100k fellowships to entrepreneurs That were all under 20 years old at the time... 13 unicorns have since been built by those 40 fellows 4 of those 40 fellows are also now billionaires Absolutely insane hit rate

Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, says AI should one day be priced by the value it creates: a few cents for telling someone to restart their Mac, maybe tens of millions for telling a drug company to move an aromatic ring to the other end of a molecule. I understand the wish. I don't think the market will grant it. I started in telecom in the 90s. Nobody ever paid us what a phone call was worth to them. The call that closed a deal and the call to say happy birthday cost the same, and the price was set by the next carrier willing to carry it for less. AI is heading the same way. On Saturday Torsten Slok, the chief economist at Apollo, wrote that outside the big tech companies, corporate America is starting to treat token spending as a cost center that weighs on margins. Apollo also notes that demand is so price sensitive that it switches to cheap open-source models when prices go up even modestly. The tens of millions from the better molecule go to whoever owns the molecule. If AI labs want to be paid for value, they will have to own the outcome: discover the drug, run the trial, hold the patent. That is why Isomorphic Labs, the drug discovery company Alphabet spun out of DeepMind, matters more than any pricing page. Selling intelligence is becoming a commodity business. Owning what intelligence discovers is not.

The biggest mistake tourists make in Japan is dragging a fifty-pound suitcase up and down subway stairs. Watch how Japanese travelers board the bullet train. They walk on with a cup of green tea, a small shoulder bag, and both hands free. Where is their luggage? It is already in the next city, waiting for them. In Japan, the system is called Takkyubin, recognizable everywhere by a logo of a mother black cat carrying her kitten gently in her mouth. When you check out of your hotel in Tokyo at eight in the morning, you hand your heavy suitcase to the front desk, fill out a tiny slip, and pay about twenty dollars. You can even send it straight from the corner convenience store. Then you spend the entire day wandering through mountain temples or eating street food with nothing on your back. When you walk into your traditional inn in Kyoto that evening, your suitcase is already standing neatly in your room, wiped clean, with the handle turned toward you. In fifty years of handling millions of bags a year, lost luggage is virtually unheard of. A society runs smoothly when you can hand your belongings to a stranger at a convenience store and know they will beat you to your hotel.