What I see in different shades of gray, from behind my reading glasses
The Man Weeping In The Parking Lot It was still dark. I left home in the darkness, and I returned in darkness.
David Epstein puts Boeing’s Door Disaster in Perspective
Half the truth is often a great lie.
\ – Benjamin Franklin
Leo Kottke and Mike Gordon: TIny Desk Concert from home from the days of COVID
Gaping Void, on the powerful impact of storytelling about the UK Post Office scandal and tragedy. ITV’s show Mr. Bates Vs The Post Office is credited with resurrecting the implications of the saga that had its last prosecution in 2015!
“Writing for me is and always has been an attempt to capture a moment in time, to capture a feeling, capture an observation, capture a conversation that serve as a sort of time capsule that allows me to remember who I have been in relationship to the world around me.” Rob Walker shines a light on poet Clint Smith’s poem, and a creative idea for imagining how a smell might look like, or a sound might smell like.. ad infinitum. Shuffle Your Senses
Manuel Morales is scathing about AI companies stealing ‘inspiration’. and rightly so. If a human does it
Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful.
\ – Margaret Wheatley
Johann Sebastian Bach was a coffee lover? Who would have thought! Coffee Cantata aka Schweigt_stille,_plaudert_nicht,_BWV_211
A significant number of events took place from the 13th until this evening so there’s been a snowball’s chance in hell of doing any reading.
Hidde de Vries on sharing links
Open Culture: Bertrand Russell and Buckminster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live and Learn More.
Brad Carter: A system for really remembering stuff. This one hits home hard for a collector of links like me. The reason I collect links is for the benefit of the people I know might be interested.
Seth Godin: The generous ask. When we offer to help someone get to where they were going, we’re approaching the relationship with generosity, not selfishness.
John Hagel: The Paradox of Progress
Lay-offs are also always a symptom of exec incompetence.
\– Baldur Bjarnasson
Muireann Bradley Candyman
Return to Office policies aren’t improving employee performance or company value. Controlling bosses don’t care. Link
Prof Aswath Damodaran invites people to sign up to his 2024 series of lessons in corporate finance and valuation.
Jon Callahan set up a spend tracker with ChatGPT. Fun learning project, I agree. The problem of consistent categorisation, or hallucinated transactions with data errors will be driving the accountants mad too 😅
Some are guilty, but all are responsible.
\ – Abraham Joshua Heschel, rabbi and professor
Carson McKee covers Gordon Lightfoot’s nostalgic I’m Not Supposed To Care
I love reading Alex Hayward-Waterhouse’s blog posts. He says while he’s recently been opening his blog posts with "At the advanced age of 81", he’s isn’t quite done yet.
Simon Wardley on why Cynefin and Wardley Maps are complementary tools Bears reading a few times. I’ve not tried the OnlineWardleyMaps tool yet.
Listened to Will Larson on Lenny’s podcast.
Saw this stunning photo taken by Valerio Minato. Already glowing in the darkness, the hilltop Basilica of Superga sits directly in the center of the Monviso mountain with the moon precisely framing the pair. HT Grace Ebert.
From the music of the day by Jackson Browne:
I don’t know what to say about these days
I’m seeing people changing in the strangest ways
Even in the richer neighborhoods
People don’t know when they’ve got it good
They’ve got the envy and they’ve got it bad
Jackson Browne – The Long Way Around
We learn from each other, and from our own mistakes. Learning in public includes accepting that there are times when you will get it wrong. Simon Willison is contrite about what he got wrong with his last post on the term Artificial Intelligence. I didn’t see the problem with his original post, given it was written on his personal blog, and it was an opinion on terminology. I can also see why he thinks a particular sentence was clumsily written.
Gary Marcus is not a fan of the OpenAI crowd. This is a howler of an observation about Open AI’s recent lobbying to the UK Govt. John Lam calls it like only an artist can in a tweet.
HT Jim Nielsen for this link – interacting with each other is the whole point of being human. I’m subscribed now to the Aboard podcast.
