Author: obsidian_ns

The 5G Hype is dying out, observes Tom Noelle. #telco

Nathan Baugh: 3 ways to get better at storytelling #storytelling

Dave Snowden: Better ways to get purposeful #complexity

Tyler Cowen: When’s the best time to read or reread many of the greatest classic novels? I say: read when young… read whenever you can… read before you die #reading

And another reader of MR writes in about Singapore, an interesting approach to how the civil servants functions there #leadership

Ed Brenegar’s advice to a new young friend: Create a life of impact #leadership

Richard Merrick on letting go.

Living through this right now: #quotes

Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect”.
– Jonathan Swift

Richard Smith & Tommy Emmanuel: Son of a Gun #music written in memory of Thom Bresh

Nicholas Carlini: An interesting test of both ChatGPT’s abilities and my own assessment of how ChatGPT will do with my prompts. I’m totally over-confident in my assessment of how ChatGPT-4 will respond, so I have some work to do on discerning the problems to get the AI to be useful.

Bill Gates is optimistic in his assessment of AI’s real risks right now and how to manage them. The technophile’s overarching theme is that humans will get through this too like previous transformations. In general it will be great for humanity. Specifically it already is catastrophic for humans, as several AI researchers have been crying out for a while.

Jessica Hagy’s one sentence seriously cynical case studies had me cackling:

• let the stakeholders think we care about them
• change the goalposts often to keep the hamsters running on their wheels
• your audience must always feel desirable
• make the turd on the plate seem appetizing
• always give your audience hope, especially when you know they’re screwed
• we’re here to take what we can get and run
• yes, this is nasty work but it pays really well
• if you can’t outspend them, out think them
• never forget that your customers are animals, just like you are
• if you have nothing special to offer, there’s always seduction via poetry

A thoroughly enjoyable interview with Roy Glauber, the Nobel Prize winner who swept the stage free of paper airplanes at the IgNobel Prizes.

Serendipitously, Bob Ewing’s speech writing blog features J Robert Oppenheimer who was also in that interview. #speech

Leo Babauta: We’re mostly trying to escape this moment #meditation

practice not escaping. When we feel uncomfortable, stay for a little longer. Not to the point of torture, but just to the point that’s just beyond our comfort zone. We grow our capacity to be with all of life.

Joyful discovery of the day: Edmund Gropl in conversation with Mike Rohde on #Zettelkasten and sketchnotes

Philip Glass: "Closing" #music

#quotes

The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without.
-Ernest Hemingway

The most valuable possession you can own is an open heart. The most powerful weapon you can be is an instrument of peace.
– Carlos Santana

Adam Mastroianni’s invitation to join a secret society is a great read. Not enough people are pursuing science because "qualifications". His suggestions are practical, & more people including myself ought to do this because we’re all naturally curious. #curiosity

News of hope: How a Brazilian couple replanted a forest #leadership

Anne Helen Petersen: Garden Mistakes Were Made. I love how AHP reframes mistakes in the garden as amazing teaching tools. Like people, each plant is different, has different needs, and takes time to get established. #leadership

Tom Nolles: Where Telcos Might Find More Opex Savings. My colleague & friend Brad put me on to Tom’s writing. I love his frank if opinionated views on the industry. Learning to pay attention, synthesise and communicate effectively is a skill worth learning anytime #writing

Storytelling with Data shows how to turn a complex looking bar chart into something more simple, elegant, and effective. #visualisation

Nick Morgan: How to Connect With An Audience Fast. #publicspeaking

We’re in the market for some kitchen appliances. The lady at the consumer goods store we were browsing at was lamenting the fact that all manufacturing had moved overseas. This article in the Economist suggests that bringing back manufacturing is a delusion. #economics

“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another. <cite>James Baldwin</cite>
#quotes

Bob Doto: Zettlekasten #notes

Pianist Glen Gould practising at home #Music

The Human Costs of Building AI: Underpaid, Overworked Labellers #AI

Pete Warden: How can AI help everyday objects? #AI

A beautiful visual explainer Understanding SVG paths #visualisation

Solving a cryptic is so much fun! #crosswords

On Appropriate Tension

x	Actually Risky	Actually Safe
Feels Risky	Risky	Growth
Feels Safe	Dangerous	Safe

What did we do after work in 2002?

This is going to be fun – #AI generated webages driving programmatic ads – via MIT Tech Review

Meta’s Llama model #AI

Ed Brenegar: A Persistent, Residual Culture of Leadership #leadership

Sara Canaday: Situational Fluency #leadership

Ask Yourself: "Why Is Now A Good Time?" #question

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Jeremy Keith: Permission Instead of responding to search queries by linking to the web pages we’ve made, Google is instead generating dodgy summaries rife with hallucina… lies #AI

MonaLisa Twins: Mercedes Benz #Music

Found on John Naughton’s blog: Claude’s Model Context Length in Context #AI

Douglas Hofstadter: Godel, Bach, Escher To fall for the illusion that vast computational systems “who” have never had a single experience in the real world outside of text are nevertheless perfectly reliable authorities about the world at large is a deep mistake, and, if that mistake is repeated sufficiently often and comes to be widely accepted, it will undermine the very nature of truth on which our society—and I mean all of human society—is based. #AI

Richard Merrick: Improvisation has an energy to it. Compromise does not.

It’s hard to soar like an eagle if you keep company with turkeys #quotes

Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Elizabeth — the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab. It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, “Call me Trim Tab.”

The truth is that you get the low pressure to do things, rather than getting on the other side and trying to push the bow of the ship around. And you build that low pressure by getting rid of a little nonsense, getting rid of things that don’t work and aren’t true until you start to get that trim-tab motion. It works every time. That’s the grand strategy you’re going for. So I’m positive that what you do with yourself, just the little things you do yourself, these are the things that count. To be a real trim tab, you’ve got to start with yourself, and soon you’ll feel that low pressure, and suddenly things begin to work in a beautiful way. Of course, they happen only when you’re dealing with really great integrity.
Buckminster Fuller

Uncertainty Project – A toolbox of ideas #tools

Blast from the past: Training video for the Bell Labs Computing Centre #computing

Casey Handmer: Why Batteries Will Win Batteries and transmission are in direct competition. Both enable electricity arbitrage – the profitable repricing of a resource by matching different levels of supply and demand. Transmission moves power through space (technically null space, at the speed of light) and batteries move power through time. And while batteries have a fixed cost per MWh delivered (that is falling about 10% per year), transmission lines get more expensive as they get longer. #energy

Wired: The History of Autocorrect #technology