1. My First Impressions of Web3 by Moxie Marlinspike. Marlinspike, a cryptographer and computer-security guy as well as the inventor of the Signal app, highlights the shortcomings of the current Web3. “MetaMask needs to interact with the blockchain, but the blockchain has been built such that clients like MetaMask can’t interact with it. So like my dApp, MetaMask accomplishes this by making API calls to three companies that have consolidated in this space.”
  2. Print Books Had a Huge Sales Year in 2021 by Jim Millot at Publisher’s Weekly. One night I was discussing the fate of book sales with a friend, and mere hours later I found the answer in a newsletter: Print books had a massive 2021, selling more than 825 million copies in the US, up 7.9%. In 2020, unit sales were up 8.2% over 2019, which saw 693.7 million print units sold.
  3. Stanford Neuromodulation Therapy (SNT): A Double-Blind Randomized Controlled Trial by Cole et al. (2021). Twenty-nine people with treatment-resistant depression participated in the study: About half received SAINT (an intensive, individualized form of transcranial magnetic stimulation), and the rest underwent a placebo procedure that mimicked the real treatment. After five days of treatment, 78.6% of the participants in the treatment group were no longer depressed. Within four weeks of treatment, 12 of the 14 treated participants and 11 of those met FDA criteria for remission.
  4. Gut Microbe Linked to Depression in Large Health Study by Elizabeth Pennisi for Science. Further evidence that inflammation caused by gut microbes can influence mood — in particular the bacteria Morganella and Klebsiella seem to play a role in depression. However, treatment strategies are yet to be developed.
  5. Go-to-Market in Web3: New Mindsets, Tactics, Metrics by Maggie Hsu at A16Z. Hsu argues that Web3 will require it’s own go to market model, based on the two pillars of purpose and community. “What allows for long-term success in web3 is clear purpose, having an engaged and high-quality community, and matching the right organizational governance to that purpose and community.”
  6. Researchers Build AI That Builds AI by Anil Ananthaswamy at Quanta Magazine. A new way of training deep neural networks — using hypernetworks – is set to make AI more accessible to people without massive budgets and less access to big data.
  7. The Simulated World According to David Chalmers by Dan Falk for Nautilus. As part of his press run for his new book Reality+ Chalmers talks about the likelihood of virtual worlds and what this implies for our sense of purpose and meaning. “Maybe there doesn’t need to be a base reality. Maybe there can just be an infinite hierarchy of universes within universes, within universes. And then, yeah, turtles all the way down. Simulations all the way up.”