2023-07-18 Links

Good work, however we term it, is dependent on relationships first and structure second. – Richard Merrick

Rishad Tobaccowala: 5 Keys to Ensure Professional Relevance

Fran Drescher’s speech on SAG-AFTRA strike

When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir? – Keynes

Gaping Void: The Peace Sign wasn’t Invented By Hippies

Raymond Luk: Repetition is Sexy In startups, we expect the performance of an elite athlete but we pay no attention to repetition. Why do we expect a first time founder to win a match if they’ve never been on the practice court?

Paul Graham: How To Do Great Work

Am I working on what I most want to work on?

Great work happens by focusing consistently on something you’re genuinely interested in.

Be professionally curious about a few topics and idly curious about many more

One way to (see more possibilities) is to ask what would be good ideas for someone else to explore. Then your subconscious won’t shoot them down to protect you.

People show much more originality in solving problems than in deciding which problems to solve.

If you were to take a break from serious work to work on something just because it would be really interesting, what would you do?

People think big ideas are answers, but the real insight was in the question.

2023-07-17 Links

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

MonaLisa Twins: Mercedes Benz

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

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.

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

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

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.

Wired: The History of Autocorrect

2023-07-16 Links

Strategy in Praxis: Emergent Organisations

Tony Kulsea: A Relatively Small Amount of Force What you’re really doing (and to the dismay of some observers, all you’re really doing) when you start a startup is committing to solve a harder type of problem than ordinary businesses do

“women relate face to face, men relate shoulder to shoulder” – Richard Reeves
hmmm

Ed Brenegar: Start Right. now If you want to be strong, or find the strength to be resilient, do these five things: Educate Yourself. Simplify Your Life. Create a Purpose for Impact. Establish a Network of Relationships. Write to Understand What You Think & Feel.

Puzzle Theory there are no cheat codes for people. You’ve actually got to use empathy with each other and build a community made of three dimensional human beings

Ben Werdmuller: How I think about Technical LeadershipThe output of a technical team is not code

Amber Case: How To Identify Truthy Trends After seeing outbreaks of truthiness repeatedly come and go for several decades, I’ve started to wonder if there is any reliable way for us to immunize ourselves against technology’s most grandiose, unsustainable promises. Maybe it’s just human nature for us to get momentarily excited about the latest bauble. Perhaps all we can do is keep in mind that being dazzled by truthiness is basically part of our DNA. Truthful tech, by contrast, wins out over the long haul!

2023-07-09 Links

Paul Graham: How to do great work  “Once you’ve found something you’re excessively interested in, the next step is to learn enough about it to get you to one of the frontiers of knowledge. Knowledge expands fractally, and from a distance its edges look smooth, but once you learn enough to get close to one, they turn out to be full of gaps.”

Careering life – a fantastic exploration of what it means to be creative at work while growing as a human.

Suzi Quatro & Chris Norman

The things we fear most in organisations – fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances – are the primary sources of creativity. – Meg Wheatley

 

On writing: A prayer wheel for capitalism

Good work is not enough. “Success is a lagging indicator”

The Miracle Sudoku. Constraints can be beautiful for creativity.

2023-07-02 Links

Om Malik: AI Hype – Smoke & Mirrors. The reason apps worked was a. Happiness (enchantment) or b. Utility (or solving a problem). The same holds for AI apps.

I discovered RSS (& Google Reader) from a Toastmasters’ speech about the subject, & have been hooked on RSS ever since to keep up with my reading. This Verge article was another one to reminisce about that time.

Long read from the Gradient: Why Transformative AI is really hard to achieve

Ethan Mollick: The Homework Apocalypse

An interesting Twitter thread for book openings