Antelope or Field Mice? What I read this week
A collection of randomly useful reads.
Starting this weekly series wherein I am sharing stuff that I read and found interesting - expect a mix of topics (right from AI to SAAS to maybe, Bollywood).
If you are somebody who reads a lot (across a range of topics) and wanna share your recommended weekly reads with others, just hit the reply button with your recommendations.
In no particular order, here goes mine for this week:
Shrink the Economy, Save the World?
The eruption tapped into a suspicion supported by reality: Gains in economic growth have too often buoyed the fortunes of the richest instead of lifting all boats. Prosperity even in the most prosperous countries hasn’t been shared. But all the attention to inequality is just a crack in the edifice of economic orthodoxy.
Now a much more radical proposition has emerged, looming like a wrecking ball: Is economic growth desirable at all? - read
A Picture is Worth 170 Tokens: How Does GPT-4o Encode Images?
GPT-4o charges 170 tokens to process each 512x512 tile used in high-res mode. At ~0.75 tokens/word, this suggests a picture is worth about 227 words—only a factor of four off from the traditional saying.
OK, but why 170? It’s an oddly specific number, isn’t it? OpenAI uses round numbers like “$20” or “$0.50” in their pricing, or powers of 2 and 3 for their internal dimensions. Why choose a numbers like 170 in this instance? - read
China’s Middle Class Is Disappearing
Gucci reports that its China sales have slumped 20 percent this quarter from levels a year ago, and Swiss watch exports to China have fallen 25 percent from levels in 2023. High-end restaurants in China also report declines, especially telling since traffic has picked up a lower end eateries. In another telling anecdote, second hand piano inventories have risen so high they have put significant downward price pressure on prices.
A primary cause of the problem, though by no means the only one, is the country’s ongoing property crisis. It has plagued Chinese economics and finance since 2021, when the giant residential real estate developer, Evergrande, announced that it could no longer discharge its financial obligations.- read
Are You Hunting Antelope or Field Mice?
Newt Gingrich is one of the most successful political leaders of our time. Yes, we disagreed with virtually everything he did, but this is a book about strategy, not ideology. And we’ve got to give Newt his due. His strategic ability—his relentless focus on capturing the House of Representatives for the Republicans—led to one of the biggest political landslides in American history.
Now that he’s in the private sector, Newt uses a brilliant illustration to explain the need to focus on the big things and let the little stuff slide: the analogy of the field mice and the antelope.
A lion is fully capable of capturing, killing, and eating a field mouse. But it turns out that the energy required to do so exceeds the caloric content of the mouse itself. So a lion that spent its day hunting and eating field mice would slowly starve to death. A lion can’t live on field mice. A lion needs antelope. Antelope are big animals. They take more speed and strength to capture and kill, and once killed, they provide a feast for the lion and her pride. A lion can live a long and happy life on a diet of antelope. The distinction is important. Are you spending all your time and exhausting all your energy catching field mice? In the short term it might give you a nice, rewarding feeling. But in the long run you’re going to die. So ask yourself at the end of the day, “Did I spend today chasing mice or hunting antelope?” - via