What I see in different shades of gray, from behind my reading glasses
Books, & links to all kinds of stuff I found interesting
Kurt Armstrong’s advice is to repair and remain
Sahil Bloom asked a bunch of nonagenarians what advice they’d give their 32 year old self
A Sydney startup proposes that Room Temperature Sodium Sulphur batteries can be a cheaper alternative storage mechanism.
Excel Mandelbrot? Seriously? Hui demonstrates how to on Chandoo’s blog.
Cory Muscara on lessons from meditating for 15 hours a day for six months.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff on Change Fatigue:
Change fatigue mostly arises when we feel like we’re not in control of the never-ending chaos that keeps on derailing our routines and forces us to constantly adapt. Very often, it is the case that change itself is unavoidable. What we have some control over, however, is how we react to change.
Dr. Hannah Rose explains how a family trip to Abilene gone wrong led to an observation called the Abilene paradox:
this unfortunately common situation where a group of people agree to an idea, despite most of them not fully believing that it is the best decision.
Robin Dunbar explains how the Dunbar number is more a series of numbers, or concentric circles, rather than an absolute
David Clowery, a songwriter, has a different take on the “Open” part of OpenAI.
Tom Krazit on why MS needs OpenAI & is worth the $10b price tag
AI recommendation of books on AI
I’ve received, gratefully, a mammoth data/information/knowledge/wisdom dump today, and a collection of the things, unsynthesized are here for later consumption/digestion:
On the dangers of Stochastic Parrots
Steve Blank has some advice for a B2B startup on its sales strategy: Be where your business is.
In Redefining the analytical process, the author emphasizes that while exploratory analysis takes time, explanatory analysis is the visible part and where more time must be actually spent for the message to land effectively.
Origins of the World Map (Video)
For laughs & giggles – and to try out on the next trip to the beach 🙂 Potato shaped stones are better for skimming
On the train trip to work & back today, I watched the interview on Caro & Gottlieb I linked to yesterday. Magnificent. I also discovered a 3 year old interview of Caro on DemocracyNow which is also fantastic. Robert Caro’s research, and his storytelling angles are incredibly inspiring, focusing as they do on “how power affects the powerless”.
Rands on The Seven Dispositions of Task Management.
40 ways to let go and feel less pain
I’m perturbed that I keep getting links to LessWrong: 100 Tips for A Better Life:
100. Bad things happen dramatically (a pandemic). Good things happen gradually (malaria deaths dropping annually) and don’t feel like ‘news’. Endeavour to keep track of the good things to avoid an inaccurate and dismal view of the world.
A little help to find/define/sharpen your Life Principles
Colin Newlyn writes a substack on decrapifying work (and if that isn’t a word, it should be).
on GPT:
On the YT watch list: Robert Caro & Robert Gottlieb in conversation at the New York Public Library
Investing a little extra into my slideware gives me much greater control over my storytelling in presentations. I’m grateful to this insanely talented, creative and generous gentleman on YouTube for the inspiration to lift my own game a notch (and many more to aspire to climb)
Geoff Marlow: Culture is inherently an embodied experience, brought to life through the clues, cues, signs and signals picked up from seven channels. He brings to life research from the 1990’s on organisational transformation, with the 7 channels of culture: Persuasive communication, participation, role modelling, expectancy, structural rearrangement, extrinsic rewards & coercion.
Ed Brenegar on Synthetic Awareness. Ed’s writing often resonates strongly with me. I’ve said to him in one of our first interactions that his writing gave me a vocabulary to think about myself in a way I’ve not been able to before.
On ChatGPT (this is going to be a standing item for a while?):
Scott Belsky’s Predictions for 2023
Is the quality of Talks at Google deteriorating? I’m not going to link to any here, but I’m finding that the signal to noise ratio has been steadily decreasing of late. Interviewers are awestruck with their guests, seem to do little to no research on the topics or the guests, and the video/audio/lighting are like from the 90’s.
On GPT:
Cassie Robinson on bringing awareness and competence of this quote, in Funding The Third Horizon:
“the future is not necessarily somewhere we go, it’s somewhere we live, but we’re not so aware of it.”
ChatGPT is a bullshit generator, say Aravind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor in this entertaining read. It is still useful in some cases, for example where truth doesn’t matter aka in writing fiction.
Sahil Bloom’s 23 actions to improve your 2023 has some gems
QOTD Ray Bradbury:
“Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad—you did it. At the end of the week you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year.”
Om Malik’s “we are certified addicts to attention” is my QOTD. In his post titled “Why Internet Silos Win“, Om’s observation rings true for me:
If we didn’t care for attention, we wouldn’t be doing anything at all. We wouldn’t broadcast. Instead, we would socialize privately in communication with friends and peers.
Warp News has an optimistic take on AI unleashing creativity
Learning to paint takes years of practice. With AI, everyone who wants to paint just needs to learn how to use AIs that paint. When we, via AI tools, also can create music, other types of audio, and video – and of course combine them – even more creativity will be unleashed. This creativity has so far been trapped, but can now come out. That unleashed creativity will create millions of jobs and tons of human progress. The number of designers, artists, and writers will increase dramatically.
Richard Merrick is on my “do not miss reading” list. Here’s one reason. Thanks to Ed Brenegar for drawing my attention to his work.
Pioneering a New Paradigm: A link to a link from a link is how I found this, and I’m glad I did!
In spite of popular slogans, the world doesn’t change one person at a time. It changes as people interact and work together. When local efforts connect as networks, then commit to work as a community of practice, a new system emerges at a greater level of scale.
Stephanie Green reminds that people are meaning-makers, and to always put your audience front of mind when creating any visualisations of your data