Please read the century article it comes from! It is so beautifully written and really gives a sense of the future vision of the times:
http://www.tfcbooks.com/tesla/1895-04-00.htm
He also talked a struggling U.S. Grant into writing an autobiography which Twain then published. This basically saved Grant's family economically. (Grant's autobiography is a great book, btw)
He was also an anti-imperialist and protested eg the US occupation of Philippines. (These writings aren’t well known). I’d like to think if he was alive today he’d be a dissident.
The original masayoshi son. Anyway, I thought he invested a ton in this startup for movable type though.I wasn't aware that he invested in other startups as well
There seems to be a rough rule that new fundamental discoveries (e.g. new theories like thermodynamics, QM, GRT) are turned into auccessful applications for the masses some 50 to 70 years later. It's a rule of thumb at best, but it holds for quite a few cases.
The trouble then is: what were the major new discoveries of the last 50 years? Science has mostly confirmed and fleshed out existing knowledge. So engineers are mostly stuck with optimizing what we have instead of coming up with things that are fundamentally new and foreign.
Isn’t the claim that the rate of change is increasing? That same amount of change in the past 125 years should occur in half or quarter of the time, for example.
rate of change may actually be decreasing, as the low hanging fruit isn't there anymore.
it may be that big breakthroughs like the last century will be fewer and further apart, especially with lots of energy (physical and intelectual) spent on bitcoin, social media and consuming in general
Is there a way to use the Bitcoin hash rate to solve more meaningful problems than SHA-256 while still being cryptographically secure? Imagine if we could send math problems to the Bitcoin network, is this possible?
I originally read it in a biography I read many years ago. I assume that biography was well cited and that a primary source exists, but I do not know where it is (I have spent literally zero seconds searching though).
