📚 The Origin of the Word "Grok"; Men Twice as Likely as Women to Support A.I. Use in Music; Most Popular Car Brands in Germany: MAPPED
PLUS, Mississippi boosted literacy among the poorest students by changing one simple rule.
🤣 Nvidia’s Net Income Jumps $21B, Groq COO Sunny Madra Talks His S***
*That’s Groq the AI company, not to be confused with Grok (the other AI company)
Groq make chips for AI inference
Grok makes LLMs
Etymology of “Grok”
And if you’re wondering why people keep naming their company variations of “grok”, it’s cuz they all read the same kickass sci-fi book Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein (1971).
The book is about an a human named Mike who was born on Mars and raised by Martians after a failed Earth mission. He returns to Earth as an adult where he’s completely unfamiliar with human culture. He’s got a completely different perspective on life than the rest of humanity - mostly about being a hippie and stuff. He’s also technically the heir to a massive fortune and possibly the owner of the planet Mars under Earth law.
Anyways, over the course of the book, Mike teaches humans the Martian word “grok”. Grok means to completely and fully understand something - like to the extreme.
Here’s the definition in Mike’s own words:
“Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed”
So like, if you read the recipe for lasagna and make it a couple times, you could say you know how to make lasagna, but you don’t grok it. You need to make it like a million times and know every little nook and cranny of that noodle pan before you could say you grok lasagna.
First, you must become one with the lasagna.
Everyone should read Stranger in a Strange Land. It’s not the science that makes it cool, it’s that you really come to learn the hippie philosophy. You might not grok it, but you definitely gain a pretty profound understanding.
POLL: Men Twice as Likely as Women to Support the Use of AI in Music
Long before the age of AI, I remember thinking it was pretty rad that Menomena had a computer science major in the band who wrote a program that they used to write music.
Using AI today seems not all that different.
📚 Mississippi Kicking Everybody’s Ass in Literacy
🚘 MAPPED: Where Each Car Brand Dominates in Germany
Beamer, benz, or bentley ?
📊 Student Loan Delinquencies Are Back, Baby
Forward this email to a friend who’s mired in student loan debt.
🇨🇦 MAPPED: Religion in Canada
🗺️ World Split into 4 Regions of Roughly Equal GDP
🗺️ % of the Population Who Live in the Capital City
Mongolia ftw
🎶 Banger of the Day
Menomena (as mentioned previously in this post) used to use a computer program to help them write licks - not so unlike the artists today who are using AI.
Menomena - Wet and Rusting
SIDE NOTE: On Instagram, we pair each post with a song that bangs. A lot of people don’t know that we have a comprehensive Spotify playlist with every song we ever played. Click here to check it out. 🎶
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*might need use incognito mode