Five Things: AI, Forests, Catfish, Hummus, Chips

As we light the second candle on our advent wreath and Christmas gets closer, the snow has almost completely melted and the rain has kicked in. My kids always give me this weird look when I tell them that we used to have snow on Christmas and that I would take my cross-country skies and ski to the neighboring villages. Call me old-fashioned, I do like rain, but not around Christmas. The amazing thing that happened this weekend was that I got to pick up our oldest daughter at the trainstation as she came home from Vienna for Christmas. It might sound weird, but when you have four kids and one is not around, it always feels empty at home.

If you’re still looking for a present, I have a suggestion. A book. But not just any book. The book I just wrote together with my business partner Christoph. It’s called Künstliche Intelligenz kompakt: Grundlagen, Chancen und Perspektiven and the title really is almost as long as the whole book. It’s a short intro to artificial intelligence and if your German is a bit rusty, you should try this book to relearn the language. Christoph and I have been investing in and working with so many AI startups over the last 8 years that we felt we should sit down and write a book about AI that tries to break down a complicated subject matter so that everybody can understand it. The book got launched last week and it’s already on a bestseller list at one of the biggest German book store chains. And no, we didn’t let ChatGPT write this, we wrote it ourselves. Just like this newsletter doesn’t get the AI treatment… anyhow, just buy the book! ???

The Year A.I. Ate the Internet

“We may look back on 2023 with a kind of nostalgia, for a time when intelligence had not yet become a product.” - OpenAI really changed a lot of things in the last 12 months.

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How Much Can Forests Fight Climate Change? A Sensor in Space Has Answers.

This is quite fascinating. And we obviously need to preserve forests: “In the past two decades, according to the research, protected areas around the world have helped stop deforestation and kept as much as a year’s worth of fossil fuel emissions from being released into the atmosphere.”

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To catch a catfish

I knew that there’s a dark side to online dating. But I didn’t know it was that dark.

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Now Hummus Is Called to Battle in the Israel-Hamas War

Hummus is just amazing stuff. No need to go to battle about it, just eat it and feel better. And I even like the sad German Hummus :)

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‘How do you reduce a national dish to a powder?’: the weird, secretive world of crisp flavours

Ok, it’s still weird that crisps are chips and chips are french fries (which are called Pommes Frites in German, to make it more confusing), but I’m totally into weird chips flavors and I love getting all sorts of weird looking bags of chips whenever I’m traveling. I just didn’t know the science behind all this.

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If you haven’t already, please drop everything and subscribe to Five Things now!

That’s it. Have an amazing second advent Sunday! And Happy Chanukka!

— Nico