Etwas every week - Feb 23rd, 2024

I’m starting something new, a weekly newsletter that should not take too much time to write, but helps be form my writing habit. Every week 5 etwas. Etwas I'm thinking about and working on. Videos I'm watching. Podcast Episodes Im listening to. Articles I'm reading. That's it.

1. The best beer: I discovered Athletic Brewing and its the first Non-Alcoholic (NA) Beer that I love. It’s the most popular NA in the states. They created an entirely new way to brew non-alcoholic beer, which makes it taste a lot better with a lot more flavorful profile and taste of traditional beer. The brewing process is still “patent-pending”, so it will be interesting to see how they actually do it. Since it’s not available in Austria, I ordered it from World of Nix, which offers a wide range of NA drinks. I have been trying to find someone in Austria, who would be interested in making one at scale. Hit me up if you know anyone.

2. Reasoning for everyone: Google released Gemini 1.5 which has a context window of 1 million tokens. We went from 4k token when ChatGPT launched to 1 Million in a bit more than a year. Why is that important? A lot of context in videos, science papers, codebases etc. have a lot of context, so the only way to go around the limited context window was to use RAG. Which is in practice ok, but hard to maintain and to work with. Now, with 1 Million tokens in context, the AI can reason a lot better and with no additional effort. This simplifies the architecture and gets also better results. It will be interesting to see though, if it makes sense in practice and how that impacts RAG. At least for now that means higher cost, since you are getting charged per token.

3. Creating oppurtunities for your kids: I’m a product of the early internet: I hated school. I was not interested in showing others that was I good at school. I failed my final exam. I failed every exam in computer science and english. Instead, I found something where I could go deep on something without asking for permission: The Computer + Internet + User-generated content (Tutorials) + Cracked Version of Adobe Photoshop Pro allowed me to choose what I want to learn, how and when. Good reminder for parents: School is not enough - via Daniel Debow

4. AI is a net positive for society: Sora was recently released and I was really annoyed by this comment on X. It always surprises me how short-sided people think about new technology. Don’t be fooled, prompting is a craft as much as taking a great photo. It will set the bar higher for content creation and replace at the same time many content creation processes that exist today. It will also create new creators and at the same time give creators new tools to work with. We will see a lot more shit content for sure, but it will also enable a lot of new creation with a lot fewer people. That is a net good for society.

5. Helldivers 2 is a great game: There are a bunch of server issues, but at its core its a really fun game. One of the things that I find always interesting is how games have totally different cultures. In Rainbow Six there there is a lot of hate in the game, not only in the chat, but primarily in the voice channel and team kills (on purpose). Although Helldivers 2 has also Voice, most people don’t talk to each other in random matches and are in general nice to each other.