Who knew that used fire trucks are on sale? And relatively cheap too (HT Tyler Cowen)
Rob Miller wrote a blog about the UK Post Office travesty a while ago titled The Thermocline of Truth. I remember sharing that widely at my then employment, trying to get the leaders to recognise the parallels between the two organisations. Several years later, and possibly too late for many innocents in the saga, the UK government is finally doing something to clear the names of the wrongfully convicted humans.
Jesse Kornbluth recommends Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami. I think it’s in the public domain too. I’ve not read it yet, but it is on the list now.
Baldur Bjarnnson has thoughts not too dissimilar to mine in "to plan a strategy you must first have a theory of how the hell things work", except of course he writes publicly about his struggle, and his process of discovery. This article complements very well Henrik Karlsson’s post a few days that caught me by the collar and shook me wide awake.
… people matter. Even in the wildest of innovations, people still matter, and human relationships still matter, and you can’t shortcut it.
- Rich Ziade on the Aboard podcast
Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5 in E Minor, Op. 64, TH. 29 – II
Edward Donner fine tuned a LLM on 240K test messages
Simon Willison has made peace with using the term AI – rather than explicitly calling it LLMs.
Prof. Ethan Mollick sees signs and portents in the year ahead for AI
Fabian Pfortmuller on The challenges of building community
Maria Popova shares 17 lessons from 17 years of Marginalian I missed this from October last year.
An interview with Dr. Gladys McGarey, the Mother of Holistic Medicine, who is 103 years old.
Derek Sivers: When in doubt, try the difference. Useful ideas.
Oliver Burkeman: The eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life
The only viable solution is to make a shift: from a life spent trying not to neglect anything, to one spent proactively and consciously choosing what to neglect, in favour of what matters most.
– Oliver Burkeman
Freddie White: Tenderness on the Block
I found the time to read only one article today. Bob Ewing in "A New Year for Regrets and Courage", asks a question I’m asking myself every day: "If I truly had the courage this year to live my life on my own terms, and speak my mind in an authentic way, what would I do and say?"
When you counsel someone, you should appear to be reminding him of something he had forgotten, not of the light he was unable to see.
– Baltasar Gracian, writer and philosopher
Donovan: Universal soldier – breaks my heart every time.
Shankar Vedantam at TED: You Don’t Actually Know What Your Future Self Wants
Christensen Institute: Education innovations to watch in 2024
We’ve seen that employer-centric approaches to building and assessing career pathways focus almost exclusively on in-demand skills. In turn, they tend to minimize the role of networks. That’s because networks benefit individuals more than they benefit corporations. Put differently: employers need skilled individuals to fill jobs. But individuals need more than just skills. They also need networks, and myriad at-bats, in order to learn skills, grow confidence, enjoy job options, and build successful careers.
Training programs that I’ve seen in my working life are often designed by those who have nothing to do with the work, and often much to do with compliance – for legal reasons or their bosses own agendas. That quote highlights the challenge that Bob Moesta calls out in his book Demand Side Selling – many products and services are designed without consideration for the customer.
Seth Godin riffs on ‘management’ in the Akimbo podcast episode on Aravind Eye Care . How is it possible for one man’s vision (pun intended) to give eyesight to those who could least afford it?
If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient observation than to any other reason. -Isaac Newton
Mariachi sol de Mexico perform Guadalajara
A day out in nature with conversations that revolved around boats and diving. I discovered terms I’d never heard before like rebreathing and getting narced. A trio of perenties (Australian goannas) were our companions too, getting very friendly with us (after of course my first shock when the monsters crept up near my feet when I was in deep listening mode 😳 )
Very little reading today!
Antirez: LLM’s and programming in the first days of 2024 (HT Jeremy Keith)
Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.
– Umberto Eco, philosopher and novelist
Chet Atkins introduces a group of fantastic musicians in this YT video titled The World’s Most Famous Unknown Band