Hello world,
So, I recently came across the idea of having a weekly journal. I found the idea to be pretty nice, so here we are.
This will start simple for now, but the format should evolve with time along with the quality.
As for what will be included, for now, it will be one thing (or more) I learned this week. Something I was grateful for or not.
Something I learned
In complete honesty, it's 2am right now, so I will keep this short.
This week was pretty eventful since I attended an LLM Hackathon. It was my first time building with LLMs, so I got an intense crash course. I built an AI agent in the hackathon that assists visually impaired people. In summary, the agent took a description of an image, let's say of a McDonald's drive-thru menu, and gave the visually impaired people info on what they could do next.
I learned and was shocked by how further along the AI ecosystem is. It's nice to see all this VC AI-hype money actually go to good use.
Lots of the content I consume is startup-related, for better or worse, and I got to learn that the secondary market will probably die down a lot because of interest rates, which makes sense since a VC would want their money now that it has value, to end up being used for the business. I also learned that founders selling their stock in secondaries are expected to do it in series B and beyond; it would raise some eyebrows if they did it earlier.
In real-world non-startup learning, I learned why brand-name drugs are more expensive than generics. For this, I will link the video here. But one statistic I will mention is that as of 2021, about 90% of all prescriptions in the US are filled with generics, while the remaining 10% accounts for 74% of all drug spending. That is wild, as he alludes to in the video; imagine if the expenditure of generics and their pricing wasn't a thing.
Gratitude, yay
And on the topic of drugs, I think my first gratitude journal should go to modern medicine. It's incredible how far we can preserve the healthy human condition. In all of medical history, last week was the best week, and the next one will be better. I'm pretty optimistic about the future of medicine, and it will probably be a topic I will reflect on in future journals.
Thanks for reading if you made it this far.
