Author: obsidian_ns

Daily Reads:

Obsidian question: How do you save quotes? Lots of ideas here to inspire but I’ll have to figure out what works best in my workflow for myself.

Elizabeth Minkel: Why Generative AI Won’t Disrupt Books Loved it entirely, and the QOTD below. I’m bemused with the obsession right now with ‘generative text’, saving oneself a lot of time in creating content. Who’s actually reading the rubbish you’re creating? And if writing or art is really for thinking, does it make sense to give that up to the machines?

Only fresh for a few days: The State of Open Source LLM models

Darius Foroux: To make a lot of money, observe the future Clickbaity headline, & it caught my attention for sure.

you’ll want to observe and analyze facts: Study the economy, understand technological changes, and see how these factors impact our daily lives.

QOTD:

… plain old reading still works for huge numbers of people, many of whom pick up books because they want to escape and not be the main character for a while. -Elizabeth Minkel

Music:

Needed Leonard Cohen’s reminder in the Anthem about cracks in everything – that’s how the light gets in.

Daily Reads:

Rob Miller: The usefulness of constraints …a tool we can deliberately use in order to influence the behaviour of systems and groups of people.

Jim Nielsen: User Feedback "All they ever wanted was to get a job done, and our interface was nothing more than a delivery mechanism for the thing they actually wanted."

QOTD:

My therapist told me "write letters to the people you hate and burn them". Did that, but now I don’t know what to do with the letters.

Thanks AJW 🙂

Music:

Inka Gold – the brothers are incredible musicians, as this cover of El Condor Pasa will prove.

Daily Reads:

Sketchplanations: Point Positive My #0.02: Everything is contextual, isn’t it? If there’s no acknowledgement from anyone that there is a problem, how do you point positive?

Rishad Tobaccowala: A Company Of One You stay because you can go & other great ideas in this week’s missive.

Jesse Kornbluth: The Woman Who Beat The Klan – an incredibly moving story of persecution and justice.

QOTD:

The era of every-declining broadband price per bit is likely ending, unless planners figure out a way to implement at least one of the strategies they’re considering. – Tom Nolles

Music:

Don Ross – in memory of Eddie Van Halen

Daily Reads:

• Anthony Howard: Change is an inside job The question you need to ask yourself is not what can you do for nature, but what can nature do for you?
• Flux Collective Episode 110 has a section called Success Creates Calluses, a topic of resilience. we learn is that things become resilient a little bit at a time. It is rare that resilient artifacts are made from whole cloth. Instead, they acquire resilience through the passage of time. Resilience emerges from cycles of rupture and repair that leave visible marks: the calluses, scars, dents, and scuffs of use. The very signs that show that a fixed-lifespan product is nearing its end are the ones that tell us that a long-lived item has been able to survive.
• The symphony of Wikipedia edits Can’t really be called a read – but the idea is fascinating!
• Gwern’s Internet Search Tips
• Seth Godin: Products & Processes Often, we use the product we make as a reason to tolerate the process we don’t enjoy.
• Timothy B Lee & Sean Trott On Understanding LLMs. Their analogies and explanations are excellent.
• Mutable AI blog: The AI Organisation

QOTD:

An AI organization is an entity that primarily uses AI to manage information flow within the organization and decide on team composition and function. – Mutable.AI

Music:

Josh Taylor, Carson McKee & Skylar McKee cover Rhythm Aces’ Third Rate Romance

Bob Ewing has a great collection of [Ideas Worth Exploring](Ideas Worth Exploring)

Terence Eden: Big numbers are difficult to contextualise

Colin Newlyn on Working to live vs living to work

Heather Bryant on Trusting News Organisations. Love this.

Hanif Kureishi on life, death and dreaming of returning home

A question worth asking every day: "So, what makes you feel alive these days?”, thanks to Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Quote of the day:

“For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light Fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break Faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”_ – James Baldwin

Poem of the week: “Small Kindnesses,” by Danusha Laméris

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”

Arlo Guthrie has a brilliant insight for us all at 1020 into this amazing rendition of Amazing Grace

Pete Seeger & Judy Collins Turn Turn Turn

Laughter is the best medicine

Leila Gharani made my jaw drop this morning. I’ve not used Excel like I did in a previous life for a while, so some of these new features are indeed spectacular.

Roger Martin: Strategy vs Planning

“Stopping, calming, and resting are preconditions for healing. If we cannot stop, the course of our destruction will just continue.” – Thich Nhat Hanh

Sahil Bloom: How will you live your life? The idea of Resume Virtues and Eulogy Virtues is a great framework way to think about life, as David Brooks writes.

Henrik Karlsson: Good Ideas

Author interview: Gloria Mark: Attention Span

Write with love: Chuck Tingle

Roger Martin: How to Thwart Strategy Masquerades

Quote of the day:

… being exceptionally talented and trained was, in the long run, not enough to do groundbreaking work because they lacked the capacity to go beyond the context they had been raised in. – Henrik Karlsson

This hour long handpan music was my primary choice for today. Two other songs that captivated my attention were Arlo Guthrie’s Alice Restaurant Massacree for the clever lyrics and Mary Gauthier’s Mercy Now (Theres people in power who’ll do anything to keep their crown are words that transform the experience I’m going through into verse)

I don’t know how Cory Doctorow does this, but it’s a veritable feast to read any of his posts, like this one about autoenshittification. The extent of deep linking he does in every one of his blog posts is surreal – I’ll never be able to read even a fraction of them. #writing

Nick Morgan: 5 ways to handle a hostile audience #publicspeaking

Sarah Bell created an animated version of Dr. John Snow’s Cholera Deaths map #visualisation

Tom Nolles is dropping some great insights every day about the telco industry #telco

Raymond Luk: Stop pitching and start figuring out why you’re so special #startup

Steve Blank: Lean meets wicked problems

Ethan Mollick on Holding back the AI tide:https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/on-holding-back-the-strange-ai-tide The scientists and engineers designing AI, as capable as they are, have no particular expertise on how AI can best be used, or even how and when it should be used. We get to make those decisions. But we have to recognize that the AI tide is rising, and that the time to decide what that means is now.

Word of the day: pastiche: an artistic style that imitates that of another work, artist, or period

Hydraloop is an interesting concept that has turned into reality what I’ve pondered about while doing the dishes – why can’t water that is used once (like the shower or washing machine or the kitchen sink) be used to water the garden?

Anne H Petersen on what community we have. Worth reflecting on.

John Hagel: Strategy as a catalyst for change. Merit in thinking about this at a personal level as much as at a professional or organisational one. #strategy

Jake Seliger: https://jakeseliger.com/2023/07/22/i-am-dying-of-squamous-cell-carcinoma-and-the-treatments-that-might-save-me-are-just-out-of-reach/ #health

Music for the soul: Vivaldi #music

A reminder for when in a downward spiral: "let us spend time with something or somebody we admire!" #quote