Week 1164

Justin and I spent more time this week playing around with image models and deployed a toy project to ghiblify.com. It takes an input image and regenerates it in the style of Studio Ghibli. If you go to the site right now, your first generation likely won’t work because the GPU is cold starting. Just refresh and the generations should take 3-5 seconds once the GPU is ready (takes about a minute). Or just watch the demo here.

My younger brother flew back home after his first semester at MIT. I was quite proud to hear his reflections and see how much he’s grown in the past few months. Sometimes I wonder how much my advice actually helps him. I’m biased in ways that may be harmful for him and the only unbiased advice I can give is a reminder to prioritize his health and relationships. I could do better at listening to my own advice too, but alas.

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Content:

The Founders by Jimmy Soni

• I finally finished the book after procrastinating on Part 3 for so long. It was fun to read about all the chaotic stories and anecdotes that came out of the early PayPal years (from founding in 1998 to eBay acquisition in 2002). The IPO process was particularly interesting — I learned how companies usually face an uptick in lawsuits before they go public because they’re likely to just settle instead of spending their limited resources to fight the lawsuit.

The importance of stupidity in scientific research by Martin A. Schwartz

• Be comfortable with feeling stupid. You should pursue things that make you feel stupid because that means you are learning. If you are exploring a novel research problem, you will feel stupid because you won’t know what’s the correct thing to do. But that is the beauty of doing research — nobody else knows either so it’s up to you to figure out the correct solutions.

The Secret History of Silicon Valley by Steve Blank

• Silicon Valley was initially started as a military R&D center during WWII and the Cold War. The government funded Stanford’s research labs and was the primary customer for the early SV companies that spun out of these labs. The two fathers of Silicon Valley, William Shockley and Frederick Terman, both had extensive military R&D backgrounds. Shockley was the co-inventor of the transistor and started the famous Shockley Semiconductor. Terman served as the Provost at Stanford and went against the status quo to encourage his graduate students to start their own companies, famously mentoring Bill Hewlett and David Packard. As the wars ended and investor friendly regulations were enacted, Silicon Valley shifted from a government funded crisis driven model to the current VC funded profit driven model.