Links
Google Experiments: Say What You See. Being able to describe what you see is a skill that is useful not just for prompt-engineering, which this seems to be targeted towards, but to describe the world around me with more use of as many of my senses as possible.
A collection of boundary phrases – short sentences that assertively set boundaries without creating conflict. "I need you to help me", "I understand you need my help, but I cannot work on this right now", "Im not available" are some that I need in my vocabulary more, along with the reminder that "No" is a complete sentence on its own.
Terence Eden’s review of Ken Banks’ book "Pursuit of Purpose", specifically this part makes me want to read it:
Ken is relentlessly practical. He explains how to examine what works and what doesn’t. How to assess whether you’re able to solve a problem and what to do in the face of adversity. Whereas an American book might be self-aggrandising and cult-like, Ken’s approach is almost ego-less and much more structured around how to build a movement for continual change.
Rishad Tobaccowala in Future proofing careers offers 3 behaviours to incorporate into the "company of one" mindset: being in charge of your own career (think like the HR/L&D department), building a reputation for generosity internally and externally, and investing in 3 key skills. The fractal nature of RT’s post structure is endlessly fascinating to me, as is his writing.
Tiago Forte writes about a workshop he attended about money, and this somatic reaction:
Eventually, once my body had completed its process, I was able to complete the sentence: that I had projected onto money that only it had the capacity to make change in the world, when in fact, that was just a way of avoiding facing the reality that it was me who had that capacity.
I’m currently reading Forte’s book Building a Second Brain. Putting into practice the third of his CODE methodology (Capture, Organise, Distill, Express) is the primary purpose.
Bernardo Kastrup: Computer Scientists Don’t Understand This makes the case that AI can never be sentient, even as the hype for AGI reaches feverish heights.
Robin Rendle: Stop calling yourself an IC So: stop calling yourself and your coworkers “ICs”. You are a designer, an engineer, a producer. Your contribution deserves more than a moniker that is made to dehumanize you, purpose-built to make you replaceable. Do not help this dehumanizing system to dehumanize you by normalizing this kind of language!
Ben Kuhn: Trust as a bottleneck to growing teams quickly suggests some ways to invest more effort in trusting others, along with how to help other people trust you. Both groups of ideas are sensible advice.
Jim Nielsen verbalises well, with help from Johny Ive, what I’ve been struggling to express: Language is a powerful design tool. Language is so powerful. If [I say] I’m going to design a chair, think how dangerous that is. Because you’ve just said chair, you’ve just said no to a thousand ideas.
I read this McKinsey report on CFO Perspectives on the future of finance to get a general sense of priorities to focus on in my next assignment/experiment. Unsurprisingly, my mental model of back-office tasks – past/present/future – as reporting/insights & analysis/forecasting & planning is echoed in this article.
Ness Labs: How to be a better reader. Some strategies: Understand the authors purpose, adjust your reading rate, annotate the content, paraphrase, use chunking, connect the dots, organise information visually, evaluate the content, consult a reference, or summarise the ideas. Doing this in public offers additional benefits for the time spent – others may find it useful too.
Ran Prieur’s note shares a mental health tip that I discovered myself too a few weeks ago: (to make change to yourself, do it at the micro scale…. catch somethign you want to change, while it’s happening. Self-awareness in the moment helps to pause, and gives other ‘affordances’ – choices to make. Takes practice, lots of it. And like exercise, you get better in ways you do not expect.
Steve Blank describes the feeling I’ve had in my own career: change makes us fear what we are losing. And more importantly, how to think, and what to do about it.
Vsauce: Do Chairs Exist? I wrote down the word Ontology a few days ago, realising that I don’t actually understand what it means. This video was the third in a sequence to remind me of language as abstractions to describe our world.
Ryder Carroll gives a very useful distinction between time boxing and time blocking. Both are essential in very different ways. Time blocking is about protecting a specific time in one’s day for a particular task. Time boxing is about protecting your time from yourself. Without a time block, you might not start. Without a time box, you might not stop.
I will continue to keep an eye on the developments in the AI, not as obsessively as I did in the last year perhaps. