TL; DR - This week I touch on how and why to create a successful podcast; more about the current state of the economy and what many ‘experts’ think comes next; housing prices still at historic highs despite month over month decline; technology industry pioneer, Gordon Moore sadly passes away; NVIDIA finds a way to increase one step of the chipmaking process by 40x; a startup focuses on applying GPT to numbers, not text and images like OpenAI; computer scientist explores ways humans could theoretically hack our way out of this reality – assuming we are in a Simulation.
The Itinerant Weekly is available on Diamond, Mirror.xyz, Medium and now Paragraph.xyz, and at www.theitinerant.io.
A16z [Video] – The Art and Science of Podcasting with Sriram and Aarthi
Lots of nuggets of gold in this ~60 minute conversation with Andreessen Horowitz General partner about how (and more importantly, why) to start a successful podcast
Multiple [Articles] – Recession Guarantees; Gundlach predicts recession within next four months; Job market may be weaker than numbers suggest; Banks sprint to borrow; Funds move to cash
Spread between current yield on three-month Treasury bills and expected yield in 18 months is inverted by a record 135 bps – more than the previous record set in January 2001, two months before the full recession began. Billionaire bond traders also draw attention to ‘red alert recession signals’. The job market may not be as strong as it appears, with many postings proving to be ‘fake’, and new postings fallen 11% in Q1`. Banks borrow $164.8B from the Fed – prior ATH was $111B during the 2008 financial crisis.
Sentiment amongst fund managers is at a 20-year low, with half expecting a weaker economy in the next 12 months, up from 35% last month; many move to cash as economic fears rise. Many investors still believe a 2008-type crisis will be avoided.
Multiple [Articles] – Home prices start to decline; but housing unaffordability still at historic rates
Sales of previously owned homes up 14.5% in Feb., over Jan; some are hopeful the housing market reached its peak low at the end of 2022. Yet U.S. housing is now relatively more expensive (measured by home price : median income) than they were at the 2005 peak of the last housing bubble, suggesting there’s still a ways to go.
VentureBeat [Article] – The passing of Gordon Moore
The world lost one of the pioneers of the semiconductor industry, Gordon Moore. Moore founded Intel, and is known for formulating ‘Moore’s Law’ which accurately predicted that the number of components on a computer chip would double every few years.
Nvidia [Video] – Keynote by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang | GTC 2023 | NVIDIA
Nvidia has found a way to increase a step in the chipmaking process by 40x through a process called ‘inverse lithography’
VentureBeat [Article] – While OpenAI has been working on text and images, iGenius has been working on GPT for numbers
OpenAI built the GPT for text, iGenius built the GPT for numbers.
Popular Mechanics [Article] – How Humans Can Escape the Simulation, According to Scientists
The idea that humans possibly live in a simulation is a surprisingly old one. French philosopher René Descartes tossed around the idea back in the 17th century, but the idea really captured the science community when Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom wrote an influential article on the possibility of a simulated reality back in 2003. Bostrom put the odds of us living inside some super-advanced alien computer at about 20 percent. A computer scientist at the University of Louisville explores ways that humans could try to hack our way out of this reality and enter the baseline reality.