Category: Reading

Daily Reads:

Geoff Marlow: Mastering Creative Tension _The more powerfully we experience both a) what the future will be like when we achieve our aspiration, and b) our current reality, the greater the creative tension. But, importantly, The emotional tension only exists in my present-day current reality.

Ben Evans: Generative AI and intellectual property

Robin Hanson is eliciting interest in field observations of how often people initiate smiles. I have time, & might do an informal one on my walks.

Rohit K on Rest

Seth Godin: Create Value

QOTD:

At its heart, relevance is about living in the creative tension between evangelizing for the things you care about and listening with interest to what others care about. It’s about radiating the inside out and inviting the outside in. – Nina Simone

Music:

Arturo Sandoval – A night in Tunisia

Daily Reads:

Biomimicry: architecture inspired by nature – this from termites.

Kara Lawson inspires us to Handle Hard Better

Joshua Rudder How other languages tell the time

Alfred Hitchcock describes the difference between surprise & suspense

Bob Ewing: How to structure what you say

Matrix multiplications and vector transformations visualised, including the obligatory cat image transformed to 3D.

QOTD:

Hopemine: When you get a dopamine hit from the false first step of simply buying a product or watching a video that you hope will help you, but you stop at that point without ever taking action or applying anything new to your life. – Shawn Blanc

Music:

Chris White (Isto) performs Lydia The Tattooed Lady

Daily Reads:

Victoria aka vrk is learning stuff and made a cute website about it

Seth Godin: The Maverick and the status quo

Ness Labs: Yes, you have a sixth sense

QOTD:

I know men aren’t attracted to me by my mind. They’re attracted by what I don’t mind. – Gypsy Rose Lee

Music:

Angelo Debarre

Daily Reads:

What does it mean when ‘tech’ says no? Ben Evans suggests it’s actually 3 kinds of No

McKinsey: The Future of Generative AI in 15 charts. I appreciate the storytelling techniques that this mob uses while peering into the crystal ball that often gives confusing smoke signals.

QOTD:

It has been said that a pretty face is a passport. But it’s not, it’s a visa, and it runs out fast. – Julie Burchill

Music:

The Lute is a beautiful instrument

Daily Reads:

A friend put me on to Haile Selassie and it reminded me of Sr. A who lived in Ethiopia a long time ago. Hadn’t thought of her in forever.

The iMac launch event presentation was not as polished as the current ones, eh?

Stop fetishising mistakes. Not all mistakes are equal says this article

What the JBTD theory teaches us about Nigeria’s generator markets the (product) solution aligns with the priorities and realities of consumers. As explained by Jobs theory, the functional, social, and emotional elements that inform purchase decisions are present in the case of generators in terms of their affordability, availability, and accessibility.

Robin Hanson has an interesting argument: Shrinking economies don’t innovate Once we have entered into a shrinking world economy, we cannot put much hope on tech or innovation solutions. The most likely time to find such solutions is before the decline.
Yes, a shrinking economy could get some advantages from larger levels of prior accumulated capital. But its workforce is also older on average, with more retired folks to support.

Tyler Cowen has a bunch of questions on his mind, but this one in particular stood out for me: 9. When generative AI models become better and smarter, how many more people will be interested in incorporating them into their workflows?  Or will most of this happen through a complete turnover of companies and institutions, happening much more slowly over time?

Always useful to go back to Hans Rosling demonstrating with stats that The World is Getting Better video

Leber on Lucidty. "a lucid person is compelling, perceptive, and aware of life’s meta-games."

Sara Canaday: Go ahead leaders, let yourself off the hook Our current business environment is so intense that leaders today are forgetting they are actually…human.

QOTD:

Things are not asking to be judged by you. Remember, you always have the power to have no opinion. – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Music:

Anouar Brahem – C’est Allieurs

Daily Reads:

Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay "As We May Think" was the impetus for Doug Englebart’s work over the next few decades.

AI is ineffective and potentially harmful at fact checking. A paper I think will be the canary in the coal-mine on this topic.

(not much reading done today given the conversations I’ve had all day long)

QOTD:

We need to give our full attention to what matters most. – Gary Klein

Music:

Daily Reads:

The big news in the economics world lately is China’s ‘recession’. Noah Smith tries his hand at explaining "Why China’s economy ran off the rails"

DFW: This is Water. Always remember.

Augmenting Human Intellect – 35 Years Later. This is a fantastic 2 hour long video of Doug Englebart’s contributions to the tools we take for granted today. Doug’s philosophy that led him to do all these wonderful things is inspiring.

Richard Ekwonye is a front-end designer/engineer whose explanation of the Bezier curves is awe-inspiring.

Elad Gil: Early Days of AI When many business people talk about “AI” today, they treat it as a continuum with past capabilities of the CNN/RNN/GAN world. In reality it is a step function in new capabilities and products enabled, and marks the dawn of a new era of tech.
It is almost like cars existed, and someone invented an airplane and said “an airplane is just another kind of car – but with wings” – instead of mentioning all the new use cases and impact to travel, logistics, defense, and other areas. The era of aviation would have kicked off, not the “era of even faster cars”.

Also, Elad Gill: High Growth Handbook

QOTD:

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colours. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” – Terry Pratchett

Music:

Django Reinhardt – Minor Swing

Daily Reads:

Gary Klein: Cognitive Diversity, what it is and why it matters

Ethan Mollick: Now is the time for grimoires

Mari Andrew: 100 Things I Know

AI Assistance in Legal Analysis

Revisiting Rob Miller’s Collective IQ & Continuous Improvement blog post, inspired by Doug Englebart. Collective IQ improvement is, in a way, what I’ve been doing with all the communities I’ve been building and nurturing.

😅 Sherlock Holmes paid zero tax thanks to his deductions. -Dad Jokes

Richard Merrick: Artisanal Meandering Trying to think faster makes about as much sense as asking trees to grow faster.

QOTD:

Politicians use statistics in the same way that a drunk uses lamp-posts – for support rather than illumination – Andrew Lang

Music:

Smokey Robinson – Ooh Baby Baby

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

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