What I see in different shades of gray, from behind my reading glasses
I feel calm, and at peace. The exercise of writing to process the events of the last few days had given me a clarity of purpose for a conversation I have tomorrow.
The consequences of the conversation could be significant personally. Not having the conversation will have devastating impacts on people’s mental health.
Leadership is a privilege, not a chore.
I spent much of the day writing to process the events of the last few days at work. I’ll say that poor leadership management behaviors create tears in the cultural fabric of teams slowly. Unattended, or attended to poorly, they will shred it at lightning speed. We’re at the space in between.
Brendan Sullivan: Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Mathematics
I hadn’t heard the entirety of Kurt Vonnegut‘s entire speech at Case Western Reserve University. Spectacular
Humans are biased. AI models are even more so. A splendid Bloomberg visual story
Andy Matsuchak on VisionPro. (ps: I like his note-taking style, and despite previous ham-handed attempts at creating my own, have given up on this mode.)
Jim Nielsen makes a very good point in Minute Rice, Minute Text, Minute Websites “If anybody can spin up a website in “3 easy steps” then what’s the differentiation? It’s everything after the three easy steps that counts; everything after the “website in minutes” that separates you from the rest.”
Seth Godin wonders how did we end up here, using the story of bicycles!
The surprising reason why there are so many Thai restaurants in the US
Singapore’s GenAI primer is a splendid read for a discussion paper.
Some of the best blog posts of all time. Stewart Brand’s origin story of the Whole Earth
Tyler Cowen’s Lecture at LSE on Economics, Hayek, & Large Language Models
Danilo Campos makes the case for AR, with the relevant appropriate skeptical cautions.
ChatGPT and jokes – the same 25 jokes repeated
JBTD: Bob Moesta does a live interview of “progress”
From science fiction to reality. Contrast that with Ted Jiang in the FT “ultimately, what makes our lives meaningful is the empathy and intent we get from human interactions — people responding to one another. With AI, he says: “It feels like there’s someone on the other end. But there isn’t.”
Julia Evans: Some blogging myths
Luke Burgis: Podcast heroes
Economist: The Pitfalls of Loving Your Job a Little Too Much
Stowe Boyd: Blinded by the illusion of control
Sketchplanations: Be Spontaneous: “The tremendous liberation, fear and confidence that comes with believing that you will do the right thing in the moment without knowing what it is beforehand.”
Getting back to the idea of a better future: “We may not be in control of what the future holds or able to predict it, but we should rediscover the hope that it will be better.”
Wonky. This is a fascinating article using sound, instead of mere text or video. “When you learn music, you’re trained to think [in terms of a] “right way” and a “wrong way.” It’s all just made up. You have to find your own way. And so often [in making music], the things that are deemed wrong, or unconventional, or strange — those are the things that work the best and move people the most, because people are moved by things that aren’t perfect.”
John “Cougar” Mellenamp: “I’m going to quote Bob Dylan to you. Bob and I were painting together one day, and I asked him how he wrote so many great songs. In all seriousness, he said, “John, I’ve written the same four [expletive] songs a million times.” I’m going to get in line with Bob on that. It’s always the same song, just more mature or with a different angle.”
“I’m good friends with Stephen King. I said, “Steve, why are we such hypochondriacs?” He said it’s because we make stuff up — a song, a story, a painting — and when we’re not doing that, we turn it on ourselves. You think, “Oh, I can’t breathe.” And even though you were breathing fine, all of a sudden you can’t, because you focused on it.
Mortimer Adler: How to speak, how to listen +100
3Blue1Brown: How to send a self-correcting message
A lecture on Learning to Learn by Richard Hamming, who invented those ‘parity checks’ in the video above.
Stack Exchange is going through a moderator strike, and it’s fascinating how its community are viewing this.
Geoff Marlow: Heresy to Orthodoxy