sweetgreen and blockchain

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A bowl of Chicken Pesto Parm represents more than just a new dish on the Sweetgreen menu. That warm salad of roasted chicken, organic spinach, quinoa, spicy broccoli, and Middle Eastern spiced za’atar bread crumbs, with pesto vinaigrette and hot sauce, represents 3,000 hours of research and work with more than 150 farmers across the country to explore new ingredients..."

Adds co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Neman: “We were the first to use blockchain as an application for food. We were one of the first in the category to release an app [in 2013]. We designed this new menu for flavor, and the analytics from our app allows us to find out what people are craving.” 

I do not and will not ever understand how blockchain creates salad but OK

cjm search march madness tournament

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i took this picture right before cjm search's employees filled out their company march madness brackets. i told myself i would crush these two chumps (i mean, look at them struggling to pick up this cheerio off the ground) in our company-wide bracket until 2018 decided to ruin everything and have a 16 seed beat a 1 for the first time. and yes, i don't ever dress my kid unless we leave room, aka our 350 sq ft apt., and then usually we de-clad upon reentry. 

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candidates : rich private jet owners :: recruiter : varsano

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ok, so basically steve varsano is living every recruiters' dream. read this and couldn't believe how similar his job is to recruiting...or at least how recruiting SHOULD be. he pretty much sells private jets to the richest people in the world and knows the entire community inside-out. he knows to message current jet owners when it's time to upgrade. he knows when someone is willing to splurge for the newest model and he's mapped out potential future buyers. 

reminded me of how i TRY to be. we should know the market, map it out. we should know who is ready for a new job when and the appropriate times to reach out to people who have been in boring jobs for JUST the right amount of time. varsano's market is obviously a lot smaller and more high touch but still, reminded me a lot of tech recruiting and this market, which is relatively high touch...at least compared to more general sales and non-tech recruiting. 

everyone is getting hilariously rich and you're not

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plz rd

"They also remember who laughed at them and when.

James Spediacci and his twin brother, Julian, who bought ether when it was about 30 cents, now run one of the most popular whale clubs: private cryptocurrency trading communities where crypto syndicates are coordinated in group chats. He showed me a screen shot of his Facebook post from 2014 telling everyone to buy ether.

“One like,” he said, pointing to his phone. “It got one like.”"

____

love me a classic take the risk even when everyone calls you dumb story but like, can we please stop with the silly-we're-so-start-up-y-and-cool-and-hip-and-young-meeting-room-names???

and yes, i know this is v sad that this is my takeaway from this article but it is annoying me VERY MUCH.

iced tea, e-cigs, spandex and cigars to blockchain

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all of these companies have pivoted to the blockchain

1. long island iced tea corp---> long blockchain corp

Long Island Iced Tea made iced teas in flavors including peach and lemon, as well as lemonades. 

2. vapetek inc. --> nodechain inc

Vapetek made batteries and liquid for electronic cigarettes.

3. croe inc. --> the crypto company 

Croe previously developed women’s fitness clothing.

4. rich cigars inc. --> intercontinental technology inc.

Rich Cigars previously produced cigars. But the Florida company said this month that it was changing its name, getting out of the cigar business, moving to Colorado and creating subsidiaries to mine for virtual currencies.

 

soooo dying to see what's going to happen to these places

 

 

so what's the juicero guy up to now, you ask???

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you guys, lol

thanks to matt levine, enjoyed this lil baby:

The telos of Silicon Valley is to (1) build electronic tools that will eliminate the need for human beings to work and (2) then replace human work with dumb pre-industrial magic rituals. In a science-fiction future where robots do all the jobs and satisfy your every need, what will you do all day? Well, maybe you'll get really into elaborate quests for water, why not. 

 

 

 

"the human now adds absolutely nothing....."

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marginal revolution writes, 

"The game of chess is the most widely-studied domain in the history of artificial intelligence. The strongest programs are based on a combination of sophisticated search techniques, domain-specific adaptations, and handcrafted evaluation functions that have been refined by human experts over several decades. In contrast, the AlphaGo Zero program recently achieved superhuman performance in the game of Go, by tabula rasa reinforcement learning from games of self-play. In this paper, we generalise this approach into a single AlphaZero algorithm that can achieve, tabula rasa, superhuman performance in many challenging domains. Starting from random play, and given no domain knowledge except the game rules, AlphaZero achieved within 24 hours a superhuman level of play in the games of chess and shogi (Japanese chess) as well as Go, and convincingly defeated a world-champion program in each case.

In other words, the human now adds absolutely nothing to man-machine chess-playing teams.  That’s in addition to the surprising power of this approach in solving problems."

software engineering for good <3

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My friend alex started at U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs two years ago and just posted this:

"This week marks two years since I started at VA and specifically on Vets.gov. There is still so much work to do to improve the Veteran experience when interacting with VA, but we're finally starting to more broadly talk about this work and to get more Veterans using the site. Please share with your networks and help Veterans, service members, and caretakers learn about VA's modernized online tools on Vets.gov!"

https://twitter.com/DeptVetAffairs/status/935231761210101764

 

 

ubes, c'mon, dude!

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again.

paying off hackers and not disclosing this to users or even the chief legal officer? is just...v uber of them. it's just too much at this point and it never works! only good news is that there's always someone worse out there making dumber decisions...at least for a little longer (please read highlighted links)

also, i'd like to thank matt levine of bloomberg view for giving me lots of good tech news nuggets so i can keep this burn book -- i mean blog -- up and running.

happy holidays, ya'll

wework is confusing me again

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let's rewind a few months to this delightful quote from wework's ceo:

"No one is investing in a co-working company worth $20 billion. That doesn't exist," Neumann says. "Our valuation and size today are much more based on our energy and spirituality than it is on a multiple of revenue."

but now they have invested in a wave-pool company?

 

plz, someone tell me i am just not smart enough to understand what is happening here...b/c i cannot understand what is happening here....