Category: Reading

Daily Reads:

Simon Willison’s annotated presentations workflow is interesting

Geoff Marlow’s post on the Double Disconnect between decision-making on one side, sense-making and action-taking on the other rings so loud and true. The people who make sense of the situation are usually at the front-lines, and are also the ones taking action. Decision makers (often stated as being the top of the organisation food chain) are not involved sense-making at all.

arXiv: Self-consuming generative models go mad Model collapse is risk with multiple models being trained on synthetic data. This paper suggests that a small dose of synthetic data, using like salt in cooking, may improve the performance of the models. Glass coffin, I say.

Jack Clark’s "Tech Tales" section of his newsletters are a huge draw card for me. In Episode 335, Sentience Is For Rich People got me thinking about my own kids, and access to technology at home.

Kashmir Hill profiles tech reporter Mike Masnick in the New York Times. What (he) doesn’t have in wealth, he makes up for in influence.

Rishad Tobaccowala’s writing has been another of my weekend (or Monday morning) staples. He’s shared a celebratory post, with a collection of some of the most read (popular?) posts from the last 3 years.

Scott Belsky: 12 Thoughts on Running (and Leading Teams and Building Products).

Brink Lindsey explores the question What Are Humans For? in the context of generative AI and it’s perceived threat to employment. First and foremost, they are for making and taking care of other human beings and enjoying their company. We may someday employ intelligent assistants to help us in these tasks, but we can never lose sight of the fact that vital connections to other flesh-and-blood people are at the heart of what makes life worth living. Furthermore, humans are for exploring and seeking to understand the world — and the larger universe — around them, and then using that understanding to serve human purposes.

Eric Nehrlich: The price and cost of belonging resonated strongly.

QOTD:

and it is also my quote of the day
And yet I still struggle to feel like I belong, still feel pressure to prove my value in every moment, as these childhood habits are still wired into my unconscious nervous system. This helps me in some ways; my hypervigilance and sensitivity to what is happening around me means that I detect subtle cues while coaching that can lead to deeper conversations. It also helps me to be a better parent. But it has a cost, as I live much of my life in a fight-or-flight activated state with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline flooding my body.

Music:

Jeremy Keith posted this on his blog Adactio – his friends Rowan Piggott & Rosie Hodgson turn a glass of beer into wonderful song

Daily Reads:

Dr. Emily Bender is scathing on what the 7 companies avoided committing to in their public stance on "Ensuring Safe, Secure & Trustworthy AI". She’s linked to this Mastodon thread that has a brilliant metaphor comparing AI synthetic output to an oil spill. Worth the read.

Anne H Petersen: The workday deadzone is a fake problem

Take with a great big pinch of salt, a16z’s Economics Case for Generative AI The focus is on the marginal cost of creation, which the authors claim is near zero for many tasks. Yet,

For many applications, AI is not competing with a traditional computer program, but with a human. And when the job involves one of the more fundamental capabilities of carbon life, such as perception, humans are often cheaper. Or, at least, it’s far cheaper to get reasonable accuracy with a relatively small investment by using people.

Ooh, this is fascinating! Are people generous when the financial stakes are high? Two-hundred participants were drawn from three low-income countries (Indonesia, Brazil, and Kenya) and four high-income countries (Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States) as part of a preregistered study. On average, participants spent over $6,400 on purchases that benefited others, including nearly $1,700 on donations to charity, suggesting that humans exhibit remarkable generosity even when the stakes are high.

Ed Brenegar on Learning to Observe and Understand Culture: The deep lesson is that you cannot gain an understanding of the world by just reading books, listening to podcasts, and watching lectures on YouTube. You have to develop the facility to talk with people. I know that people do not do this because they fear looking ignorant. We are all ignorant about most things in life. It is only when we realize that our lack of understanding is the best entre’ into getting to know people and learning about the world. It is how real self-awareness happens.

QOTD:

"We can disagree and still love each other. Unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression, your denial of my humanity, my right to exist." – Robert Jones Jr.

Music:

Magnificent Oud meditative music

Daily Reads:

Ethan Mollick: In praise of boring AI Companies and organizations could start with thinking about how to make boring processes “AI friendly,” allowing machines (with human supervision) to fill our required forms. Rewarding workers for slaying boring tasks with AI could also help streamline operations while making everyone happier. And, if this sheds light on tasks that could be safely automated with no decrease in value, so much the better. Maybe that is work that can be eliminated.

I almost skipped this article on "Regenerative Travel" but I’m glad I didn’t. Combinatorial innovation holds so many possibilities – and lots of failures along the way.

In Deferred Happiness and The Retirement Trap, Sahil Bloom claims "The traditional concept of retirement is grounded in a foundational assumption that there should be a "before and after" within your life. I would propose a reframe: The goal is to design a life that you don’t need to retire from."

I struggle with focus (obviously!) and so a note to self. Put this into practice

I had a long discussion with an older gentleman this morning about money as the primary way of measuring success. The return on hassle is a different phrasing of the idea I was espousing but hadn’t heard until now.

Simon Willison inspires me to try this over the next few days. Maybe. Run Llama2 on your own Mac using LLM and Homebrew

Stowe Boyd’s 2015 article in Wired imagining the corporation of 2050 I’ve selected three extremely pressing problems, and their impact on jobs and work, to serve as the dimensions for scenario development: economic inequality, climate change, and artificials (AI and robots).

QOTD:

The grounding of life is those we love, more so than work we love, no matter how much we love our work. -Stowe Boyd

Music:

Southern Raised Grandpa – Tell me about the good old days

Daily Reads:

Steven Pressfield: Self-doubt Part 3.
Part 1 & Part 2 are also great reads

Gleb Tsipursky in Forbes: The damaging results of the Return To Work mandate are becoming clear ^1c5cf5

Nick Morgan: How to Lead with Socratic Questions

https://www.cascade.io/ The co-founders of this no-code analytics tool have a final post of their learning from the venture.

Another example of why I love Adam Mastroianni’s writing – How many people has Dolly Parton killed?

Tim Bray, writing about Alex Waterhouse-Hayward, an 80-year-old master photographer at work: Scanography.

Mary Flanagan: What if Wargames Could Be Something Else?

Mary L ‘Missy’ Cummings: What self driving cars tell us about AI risks

Ben Werdmuller: Always know your core value proposition

Markdown tips I learnt today for Obsidian:

• To share a link to [[2023-08-03 Links | Yesterday’s Links]] all I have to do is include a pipe operator inside the [[ syntax after the page ]]
• Linking to a block inside a page, use a ‘^’ operator [[2023-08-04 Links#^1c5cf5 | linked above]]
• Linking to a heading inside a page, use the ‘#’ operator after the page inside the [[ syntax

QOTD:

we need to disempower the Product Managers who insist on “improving” their offerings for reasons related to their career aspirations, not their customers’ experience. I loathe their assumption that the cost of the world retraining itself is zero. – Tim Bray

Music:

Sinead O’Connor & Willie Nelson: Don’t Give Up

Daily Reads:

HBR: Why do we continue to reward A while hoping for B? We hope for collaboration and teamwork for the benefit of the organization but provide incentives for individual performance. The paper referred to in this article (Author: Steven Kerr) is a worthwhile read

Roger Martin How Brands Grow, and Playing to Win

QOTD:

The first thing to do when thinking about starting a project, before you invest in systems design, infrastructure or fancy tools, is to practice getting some customers. And the second thing to do is to find out what it’s like to delight or disappoint those customers. -Seth Godin

Music:

Sting: Shape of My Heart

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.”