Alka Ram

[Tara Viswanathan @TaraViswanathan]

When we were starting Rupa, we hired a girl just out of college to do operations work for us.

Shortly after we hired her, her dad messaged me on LinkedIn saying how excited his daughter was about Rupa.

Very few teammates dads did this so it stood out. 😂

Over the years he would message me telling me how grateful he was that his daughter had found Rupa and how much she loved it.

This girl was a rockstar and grew into a lead on our operations team. Every now and then I would text her dad telling him how amazing she was and how lucky we were to have her.

The other day I got a message saying he was going to be in SF and wanted to finally meet the person who made such an impact on his daughter.

It felt obvious to say yes and make it work.

Anyway, we got coffee the other day and it was one of the best, unexpectedly inspiring, mornings I’ve had.

He (a German immigrant) was in town to show his 81 year old mentor and friend (the person who gave him his first job as a kid in Germany) Yosemite. It was one of his mentor’s lifelong goals to see it.

They stopped in sf to grab coffee with me before exploring Yosemite on their own.

Legends.

Turns out, he wasn’t just “my teammate’s dad from Michigan”. He had actually risked it all on his own startup, bootstrapping a data center and cloud services company in the 2000s and having a very successful run for 20+ years (still going today though he exited it).

He and his 81 year old mentor (who turns out is a business legend in Germany) spent 2 hours giving me life advice on work and family and risk taking.

An unexpectedly wonderful morning.

Anyway, I stand by the fact that one of the best gifts of startups are the people you get to meet along the way.

Including your teammate’s dads and their mentors.

[alterego @alterego_io]

Introducing Alterego: the world’s first near-telepathic wearable that enables silent communication at the speed of thought.

Alterego makes AI an extension of the human mind.

We’ve made several breakthroughs since our work started at MIT.

We’re announcing those today.

[Adam Grant @AdamMGrant]

Taking phones off the internet boosts mental health.

People were randomly assigned to block mobile internet for 2 weeks. They socialized, exercised, and read more—and became happier, less depressed & anxious, and more focused.

Being unglued from devices is good for well-being.

[Blake Scholl 🛫 @bscholl]

Boom! We cracked it! Today we are introducing Boomless Cruise—supersonic flights up to 50% faster with no audible sonic boom.

We quietly (har har) demo'd this on XB-1's first supersonic flight—three times actually. 🧵👇

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

New randomized, controlled trial of students using GPT-4 as a tutor in Nigeria. 6 weeks of after-school AI tutoring = 2 years of typical learning gains, outperforming 80% of other educational interventions.

And it helped all students, especially girls who were initially behind

[NASA @NASA]

Tonight (Aug. 19) through Wednesday, look up to see a full moon that is both:

A supermoon—when the Moon is within 90% of its closest approach to Earth
A blue moon—which doesn't necessarily mean the Moon will look blue.

What *does* it mean? Read on: https://t.co/ByNDVSbRr0

[Jim Fan @DrJimFan]

We trained a robot dog to balance and walk on top of a yoga ball purely in simulation, and then transfer zero-shot to the real world. No fine-tuning. Just works.

I’m excited to announce DrEureka, an LLM agent that writes code to train robot skills in simulation, and writes more code to bridge the difficult simulation-reality gap. It fully automates the pipeline from new skill learning to real-world deployment.

The Yoga ball task is particularly hard because it is not possible to accurately simulate the bouncy ball surface. Yet DrEureka has no trouble searching over a vast space of sim-to-real configurations, and enables the dog to steer the ball on various terrains, even walking sideways!

Traditionally, the sim-to-real transfer is achieved by domain randomization, a tedious process that requires expert human roboticists to stare at every parameter and adjust by hand. Frontier LLMs like GPT-4 have tons of built-in physical intuition for friction, damping, stiffness, gravity, etc. We are (mildly) surprised to find that DrEureka can tune these parameters competently and explain its reasoning well.

DrEureka builds on our prior work Eureka, the algorithm that teaches a 5-finger robot hand to do pen spinning. It takes one step further on our quest to automate the entire robot learning pipeline by an AI agent system. One model that outputs strings will supervise another model that outputs torque control.

We open-source everything! Welcome you all to check out the paper, more videos, and try the codebase today: https://t.co/RwiBT3z78H
Code: https://t.co/ERp4Gl0N36

[James Clear @JamesClear]

I'm searching for beautiful and compelling descriptions about family life, relationships, friendship, parenting, love, etc.

What is one quote or passage that comes to mind?

[edutopia @edutopia]

Why do students forget—and what can you do about it?

Our brains are wired to forget, but there are research-backed strategies you can use to make your teaching stick.

🧵Thread adapted from this article: https://t.co/U057s7Y3JB

1/10

[edutopia @edutopia]

We visited 5 schools around the world that make play central to their pedagogy. 🌍

Discover our new series on the incredible—and sometimes surprising—benefits of play-based learning, with @LEGOFoundation. #MakingLearningMorePlayful
https://t.co/h0PGmZOcKQ

[Brent Beshore @BrentBeshore]

Why do most marriages end up in divorce or cold war? Why do most businesses die from suicide and not homicide? Why do we struggle to form and maintain life-long friendships? Why has there been a dramatic rise in anxiety, depression, and deaths of despair?

Alain de Botton explains:

[Naomi Fisher @naomicfisher]

Imagine a world where we said, what’s going on with the children? So many of them are angry and distressed after school. So many of them are shut in their bedrooms. So many of them are anxious and unhappy. So many of them disillusioned at 15. 1;

[In the Bubble @inthebubblepod]

Scientist @EricTopol explains why some people are getting reinfected with COVID repeatedly while others have yet to contract it once. Join @ASlavitt here: https://t.co/AJveHOMl4L

[Kimberly Prather, Ph.D. @kprather88]

I am privileged to be in position to make life choices that have led to me not getting infected with COVID-19 or the flu. I appreciate this option to make choices that I realize most people do not have. This is why I am fighting so hard for cleaner indoor air for all. (1/4)

[Dr. Deepti Gurdasani @dgurdasani1]

So tired of all the privileged abelism among so many (including scientists) during the pandemic. Just because you haven't been personally impacted doesn't mean others haven't. Consider that your experience is very different from others who don't enjoy the privileges you do. 🧵

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

You’ve been told that money is the only type of wealth.

This is a lie.

The 5 types of wealth you MUST understand: