What I see in different shades of gray, from behind my reading glasses
Robin Hanson: Gender and status
Image of the day: An ageing population is less innovative in a wide swathe of industries. (HT Caleb Watney)
Chris Hayzel: How to suck at music – the lessons are relevant to every endeavor
Tina Turner chanting a Buddhist mantra
Bob Dylan turned 82 on May 24. Jesse “Headbutler” Kornbluth has a lovely collection of his works and works about him
Bob Moesta talks about the JBTD theory: “Questions create spaces in the brain for solutions to fall into”
Po-Shen Lo, a maths teacher, is the subject of this WSJ article: “The future of jobs is figuring out how to find pain points,” he said. “And a pain point is a human pain.”
Seth Godin in conversation with Tyler Cowen. Doesn’t get better than this 🙂
The ABC’s digital identity visualisation based on your compromised email id. Stunningly executed.
The web’s most important decision
Shawn (swyx) has some thoughts on how to Learn in public
Leo Babauta: Embarrassment is an integral part of the growth process
Hannah Fry: What is rewilding?
BBC: How good is eagle vision? And image recognition makes a surprise appearance (no pun intended)
Anne H Petersen: The Optimisation Sinkhole It’s remembering, over and over again, what a blessing it is to be simply, overwhelmingly, satisfied
Ben Werdmuller: Is AI an evolutionary trend? TL;DR: No.
Matt Mullenberg: The Power of One
Bob Ewing: How to deal with disagreeable people. What a story!
Juergen Schimdhuber, Father of Modern AI, on his life’s work
I’m noticing a fascinating development during the ‘annual performance evaluation’ season. Employees are required to request feedback, and the volume of requests is driving some clever people to use ChatGPT to provide feedback. All good, right? Not so fast. One recipient read out the feedback they got from a senior leader because they knew it was ‘fake’. The damage is already done to that relationship between them, unbeknownst to the senior leader.
Wired: Doug Rushkoff
Richard Merrick Reflections 28 May 2023
Phillip Carter: All the hard stuff no one talks about building stuff with LLMs
Microsoft Developer Conference: State of GPT
Ethan Mollick: What happens when AI reads a book
ChatGPT + Notable “ Do you use Python, Pandas, and Seaborn to collect, analyze, and plot data? Then you’ll be amazed by what ChatGPT can do, when using ChatGPT+, GPT-4 model, and the plugin for Noteable’s version of Jupyter notebooks.”
David Brooks: The Moral Bucket List
A valuable repo on the evolution of language models
Prof E W Dijkstra on the “foolishness of natural language programming“
Baldur Bjarnason: Generative AI BS detector
Stowe Boyd: The purpose of an economy is not to make the boss happy (somehow I lost my feed to Boyd’s splendid substack, now rectified)
Charles Handy: A Portfolio Life
Rodney Brooks: Calm down about GPT4
RIP Martin Amis. A 1998 review of Four Weddings & A Funeral to remember him by.
Down a memory lane: Jobs Demo’ing the Apple Mac
I did not know Maria Montessori’s story, and I’m glad I didn’t skip reading this story! Long Now: The Epoch of the Child
A conversation with economist Daron Acemoglu (FT): “Yes, you got progress,” Acemoglu says, “but you also had costs that were huge and very long-lasting. A hundred years of much harsher conditions for working people, lower real wages, much worse health and living conditions, less autonomy, greater hierarchy. And the reason that we came out of it wasn’t some law of economics, but rather a grassroots social struggle in which unions, more progressive politics and, ultimately, better institutions played a key role — and a redirection of technological change away from pure automation also contributed importantly.”
Ed Brenegar: Seeing Below the Surface of Things Ed’s writing on certain topics resonates strongly with me, while others I still have a while to go to learn what he sees and why.
“Sometimes when you’re in a dark place you think you have been buried, when actually you have been planted” – Christine Caine (HT ASR)
Sarah Canaday: Leading on the Tightrope. “Business is not a democracy” is the most telling line.
Richard Merrick is on fire! Artisans and the first rule of uncertainty. “…three things matter. Firstly, we have a commitment to something bigger than ourselves that needs us (whatever that may be for us). Secondly, being part of a community that values us for who we are more than the stories we tell about ourselves, and thirdly, a skill that will help others. Something that constitutes “good work”, that makes us a living in a way that does not cause harm to or exploit others, has an eye to beauty, and understands the concept of “enough.”
Gaping Void: Totemic Power
Is it possible to Show Confidence and Be Vulnerable at the same time? Scott Eblin says yes.
Henrik Karlsson: Building new cultures.
Ben Evans: There’s no such thing as data
Sara Soueidan’s website is a goldmine of knowledge about accessibility design on the web.
Accessible Numbers: another goldmine on the topic.
This looks rather interesting to play with
Seth Godin has another reminder about the choice we have to go ‘steady’: Compounding head starts.
