Category: Reading

Peruvian water whistles make animal sounds. Last week, I saw similar pots made by artisans in India that were birdsong, except that you had to blow into the pot.

A soliloquy From my favourite author Robert Fulghum, whose writing on the web is ephemeral – only the most recent three articles are visible at any time. Read quick before it disappears 🙂

Bonnie Raitt’s song Just Like That won a Grammy. Is this the story that inspired the song?

There was a school shooting in Michigan, and 17-year-old Justin Shilling was one of four students who died. His parents donated his organs. Hundreds showed up at the hospital to watch “the honor walk” — a gurney taking Justin across a windowed bridge to the operating room where his organs would be harvested.

Or was it this one?

Bruce Schneier’s new book A Hacker’s Mind reviewed by the inimitable, inexhaustible Cory Doctorow.

Ben Thompson, in his usual style, explains the Tech Recession using a biblical reference. While the technology industry is hurting (layoffs and funding drying up with bankruptcies on the rise), the rest of the economy seems to be doing better in the US (even increases in job numbers, if this tweet is to be taken at face value).

Cedric Chin of Commoncog has some ideas on how to become data driven. Using the distinction between Voice of the Customer (specifications) and Voice of the Process, by Donald Wheeler resonates strongly with my own (limited) experiences, although I did not have the vocabulary to describe it.
“You cannot investigate changes in your underlying process if you do not know which data points signal real change. ”

Google plays its hand (finally?) at its version of ChatGPT, called Bard. Given much of the foundational work on LLM’s was done by Google (& of course the cautions that Timnit Gebru paid a steep price for), this is not a surprise, I suppose?

Service-sector jobs like never before: “I made nearly $2 million in 2 years selling my nursing-school study notes on Etsy and TikTok”

The End of Writing: You can let Artificial Intelligence speak for you, but it can’t feel and think for you.

Google announces Dreamix:  a model that generates videos when given: – video + prompt (Video editing) – input images + prompt (Subject Driven Generation) – input image + prompt (Image-toVideo

Max Langenkamp on How Open Source Machine Learning Software Shapes AI

Seth Godin on What’s next:  “First in/first out is not a strategy, it’s an excuse.”

Geoff Marlow on the Power of Expectancy

Noah Smith’s attempts to get ChatGPT to write for him have “have all ended in failure, for one simple reason: ChatGPT routinely spews out a lot of fake “facts”.  (behind a paywall)

Richard Merrick on Connection & Influence: “If we want to change things for ourselves and those we care for, it starts with conversations with those we are connected to. Exploring what matters, discovering what small changes we might make, and who else we might want to connect to – properly connect to and converse with, rather than just ping someone on social media and hope.” John Boyd’s quote on vision there is perspicuous.

A series of blog posts on the “most important century” from Holden Karnofsky. Bookmarking here for ongoing reading. I’m particularly interested in this idea on how to spread messages: “find ways to help people understand the core parts of the challenges we might face, in as much detail as is feasible.”

ChatGPT sets the record for the fastest growing user-base – it’s already hit 100m users in 2 months!

Loved this story about Marines defeating a AI surveillance system

Robin Hansen hypothesizes on Why Is Everyone So Boring

This Richard Dimbleby lecture is a must listen for me at least once every year.

What companies still get wrong about layoffs via HBR

ChatGPT and its commercial applications. Other novel uses.

Investigating Santa a fun story 🙂

How does basketballer Steph Curry practice?

“it is possible to obtain dense human body poses from WiFi signals by utilizing deep learning architectures commonly used in computer vision.”🤯

Apple Macbook experience – offered here because I didn’t have a chance to read much today:
I bought a M2 Macbook Pro in late August, & it’s been working well with one annoying exception – it seemed to have an uneven base, and wobbled constantly on my desk. I put it down to an uneven table, & didn’t worry too much about it. Today, I was in the office, & was talking to a colleague about it. He too has a M2 Mac Pro, and he said that was unusual, & worth taking it to an Apple store.  I did (insert an hour and half of logistics) and walked out of the store with a new laptop. While battery swelling (or whatever it’s called) is a real thing, my machine didn’t have that, and yet was slightly out of shape. I’d noticed the wobble from day 0, and not the slight bend. In any case, I’m a happy customer of the Apple experience.

We have more than 5 senses. A 1964 article from the New York Times.

A bee in the bonnet of a New York Times columnist, and some lessons on communication power vs structural power from Dave Kampf, a professor at George Washington University

Rishad Tobaccowala’s substack is always full of actionable insights – read The Triangle of Engagement to see what I mean

From 2014: Future Islands on David Letterman, performing Seasons (Waiting on You)

 

 

This is such a powerful story: Does my son KNOW  you?

Arthur Brooks: The Science of Happiness

Adam Mastroianni proposes living with the radical idea that people aren’t stupid.

GPT:

• • OpenAI has hired a bunch of contractors to help it make ChatGPT into a no-code software development tool.
  • Yann LeCun says ChatGPT is not particularly innovative.
  • A handy simple chart to decide whether you should use ChatGPT.
  • This week’s The Batch.AI is wonderful reading, with several cautionary tales on using ChatGPT

 

 

Many strategies fail because they’re not actually strategies – a 2017 HBR post by Freek Veermeulen.

Brink Lindsay’s essay on Prospects for  a More Inclusive Capitalism, while focused on the American economy primarily, provokes thinking in a different dimension.

Bill George wonders if the business world has lost sight of integrity

 

I loved both the clever title, & the subject of Revolutionary Types.

Kate O’Neill has some sensible, practical suggestions on how to use AI writing tools.

Happiness, compared. Why is rich East Asia unhappy?

An overview of OpenAI & ChatGPT, from a business lens

Culture Wars Look Different on Wikipedia – and are slowly shaping our worldview.

Are exams dead? ChatGPT ‘passed’ the US Medical Licensing Exam. It’s also passed the Evidence and Torts Section of the Bar Exam, and the MBA exam…