Thao Trang Nguyen

After being away for a while, now Interesting stuffs is back. Exciting things I learned and read during the week (12 Sept – 16 Sept):

1. We Need to Talk About How Good A.I. Is Getting

“What’s impressive about DALL-E 2 isn’t just the art it generates. It’s how it generates art. These aren’t composites made out of existing internet images — they’re wholly new creations made through a complex A.I. process known as “diffusion,” which starts with a random series of pixels and refines it repeatedly until it matches a given text description. And it’s improving quickly — DALL-E 2’s images are four times as detailed as the images generated by the original DALL-E, which was introduced only last year.”

Exciting things I learned and read during the week (12 Feb – 18 Feb) beside my current hard workload of PhD:

1. Artificial intelligence challenges what it means to be creative

“When British artist Harold Cohen met his first computer in 1968, he wondered if the machine might help solve a mystery that had long puzzled him: How can we look at a drawing, a few little scribbles, and see a face? Five years later, he devised a robotic artist called AARON to explore this idea. He equipped it with basic rules for painting and for how body parts are represented in portraiture — and then set it loose making art.”

Exciting things I learned and read during the week (5 Feb – 11 Feb) beside my current hard workload of PhD:

1.What the Big Mac index says about the dollar and the dong

“McDonald’s hamburger cost just $1.60 in America. Now it costs $5.65”

“In Vietnam, for example, the burger costs 69,000 dong. You can buy 69,000 dong for only $3 on the foreign-exchange market. And so a Big Mac in Vietnam works out to be 47% cheaper than in America.”

“The fact that you can buy a burger’s worth of dong for 47% less than a burger’s worth of dollars suggests the dong is undervalued.”

“Countries that might be keeping their currencies artificially cheap to boost exports and steal a competitive edge.”

Exciting things I learned and read during the week (29 Jan – 3 Feb) beside my current hard workload of PhD:

1/ Book Review: The Right Price

“Are high drug prices a good thing?

High prices for brand-name drugs–rather than reflecting a policy flaw or “bug” in the system–is an expected and even intentional outcome. Monopolistic pricing is a system “feature,” designed to incentivize companies to invest in expensive and risky drug discovery by providing the prospect of a big payoff.”

2/Special Report: Green Jobs Have a Nice Future … But Fossil Fuel Work Will Persist

“It will take decades for the vast fleets of petroleum-powered aircraft, automobiles, and trucks to be replaced by electric vehicles (EVs) or other non-carbon-oriented propulsion systems.”

Exciting things I learned and read during the week (22 Jan – 28 Jan) beside my current hard workload of PhD:

1. AI armed with multiple senses could gain more flexible intelligence

Deep-learning algorithms, in other words, are masters at picking up patterns, but they cannot understand and adapt to a changing world.

Children learn about the world by sensing and talking about it. As kids begin to associate words with sights, sounds, and other sensory information, they are able to describe more and more complicated phenomena and dynamics, tease apart what is causal from what reflects only correlation, and construct a sophisticated model of the world.