Original link: http://www.ruanyifeng.com/blog/2023/04/weekly-issue-252.html
Here is a record of the technology content worth sharing every week, released on Friday.
This journal is open source and contributions are welcome. The weekly magazine also has a service called “Who’s Recruiting” , which publishes programmer recruitment information. For cooperative promotion, please email ([email protected]).
cover picture
On April 24, the photographer “@Jeff的星空游” captured the aurora in Karamay, Xinjiang. On that day, a violent coronal mass ejection occurred on the sun, which triggered the largest geomagnetic storm on the earth in the past 20 years. ( via )
Topic of the Week: Internet Entrepreneurship Has Been Difficult
A foreigner found that after 2010, no new large Internet companies appeared in the United States.
It can be seen that the above giants were established very early. He came to a conclusion that Internet entrepreneurship after 2010 has no chance to become an industry giant.
I thought about it, and it seems that this is the case. I can’t think of any foreign Internet giant that was established in the past ten years.
So what about China? I went to check it out.
Most of the Chinese Internet giants were established no later than 2010, but there are three exceptions.
Among the three companies, the core business of Kuaishou and Byte is short video, and short video appeared after 2010. Therefore, Pinduoduo is probably the only new company that can grow bigger in the traditional Internet business.
So for China, the above conclusions are basically valid: After 2010, the opportunities for Internet entrepreneurship to grow bigger have decreased sharply.
why?
The foreigner explained that only companies established in the early days of the industry have the opportunity to become industry giants.
If you think about it, Microsoft and Apple were founded in the early days of the personal computer; Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent, and Ali were founded in the early days of the Internet.
The most recent entrepreneurial window was around 2007 to 2010, because the iPhone was released in 2007, and the era of mobile Internet came.
The initial stage of the birth of a new thing is when there are the most opportunities. Because there are no competitors, but the market is growing exponentially, you can attract a large number of users simply by making one thing. You can explore various directions, as long as one direction is right, you are the leader in that direction, and there are plenty of opportunities to make it bigger.
When the industry gradually matures and all directions are occupied by the pioneers, it will be difficult for the latecomers to grow bigger, mainly for the following reasons.
(1) The existing market is close to saturation, there are many participating companies and many competing products.
(2) The public is used to the Internet, and it is becoming increasingly difficult for new products to excite users.
(3) The technical threshold for starting a business is high, various costs have increased, and programmers have become very expensive, making it difficult for projects to make money so easily.
In short, it is not easy for latecomers to grab market share from the forerunners and replace them. After the difficulty of starting a business becomes more difficult, even for entrepreneurs who have succeeded in the early stage, many projects in the later stage have failed.
The status quo is that by 2023, Internet entrepreneurship will be as difficult as ordinary entrepreneurship , and there will not be so many opportunities. After all, there are fewer and fewer fields that have not been transformed by the Internet.
Emerging fields have the greatest opportunities. The hottest emerging field now is artificial intelligence. I boldly predict that the future artificial intelligence giants are likely to be established recently or will be established soon.
Technology dynamics
Last Thursday, the Starship spacecraft conducted its first orbital test.
With several rocket engines failing to ignite (below), it spun out of control a few minutes after launch and had to be ordered to explode.
Starship is currently the most powerful aircraft for human beings, with 33 rocket engines.
The reason why there are so many rocket engines is because it weighs 5,000 tons and needs enough thrust to lift off. No one has ever launched such a weight into the sky.
It consumes 120 tons of fuel (methane and liquid oxygen) per minute during the launch phase, which is equivalent to the weight of 51 African elephants. Imagine how many elephants there are in a bunker and you get an idea of how massive it is.
Although it exploded, it was its first orbital test, proving its ability to launch itself into orbit, so the test was largely a success. A second orbital test will be conducted soon, Musk said.
The lid of some plastic bottles is connected to the mouth of the bottle through a plastic ring, which will not break away from the bottle when unscrewed.
This kind of cap is called “tethered cap”, which is a special invention, which is beneficial to the recycling of plastic bottles and prevents caps from being discarded at will and polluting the environment.
The European Union has passed laws that will require one-piece caps on all plastic bottles from 2024. Although there is no such law in China, we should give priority to choosing this kind of bottle at ordinary times, and do not unscrew the conjoined part of the bottle cap.
3. Silent drone
Consumer drones are propelled by propellers, which can make a lot of noise, which can be heard from a long distance.
To solve this problem, an American start-up company invented the “silent drone”.
This drone flies extremely quietly because it has no propellers at all, but has two built-in electrodes that generate a high-voltage electric field that ionizes oxygen and nitrogen molecules in the air, turning them into ions. These ions are expelled downward, creating an “ionic wind” that propels the aircraft in flight.
