What I see in different shades of gray, from behind my reading glasses
Books, & links to all kinds of stuff I found interesting
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
“Machine learning is money laundering for bias.” – Maciej Cegłowski
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:
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
Be My Mistake: Mike Dawes and Tommy Emmanuel
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.
“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
Eric Whitaker’s Virtual Choir performing Sing Gently gave me goosebumps
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
The Supreme Ethical Rule: Act so as to elicit the best in others and thereby in thyself. – Felix Adler, professor, lecturer, and reformer
Dean Martin: Sway
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’
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
Gretta Ziller, Judas Tree
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
“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.
Seth Godin, 3 years ago, at the Nordic Business Forum: How to get your ideas to spread
Grant Sanderson of 3Blue1Brown YT channel channels his inner Leonard Cohen to do some math in verse Matt Parker grins and holds on for dear life 😃 – yeah, the same Matt Parker of the Spreadsheet Standup fame
I’ve tried to learn how to sight read music, in vain of course. The kids put me to shame every time I try to pick up a piece they’re learning and play along with them because I can’t keep up 😸 Found this video by accident last night, and will attempt to learn.
I like this graphic – a reminder I needed today.
How should one gauge trustworthiness? Here’s a nugget of wisdom: converse with those who worked under them, rather than those who they reported to. We become adept at projecting a facade upwards, yet those subordinate to us usually experience our true selves. They are on the receiving end of the unfiltered individual, and know that they are truly like when under pressure. Subordinates will quickly let you know if their boss is trustworthy. – Anthony Howard
Annie Lennox and Eurythmics: Here comes the rain again
Tom Nolles has a good hard look at the business cases behind Generative AI through the lens of earnings reports, and is not convinced. You need a business case for anything to drive massive market changes. There has to be buyers willing to pay and sellers able to profit. Right now, we’re in the venture stage of generative AI, the stage where everyone is excited except the accountants, who are increasingly frightened. The fact is that there are many valuable AI applications, but those applications use something different from the generative AI models we see, use, and hear about. Many are really machine learning, a few add some neural network processing, and a very small number are based on a less resource-intensive form of deep learning or large language modeling, but trained and used on specialized and even user-specific data.
Important advice:
Emily Bender’s latest post about a baby peacock reminded me of The Lindy Effect. (Sounds more impressive when you say Lindy Effect? 😉 The future life-expectancy of some non-perishable thing is proportional to their current age.
Leo Babuta has a gentle reminder: 5 ways to reduce stress levels
These last few weeks, I’ve been ruminating on the tools I’ve used over the years to collect information: digital, analog, my own (degrading) memory. Diving headlong into Zettelkasten and Obsidian a few weeks ago, I’ve realised how much this simple text based tool has changed the way I am working, not only in collecting information but synthesizing it, connecting it, and dare I say even sharing the links. Discovering the relationships between ideas is so powerful. Richard Merrick’s post today about The Tools We Use was serendipitous, & put that into words better than I could, of course.
Robert Wringham features Megan Kelso as an example of showing up, and continuing to make comics long after she made a public commitment. Hilarious choice of words of course: Catfood Omelettes > I plan to be drawing comics when I am an old, old, woman, barring early death or a freak accident. Maybe I’ll own a skating rink or maybe I’ll be living on catfood omelettes in a damp basement apartment, but I WILL be making comics.
Dan Cable explains disengagement from boring work in this Big Think YouTube video. Sick observations about modern management practices. 💙 The idea of removing meaning from job and curiosity from job was intentional.
Bob Ewing: How to get people to care. I’ve not heard Sandy’s story before, and Ewing makes a compelling argument to use pathos to get peolpe to care.
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently something that should not have been done at all. – Peter Drucker
Geoff Castellucci’s rendition of Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues. The comments on Geoff’s YT videos are hilarious always, including this one that I paraphrase: "I think I just got pregnant listening to Geoff, & I’m a man."_