Category: Reading

Leo Babauta: Embarrassment is an integral part of the growth process

Hannah Fry: What is rewilding?

BBC: How good is eagle vision? And image recognition makes a surprise appearance (no pun intended)

Anne H Petersen: The Optimisation Sinkhole It’s remembering, over and over again, what a blessing it is to be simply, overwhelmingly, satisfied

Ben Werdmuller: Is AI an evolutionary trend? TL;DR: No.

Matt Mullenberg: The Power of One

Bob Ewing: How to deal with disagreeable people. What a story!

Juergen Schimdhuber, Father of Modern AI, on his life’s work

I’m noticing a fascinating development during the ‘annual performance evaluation’ season. Employees are required to request feedback, and the volume of requests is driving some clever people to use ChatGPT to provide feedback. All good, right? Not so fast. One recipient read out the feedback they got from a senior leader because they knew it was ‘fake’.  The damage is already done to that relationship between them, unbeknownst to the senior leader.

Wired: Doug Rushkoff

Richard Merrick Reflections 28 May 2023

Phillip Carter: All the hard stuff no one talks about building stuff with LLMs

Microsoft Developer Conference: State of GPT

Ethan Mollick: What happens when AI reads a book

ChatGPT + Notable “ Do you use Python, Pandas, and Seaborn to collect, analyze, and plot data? Then you’ll be amazed by what ChatGPT can do, when using ChatGPT+, GPT-4 model, and the plugin for Noteable’s version of Jupyter notebooks.”

David Brooks: The Moral Bucket List

Acquaintances & Happiness

A valuable repo on the evolution of language models

How to decline a job offer

Prof E W Dijkstra on the “foolishness of natural language programming“

Baldur Bjarnason: Generative AI BS detector

Stowe Boyd: The purpose of an economy is not to make the boss happy (somehow I lost my feed to Boyd’s splendid substack, now rectified)

Charles Handy: A Portfolio Life

Rodney Brooks: Calm down about GPT4

RIP Martin Amis. A 1998 review of Four Weddings & A Funeral to remember him by.

 

Down a memory lane: Jobs Demo’ing the Apple Mac

I did not know Maria Montessori’s story, and I’m glad I didn’t skip reading this story! Long Now: The Epoch of the Child

A conversation with economist Daron Acemoglu (FT): “Yes, you got progress,” Acemoglu says, “but you also had costs that were huge and very long-lasting. A hundred years of much harsher conditions for working people, lower real wages, much worse health and living conditions, less autonomy, greater hierarchy. And the reason that we came out of it wasn’t some law of economics, but rather a grassroots social struggle in which unions, more progressive politics and, ultimately, better institutions played a key role — and a redirection of technological change away from pure automation also contributed importantly.”

Ed Brenegar: Seeing Below the Surface of Things Ed’s writing on certain topics resonates strongly with me, while others I still have a while to go to learn what he sees and why.

“Sometimes when you’re in a dark place you think you have been buried, when actually you have been planted” – Christine Caine (HT ASR)

Sarah Canaday: Leading on the Tightrope. “Business is not a democracy” is the most telling line.

Richard Merrick is on fire! Artisans and the first rule of uncertainty. “…three things matter. Firstly, we have a commitment to something bigger than ourselves that needs us (whatever that may be for us). Secondly, being part of a community that values us for who we are more than the stories we tell about ourselves, and thirdly, a skill that will help others. Something that constitutes “good work”, that makes us a living in a way that does not cause harm to or exploit others, has an eye to beauty, and understands the concept of “enough.”

Gaping Void: Totemic Power

Is it possible to Show Confidence and Be Vulnerable at the same time? Scott Eblin says yes.

Henrik Karlsson: Building new cultures.

Ben Evans: There’s no such thing as data

Sara Soueidan’s website is a goldmine of knowledge about accessibility design on the web.

Accessible Numbers: another goldmine on the topic.

This looks rather interesting to play with

Seth Godin has another reminder about the choice we have to go ‘steady’: Compounding head starts.

 

Paul Simon: losing my hearing & why I’m writing songs again. And the Seven Psalms trailer

Lisa Kanarek: I learned to talk less and listen more

The best things we learned in therapy

Terrence Eden: How do you stop people accessing data they shouldn’t?

Building a signal analyser with modern web-tech: “I’ve always tended to be a web maximalist, but I’ve never felt more optimistic than I do now about the power of the modern web as a true application platform.”

“pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis” lends itself to a great dad joke 😀

Rob wants an introduction to Sense-making to be accessible to everyone. I agree.

Milani Creative has a wonderful newsletter of visuals- like this one about telephoto vs wideangle thinking

Peter Senge: ““Leadership is the capacity of a human community to shape its future”.

Geoff Marlow: The Double Disconnect

A fascinating interaction between two giants Donald Knuth & Stephen Wolfram involving ChatGPT. Quoting: “I find it fascinating that novelists galore have written for decades about scenarios that might occur after a “singularity” in which superintelligent machines exist. But as far as I know, not a single novelist has realized that such a singularity would almost surely be preceded by a world in which machines are 0.01% intelligent
(say), and in which millions of real people would be able to interact
with them freely at essentially no cost.”

Seth Godin: Which sort of sinecure? “The places we inhabit are external, for sure, based on how the world treats us. But they’re often internally driven as well, a story that felt comfortable for a while. But if that story has created a stable place of ennui, dread or dissatisfaction, it might pay to find someone who can help us see that it’s possible to move on.”

What makes sad music sad? (NYT)

Orca-nised crime!

What do triangles & game design have in common? This video was an eye-opener for me