This technology is already used in space, but not yet for drones. Its disadvantage is that it consumes a lot of power and requires a large battery. In recent years, battery technology has gradually matured, and it may become a reality.
Fireflies, some fish and algae glow at night because they have a protein in their bodies that releases photons when they consume oxygen. Since ancient times, people have been thinking about whether it is possible to use fireflies for lighting.
A French company has launched a fluorescent lamp, which is actually a bacterial culture container filled with a glowing bacterial culture. The bacteria fluoresce whenever they come into contact with air.
This fluorescent lamp is completely environmentally friendly, and all materials are biodegradable. The disadvantage is that the light emitted is very dim, less than one-tenth of the brightness of ordinary bulbs, and can only slightly illuminate the road at night, similar to ambient lights.
A town in France has begun to use this kind of lamp (the cyan lamp in the picture below) to create an “eco-luminous town”.
5. Mobile public toilets without maintenance
Public restrooms have been declining in major U.S. cities due to rising construction and maintenance costs. In 1940, there were 1,676 public toilets in the New York City subway, but today there are only 78, and there are only two public toilets open 24 hours in New York.
To solve this problem, an American start-up company has designed a cheap and easy-to-use mobile toilet.
Their goal is a toilet that can be kept hygienic with a minimum of human maintenance, while still being low enough cost.
At present, more than 160 of their single-person public toilets have been sold in the United States and Canada, and they are open 24 hours a day. Sensors are placed inside, which can be cleaned automatically, and the cost is 90,000 US dollars.
article
1. I cloned a digital version of myself using chat logs and blog posts (Chinese)
The author introduces how to use his own chat records and articles to train a chat robot that clones himself.
2. My opinion on ChatGPT (Chinese)
The article of the official account “Silicon Valley Wang Chuan” analyzes ChatGPT from the perspective of investors, which mentions that “after the calculation training volume exceeds 10^23 FLOP, the accuracy of the model suddenly begins to leap.”
3. Current status of Web Components in 2023 (Chinese)
This article discusses the current state of standards for Web Components, as well as the outlook for the future. (Contributed by @occupy5 )
4. How easy it is to clone yourself (in English)
A professor demonstrates how easy it is to use AI tools to generate a deepfake video of himself giving a speech. He used this to remind readers that the development of AI has far exceeded the imagination of ordinary people.
5. The variable aperture of the mobile phone
The mobile phone camera also has a variable aperture, and the Mi 13 Ultra and Huawei P60 Pro released this year have this feature.
Netizens took the two phones apart and compared their variable aperture implementations.
6. The Story of LAION Dataset (English)
LAION is the world’s largest free AI training data set, containing nearly 600 million pictures, and many models use it for training.
Surprisingly, its founder was a high school teacher in Hamburg, Germany, who still teaches today.
7. Our cloud spending in 2022 (in English)
37signals disclosed in detail the spending on Amazon’s cloud service AWS in 2022.
They spent a total of $3.2 million, an average of $260,000+ per month, and S3 storage alone accounted for 30%. This overwhelmed the company, which eventually decided to say goodbye to cloud services .
8. New HTML tag <search> (English)
The latest HTML standard adds <search> tag, which is similar to the <div> tag and is used to place search-related elements.
tool
1. rety
A webpage JS library, which can record the process of typing and editing, and then play it again. Great for presentations, showing the audience the code to type in.
An online Gantt chart tool that supports multi-person collaboration, personnel view, project snapshot and other functions. (Contributed by @lizhichao )
3. Receive SMS
Foreign mobile phone code receiving platform. (Contributed by @williamwoodhq )
A plug-in for Microsoft Word that integrates ChatGPT to generate and modify text. (Contributed by @Kuingsmile )
5. create-chart
A visual large-screen designer based on echarts. (Contributed by @food-billboard )
6. Typst
An online typesetting system, similar to LaTeX, can view the rendering effect in real time, mainly used for academic publications, and the code is open source . (Contributed by @wolfg1969 )
7. Wails
A Go framework for writing cross-platform desktop applications that can replace Electron. Similar to Tauri , the difference is that Tauri is based on the Rust language, which is based on Go.
An interactive mechanical device, it’s hard to believe that its interactive effect is completely realized with CSS. Pull the rope handle on the left, and the whole device will move.
9. Relight
This web tool adjusts the lighting of your photos. A user uploads a photo, and it modifies the lighting, adjusting color, distance, brightness, etc., and adding other light sources.
