2023-08-20 Links

Daily Reads:

Rich and anonymous: I think there’s an “ideal” net worth for everyone, when money not only stops bringing pleasure but becomes a social liability. And that number is probably lower than most people think.

Richard Merrick: You are not your qualifications What matters, at the end of the day, is our intent and character. When they are on display, nobody looks at our qualifications, which is something to remember when we are packing for the journey to what we want to become. Qualifications are there for other people who don’t know us to make quick judgements to see if we “fit” the machine they are responsible for (and to).

Ben Werdmuller: Open feedback as a gift. My experiences in the last few months, particularly with poor feedback mechanisms in unsafe environments, makes me think that this method can work, and work well.

QOTD:

If you want to convey what’s inside your head, all you can do is waggle your tongue and hope to vibrate other people’s ear-bones at a frequency that makes them understand. – Adam Mastroianni

Music:

Tommy Emmanuel – Doc’s Guitar

2023-08-19 Links

Daily Reads:

  • Bob Ewin: How to find good stories. I’ve read the story of William Benz & Leonard Read, and Gary Klein’s neonatal nurse before, and drew a blank when reading it on this link. No, my memory isn’t as good with recall as I think it is, which is why Obsidian is helpful now.

  • The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon: once something comes into our attention, we see it all the time (like a Red Camry or a specific brand of shoes). Reminds me of the gorilla experiment, quite the opposite of this phenomenon?

  • The Comfort Crisis: The tendency of humans to always scan our environment for problems, regardless of how safe and perfect that environment is.

  • Tobias Rose-Stockwell is the author of Outrage Machine, and in this interview brings the topic squarely back to ‘attention’. It turns out that we have a natural disposition to focus on negatively-valenced information

  • David Cain’s ideas about future gifts left to yourself, and thinking in blocks are small enough to implement now.

  • Kaiser Fung has an update to this Ethics in data science questions. Worth grappling with.

  • Steve Blank tells the story behind the secret history of Silicon Valley. A fascinating storyteller.

  • How to move an elephant: The Flux Review’s post this week talks about the space to hold conversations in a fearless, nuanced manner – most often impossible.

  • A better way to divide the pie Some ideas on better negotiations

  • Subtraction, rather than addition, for better problem solving

  • A recent Wordsmith newsletter that had a picture of him titled "Money on the Table" and triggered some memories from a time I’ve put out of my mind.

  • Savage Chickens for Inspiration

QOTD:

“I was wise enough to never grow up, while fooling most people into believing I had.” – Margaret Mead

Music:

JS Bach: Suites for Guitar

2023-08-18 Links

Daily Reads:

Efosa Ojomo: The goal of an economy _What could be more important than enabling people to consume education, food, healthcare, leisure, knowledge, religion, friendships, dignified jobs, laughter, good governance, feelings of safety, social mobility, and perhaps most important of all, _hope?

Gary Marcus: The Imminent Enshittification of the Internet

Maciej Ceglowski: The Moral Economy of Tech

QOTD:

“Machine learning is money laundering for bias.” – Maciej Cegłowski

Music:

2023-08-16 Links

Daily Reads:

News vs LLMs: If history repeats itself, and only the details change, then should it follow that LLM’s generate the news based on past data? Media orgs don’t think so, or maybe they do? 😅

When hope is lost, we risk our lives. This is an incredible story of four men who survived 14 days on a ship’s rudder on a trip across the Atlantic from Nigeria to Brazil.

Ben Thompson on Taylor Swift and Disney makes for interesting reading. Quoting Swift’s 2014 OpEd in the WSJ:

QOTD:

Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. It’s my opinion that music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album’s price point is. I hope they don’t underestimate themselves or undervalue their art. – Taylor Swift

Music:

Be My Mistake: Mike Dawes and Tommy Emmanuel

2023-08-15 Links

Daily Reads:

I chanced upon this short talk by Eric Whitaker talking about how he learnt to ‘separate dogma from wisdom’, which I found a memorable turn of phrase.

HBR: Can You Be a Great Leader without Technical Expertise? Betteridge’s law kicks in, and a nuanced reasoning which I’m seeing play out around me.

In How America Got Mean, David Brooks makes the case for moral formation, a human skill he says has been eroding over the decades since WWII ended.

Roger Martin: Strategy, Strategy Everywhere Brand Strategy, Data Strategy, Pricing Strategy, Sales Strategy, Corporate Strategy… ad nauseum. Is there any strategy? Martin posits that strategy is singular. It is an integrated set of choices – and involves making choices under uncertainty, constraints, and competition, and it happens in a lot of places across the company. But some ‘strategy’ terms make no sense at all.

Sari Azout: A letter to a friend who is thinking of starting something new

Ava: Therapy as a way of aligning with your subconscious

Whoa! New ways of financing AI madness? CoreWeave raises $2.3m in debt collateralized by Nvidia H100 chips

Addy Osmani articulates the benefits of learning by writing I went down the rabbit hole & read this other article he published too called "The key to understanding complex systems is patience". Recommended.

QOTD:

“If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.” – Joseph Campbell

Music:

Eric Whitaker’s Virtual Choir performing Sing Gently gave me goosebumpsSing Gently

2023-08-14 Links

Daily Reads:

Luke Burgis takes a stab at explaining How to know what you really want

This guy’s DIY tips are fantastic! Here’s a bunch of things I did not know about tape measures!

