What I see in different shades of gray, from behind my reading glasses
Books, & links to all kinds of stuff I found interesting
I signed up to Andrew Ng’s Generative AI for Everyone course today. As usual, Ng’s teaching is fantastic. I’m halfway through the course, and should complete it in the next couple of days.
No reading. No good.
”You’re not a star until they can spell your name in Karachi.”
\ – Humphrey Bogart
National Flatpick Guitar Championship 2023 for some picking inspiration. The second guitarist, Hayden Riesling, kept playing after a string broke.
New York Times: How the AI fuse was lit
Dr. Andrew Huberman shares research recommending the physiological sigh as the most effective way of reducing stress through breathing, even more effective than mindfulness or meditation.
Gaping Void: Control is an illusion.
Rigid, command-and-control authoritarianism is a weakness. Fluidity is strength.
– Gaping Void article above
Carson McKee over’s Bob Dylan’s If you see her, say hello
Finally caught up on Kevin Kelly in conversation with Shane Parrish on the Knowledge Project (episode aired in May 2023).
I loved Tracy Durnell’s post about Building community out of strangers. I was curious about this "indieweb" concept she mentions there, and discovered that Ben Werdmuller, Jeremy Keith and a bunch of other people are all mentioned in in one place. I’m wondering how I might show the feedreader on my own blog, so expect another technical rabbit hole walk for me in the near future.
Andrew Curry’s Thing Two on his wonderful newsletter Just Two Things took me down memory lane, and into a little side alley that promises more research reading. Kurt Vonnegut’s shapes of stories is one of my most shared links 😄
In Writing as communion, Henrik Karlsson makes this point that somehow resonates with my own experience: Thereis often conflict between the needs of the writer and the needs of the audience. But there can also be mutuality. An audience that is right at one time might be wrong at another.
Everyone takes the limits of their own field of vision to be the limits of the world”.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Polyphonic sequences -music of the Bibayak Pygmies from Henrik’s post above.
I spent the day as a stage hand for the combined performance of the local Youth Orchestra and the local Philharmonia Choir at a local church. They performed Handel’s Messiah, and it was a surreal performance, given that they rehearsed together for the first time this morning.
A quick flick through the story behind the piece was all I could accomplish today. No other reading save the Daily Stoic reminder that being born is a fatal condition. How would you live if you knew today was your last day? For me, it would be to soak my soul in music, and that’s precisely what happened.
“I did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God Himself seated on His throne, with His company of Angels.” – George F. Handel
The Sydney Philharmonia Choir’s rendition of Messiah at the Sydney Opera House, accompanied by the Sydney Philharmonia Orchestra
Om Malik: Nostalgia is a curse in life and tech
This LinkedIn post by Mark Freed, a CEO celebrating an employee is both impressive, and unfortunately way too rare.
Labels are for the things men make, not for men. The most primitive man is too complex to be labeled.
- Rex Stout, novelist
Eric Shi: Amarillo by Morning Bluegrass cover
11 months gone by already? 🤔
Revisiting the Kano model for prioritising feature development.
Sara Wachter-Boettcher: Hey Designers, They’re Gaslighting You This is true of many other disciplines of work. There’s a high price to saying yes: burnout, disillusionment, cynicism.
WTH is Latent Space Optimisation? This Nature paper has an explanation.
You can’t prove your value to someone who isn’t interested in seeing it.
– Sara Wachter-Boettcher, a UX designer
Music Travel Love cover of The Police "Every Breath You Take" is breathtaking.
Seth Godin: The art of estimation. Sometimes, it’s best to politely decline to play.
Cal Newport reckons that blogging is making a comeback and so does Neil Gaiman. I’ve been encouraging my friends to create their own little corner of the internet.
John Hagel points out what’s missing in artificial intelligence. Tacit (or implicit) knowledge is outside the domain of training data.
Vitalik Buterin’s view on techno-optimism to test my own thinking on the subject.
Erika suggests an antidote to consensus based decision making, if you are the HIPPO in the room.
Whatever else AI is, it is not neutral, and neither can we be.
– Dan McQuillan
Blanco White Olalla
John Naughton dug up this 2016 New Yorker profile on Sam Altman. Interesting reading.
Andrej Karpathy’s one hour talk on LLM’s remains to watch later on my browser, and has notched up 360k views already.
Ethan Mollick explores how to rebuild organisations in the age of AI. This is worth paying a lot of attention to for the next decade.
One law for the lion and ox is oppression.
– William Blake
Nina Simone – Sinnerman
The most engaging things I read today were the notes stuck on the fridge. Routine commences in a day.
Ok, Molly White’s post on Effective Obfuscation couldn’t be resisted.
“A guy walks into a pub with a lump of asphalt on his shoulder and says to the barman, give us a pint and one for the road.”
– Tommy Cooper
Hours of Happy Bach
Joan Westenberg: No matter how hard you try, your job will not love you back
I’m glad to see CommonCog evolving and learning in public. The recent announcement is all I’ve had time to read, but it looks very relevant to my next few steps. Learning in Ill-structured domains, with cases as a way of recognising patterns without going to BSchools for the credentials, is a sensible way of learning (and saving money & time both) for many people, including me.
Matt Webb: It takes a while to figure out technology
Where are the godmothers of AI, asks Luba Kassova. Where are they, indeed? Timnit Gebru, Emily Bender, and the other women who spoke up have been scoffed at, laughed about, and generally been treated so poorly.
Two posts by Seth Godin: Generosity and gratitude A gift doesn’t diminish the giver. Sharing creates connection, possibility, and energy. The other, "After the meteorite" asks, now what?
This by Tracy Durnell is inspiring. "Finding enough together"
Paul Ford: A grand unified theory of buying stuff Reading this makes me very uncomfortable because I recognise myself in the category of buying stuff for my stuff. George Carlin will agree from wherever he is.
We have three fundamental ways in which we may deal with surprise:
- we may suppress it
- we may ignore it
- we may adapt to it
– Steve McCrone