10. Unclutter
A browser plug-in that can extract the text of a web page, display it in reading mode, and adjust various parameters. There is also a similar tool here.
resource
1. Amazon Web Services AWS Guide
This English warehouse gives a brief introduction and usage tips for each product of AWS.
2. LangChain Chinese Introductory Tutorial
LangChain is a large language model (LLM) programming framework, and this warehouse is a Chinese tutorial written by netizens. (Contributed by @liaokongVFX )
The author feeds Chinese laws and regulations to ChatGPT to create a legal question-and-answer engine with open-source code . (Contributed by @lvwzhen )
A translation website that can compare the results of multiple translation engines and also supports Cantonese translation. (Contributed by @williamwoodhq )
5. Prompt Boom
ChatGPT website that is free to use and does not require registration. (Contributed by @williamwoodhq )
picture
In Europe in the 19th century, retailers needed shelves that could change their height. A craftsman invented the “serrated shelf”.
He added a layer of sawtooth to the vertical shelf, and he could easily adjust the height of the shelf by inserting the shelf and putting the shelf on it.
2. A building that grows like a tree
An Indian designer told the AI model that he wanted a “building that would grow like a tree”.
As a result, AI gave him the picture below.
abstract
About five years ago, I imported a kilogram of “Neotame” sweetener from a chemical factory in Shanghai.
Neotame is an artificial sweetener that is a derivative of aspartame. It is the sweetest synthetic sweetener in the world and is said to be 10,000-12,000 times sweeter than sugar.
Neotame is a white powder that was mailed to me in a metal can with a crimped lid and a simple chemical label on it.
US Customs suspected drugs, held it for two weeks, sent it to Colorado, and gave me no explanation.
When I finally received it, the jar had a “checked” sticker on it. They put the jar in a clear plastic bag with the lid pitted like it had been chewed by a dog. The bag was full of white powder.
I unwisely opened the bag in the kitchen. According to the advice in the manual I read after the fact, a breathing filter should be worn when unpacking. Obviously, I’m wearing nothing.
A small cloud of powder slammed apart and landed on the kitchen floor. I felt a burning sensation in my eyes and a slight choking sensation in my airways after inhaling the powder.
I was amazed by the sudden sweetness in the air, and the air smelled good. Hours later, I can still taste the sweetness on my lips. I’m sure the customs inspectors must have been impressed with that jar.
After the kitchen was thoroughly cleaned, I can still feel its presence to this day. Just a little bit of any utensil (cup, bowl, plate, etc.) imparts a tangy sweetness to the food inside.
Even if I split the powder into multiple sachets and give away to friends and family (with safety precautions), I still have over 900 grams.
I’m kind of obsessed with this thing. I made it into a 100ml solution and kept a bottle in the fridge for further dispensing.
I keep a 30ml dropper bottle with me to sweeten very bitter office coffee. We also use it in home fizzy drinks, oatmeal, baked goods, marinades, and more.
I don’t know if it’s safe, the amount I’ve actually used is very small and it’s heavily diluted so it shouldn’t be a problem.
remarks
1,
People are always looking for the 10X engineer who is ten times more productive. Now, all you need is an OpenAI API key to find 1000X engineers.
— “Be a 1000x Engineer or Die Trying”
2,
There is an Argentine proverb: if you come back after 20 days away, everything will be different, if you come back after 20 years away, everything will be the same. Such is life in South America.
3.
The book always says to live each day as if it were your last. As an entrepreneur, the best way to do it is just the opposite: Live every day as if you were alive forever. What you want to create is a project that can live on for a long time.
— Peter Thiel
4.
Compare Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” with Clausewitz’s “On War” and you will find that Sun Tzu is a Twitter guru and Clausewitz is a podcaster.
this week in history
Has the internet blown past? (2022 #205)
Is digital currency a weapon to break the hegemony of the dollar? (2021 #155)
The online industry will win (2020 #105)
Not against 996, but for telecommuting (2019 #55)
thank you
The Weekly is deeply grateful for the help of FlowUs , a new generation of knowledge management and collaboration platform in China.
FlowUS = document + form + network disk. You can use it to write documents, make a home page, manage data, store files, and more.
Each issue of the weekly magazine is published in the FlowUs column at the same time. You are welcome to open your own column and homepage.
(over)
document information
- Copyright Notice: Free Reprint-Non-Commercial-Non-Derivative-Attribution ( Creative Commons 3.0 License )
- Date of publication: April 28, 2023
This article is transferred from: http://www.ruanyifeng.com/blog/2023/04/weekly-issue-252.html
This site is only for collection, and the copyright belongs to the original author.