1. The S&P After Back-to-Back 20% Years
2. Interest Rates…30-Year Rate Highest Since November 2023
Via Bloomberg
3. Biggest Holders of Bitcoin
4. GLP-1 Users Are Buying Fewer Snacks
Via Ritholtz
5. Updated Buffett Indicator
Via Advisor Perspectives’ blog
6. 2020s: 5 Years of Big Moves
7. U.S. Foreign Aid Accounts for About 1% of Federal Budget
8. AI and Gambling
Fear and coding in Las Vegas–Inside the gambling industry’s big bet on AI.
Via Business Insider: Narrativa is among a crop of startups seizing on the artificial intelligence boom to enthusiastically automate writing tasks that would once have fallen to humans. From penning regulatory documentation for Pfizer to zhuzhing up marketing copy for insurance and e-commerce firms and helping generate breaking news articles for The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles-based Narrativa boasts roughly 50 clients in various industries. But one of its core focus areas, comprising a quarter of its business, is a little more polarizing than the rest: gambling.
Working with major industry players like 888 and Betway, Narrativa uses large language models to pump out everything from automated summaries of sports games to SEO-friendly reviews of online casino games and promotional social media posts. With no humans required, the 20-person company’s AI tools produce 10 million words a month for gambling clients — the effective output of 170-odd full-time writers producing a grueling 3,000 words a day. It’s all in service of enticing gamblers to place more bets.
“You want to create a community, you want people coming back for more,” Matthew Rector, Narrativa’s vice president of content, says. “You want to foster that environment, and our content helps facilitate that.”
Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Satya Nadella, and the tech industry’s other top impresarios talk a big game about how AI may one day attain sentience, solve the climate crisis, and lead society to a post-scarcity economy. Today, though, the technology is being embraced by traditional industries for more prosaic — and mercenary — aims. Key among them is the gambling industry, which is rapidly adopting AI for everything from writing alluring online marketing copy to identifying and helping problem gamblers to tracking people and perfecting the physical layout of casinos. The ultimate goal: to harvest ever more money from gamblers, by profiling them, feeding them content and games personalized to their whims, and cajoling them to stay longer and make bigger bets.
9. Baby Boom: 2600 Indians Born Per Minute
10. Strategies for Wealth & Happiness
Alan Watts on applying yay one thinking to yourself:
“You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.”
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Charlie Munger on preparation:
“Neither Warren nor I are smart enough to make decisions with no time to think. We make actual decisions very rapidly, but that’s because we have spent so much time preparing ourselves by quietly reading.”
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Jim Rohn on failure:
“Failure is rarely the result of some isolated event. Rather, it is a consequence of a long list of accumulated little failures which happen as a result of too little discipline. Failure occurs each time we fail to think … today, act … today, care, strive, climb, learn, or just keep going … today. If your goal requires that today you write ten letters and you write only three, you are behind by seven letters … today. If you commit yourself to making five phone calls and you make only one, you are behind by four phone calls … today. If your financial plan requires that you save ten dollars and you save none, you are behind ten dollars … today. The danger comes when we look at a day squandered and conclude that no harm has been done. After all, it was just one day. But add up these days to make a year and then add up these years to make a lifetime and perhaps you can now see how repeating today’s small failures can easily turn your life into a major disaster.”
Via the Farnum Street blog