What I see in different shades of gray, from behind my reading glasses
We have more than 5 senses. A 1964 article from the New York Times.
A bee in the bonnet of a New York Times columnist, and some lessons on communication power vs structural power from Dave Kampf, a professor at George Washington University
Rishad Tobaccowala’s substack is always full of actionable insights – read The Triangle of Engagement to see what I mean
From 2014: Future Islands on David Letterman, performing Seasons (Waiting on You)
This is such a powerful story: Does my son KNOW you?
Arthur Brooks: The Science of Happiness
Adam Mastroianni proposes living with the radical idea that people aren’t stupid.
Many strategies fail because they’re not actually strategies – a 2017 HBR post by Freek Veermeulen.
Brink Lindsay’s essay on Prospects for a More Inclusive Capitalism, while focused on the American economy primarily, provokes thinking in a different dimension.
Bill George wonders if the business world has lost sight of integrity
I loved both the clever title, & the subject of Revolutionary Types.
Kate O’Neill has some sensible, practical suggestions on how to use AI writing tools.
Happiness, compared. Why is rich East Asia unhappy?
An overview of OpenAI & ChatGPT, from a business lens
Culture Wars Look Different on Wikipedia – and are slowly shaping our worldview.
Are exams dead? ChatGPT ‘passed’ the US Medical Licensing Exam. It’s also passed the Evidence and Torts Section of the Bar Exam, and the MBA exam…
This David Epstein interview with Olympian Lauren Freshman is a fabulous read.
Name one (or more) people in your local community who you think is influential. Turns out (in America at least), fewer and fewer people can name anyone.
Job interview bureaucracy is getting worse.
Vibraphonist Gary Burton on improvising a jazz solo, relates it back to storytelling
A helpful tutorial on git-ting started. Will need to refer back to this as we (my daughter & I, both novices), progress through the CS50 course.
Tyler Cowen in an absolutely fascinating conversation with Paul Salopek who’s doing a decade long Out of Eden Walk. Also discovered the story a young man in India walking the length of the Ganga river. And this tweet of Paul’s “pragmatic” walking partner in China
Novel early practical uses for quantum computing, using a technique called annealing. D-Wave is the company that offers a commercial solution.
20 podcasts to listen to over this year, thanks to Ryan Holiday’s compilation.
Hire – and manage – for passsion, says this HBR article.
A fantastic conversation: Carla Harris’ talking with Adam Grant on finding & being a great mentor.
A view on the technical difficulty of censoring LLM‘s. I’m not sure I understand this perspective well enough, but if the training data is controlled/limited, wouldn’t the output be limited too?
Google pioneered much of the foundational research that has since led to the recent explosion in large language models.. After the clusterfuck response to its own researchers work, Google is now starting to talk about all the research it has been doing on LLMs.
Tyler Cowen’s latest Bloomberg column on how quickly LLM’s are getting better.
They are not always reliable, but they are often useful for new ideas and inspirations, not fact-checking.
I’ve started dividing the people I know into three camps: those who are not yet aware of LLMs; those who complain about their current LLMs; and those who have some inkling of the startling future before us.
Oh Sh*t! Some use for it, after all?
Lying with visualization: the St Louis Fed Reserve chart on military $ spend
CHARIENTISM [karr-ee-EN-tizz-uhm] – softening bad news with humour; disguising an insult within friendly banter [From Greek rhetoric, kharientismós] Delivering sharp blows with velvet gloves is the epitome of charientism. (HT the wicked David Astle)
Uncomfortable reading for marketing types, from the Economist: How to sell to the young
Just came across Sharon Shannon‘s music today, thanks to John Naughton.
VC Fred Wilson on AI Assist, while he gets back to writing code after years/decades:
The machines replacing humans narrative is powerful. But the narrative I prefer is that AI is making things available that have been expensive and unobtainable for so many. And that is not limited to programming. It is true of so many things.
Author Toni Morrison in a 2017 article in the New Yorker: The Work You Do, The Person You Are
Geoff Marlow: Focus for results
Stephanie Green: What makes a good one pager (Specific audience, balance visuals and text, clear call to action)
Leo Babauta: The Art of Effortless Decision Making
A16z: Who owns the generative AI platform? Spoiler alert – cloud platforms
Wendy Grossman is recording a folk-album 42 years after her first one, & marvels at the way AI is making the process simpler – more impressive, she says, than merely an AI that outputs text in rows (see Nick Cave link yesterday)
Ed Brenegar on generational relationships. Ed’s writing, & the writing of people he’s introduced me to in his network, resonate strongly with me. A simple, yet profoundly valuable question: What should change because of this idea?
Pink Floyd’s playing in the background – Lost for Words caught my attention as I was reading.
To martyr yourself to caution is not gonna help at all
Colin Newlyn’s observations on Jacinda Ardern’s walking away had me nodding furiously (Colin’s writing is to blame for my recent nodding-induced neck-aches 😉 )
Our corpus of text represents the outputs of millions of humans. Embedded within that mess of information is all of our social graphs, the information we observe, and how we have reacted, processed, and written down that information.