Serendipitously, a conversation with a colleague today revolved around this topic Leaving the cult of never enough

Kara Wynn: Language is a poor heuristic for intelligence

Julia Evans: Tactics for writing in public

Chris Orlob: Sales demo technique

Robin Hanson: Why Interpret Me? An astute observation that for ‘prominent’ intellectuals, we seem to use their personas as a shortcut to create opinions about what that person might say, without all the messy struggles of getting to that argument. There’s more nuance to this than my coarse summary, which is why you should read the whole thing. 🙂

This is so cool, even though I’ve not read this book. A data scientist visualises the London of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway

Ethan Mollick: Automating Creativity

QOTD:

The Supreme Ethical Rule: Act so as to elicit the best in others and thereby in thyself. – Felix Adler, professor, lecturer, and reformer

Music:

Dean Martin: Sway

2023-08-13 Links

Daily Reads:

Clayton Christensen Institute: Is Your Business Model Working?:

The first note on this blog post is called Display Fascination – and it’s a scary thought that 45 years later, it’s playing out at scale.

I revisited this 2018 article by Alexis Madrigal on drop-shipping. The Generative AI content creation turns this into a ludicrous scheme.

Design for how people behave, not how they should behave. Robotaxi debauchery. Also reminds me of "unintended consequences".

Dario Amodei (CEO of Anthropic) in conversation with Dwarkesh Patel.

Culture isn’t arbitrary, argues W. David Marx in Human Defenses Against AI Culture

Video of the week: A young man explains what it feels like to be ‘dead’

QOTD:

Talented artists take in the specifics of valuable experiences. Spring isn’t just ‘nice’: Leaves that are as soft as a newborn’s hands, contrast between warm sun and a sharp breeze, the cry of baby blackbirds, moving from generalities to specifics, they bring the scene alive in our minds. – School of Life

Music:

Gretta Ziller, Judas Tree

2023-08-12 Links

Daily Reads:

Seth Godin: Significant Work is a VoteOur best work is scarce. We shouldn’t waste it on jerks, selfish hustlers, or those that don’t appreciate it.

Simon Cross: The Circle of Control Borrowing from Steven Covey, who must have also borrowed from someone?

QOTD:

Writing gives poor thinking nowhere to hide. When your invisible thoughts are made visible, you are forced to confront them as they are, not as you wish them to be. You can’t simply take a few minutes here and there, get the gist of the problem, and expect to have clear thinking and unique insights. Good thinking, like good writing, demands patience.

Music:

Wynton Marsalis delivers the Nancy Hanks Lecture 2010 is as musical as music can be. I get to watch the Jazz at the Lincoln Centre Orchestra performing at the Sydney Opera House along with the Sydney Philharmonia Choir in a couple of weeks, thanks to a chance conversation today with a parent who also sings with the SPC. I thought I’d heard Marsalis’ name before, & I was right: Ed Brenegar had posted a link to this lecture a few weeks ago.

2023-08-11 links

Daily Reads:

Designing for humans: some designers are amazing at imagining things, but not as amazing at imagining them surrounded by the universe. That beautiful thing you’re working on, it lives in a window on your monitor tucked under a title bar, and that’s as tricky as it gets.

Beirut at Sunset What is Beirut like 3 years after a blast tore apart the city?

Crowdless Future Can AI generate better ideas than humans?

Ed Brenegar: Executing a Vision for Impact as a Shared Experience in Leadership:

Rob Estreitinho: Find a borrowing system The system of capturing, processing & output-ting to “borrow from the past in thoughtful ways to do imaginative leaps into the future“.

JP Castlin: Theory & Reality when strategies do fail, it is typically because they neglect to account for the messy reality in which they are intended to be executed. Echoes the link about designing for humans above.

QOTD:

The first step is to imagine what the people you serve want and care about it.
The second is to figure out why they don’t have it yet.

If you can help people get to where they seek to go, when they’re ready to get there, the stuff called marketing gets significantly easier. – Seth Godin

Music:

It’s been a while since I’ve listened to Eric Clapton “Unplugged”. The first time I heard it was in 1993 or thereabout on MTV I think. Like, on a proper box tv – which probably makes me a neanderthal? https://youtu.be/gndC52eJwJ8

 

2023-08-10 Links

Daily Reads:

There’s incredible talent and skill on YouTube, and this short from OneSkillPowerPoint is just one example that is of practical use for me.

A little less hype-ventilating post from Mosaic Ventures on their GenAI investing framework.

Relief that Doc Searls’ has all his virtual assets in place: All home now

Jim Nielsen had two memorable reads on his blog today: Knowledge laundering on the subject of LLM’s
and on Stealth Airplanes and Best Practices as a audio-book review of Ben Rich’s memoir of his time at Lockheed Martin.
It’s a good reminder when you’re working on something to continually ask yourself about the purpose behind what you’re making. It’s very possible you might have to deviate from the “best practices” or “accepted conventions” in service of a goal that is different or beyond the tradition of any medium or form.

YouTube’s experimentation with auto-generated video captioning – reminds me of what Alex was describing

QOTD:

“Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter.” – Marcus Aurelius

"When someone acts in a surprising way, we can begin to understand by wondering what they might be afraid of." – Seth Godin had this on a very short blog post.

Music: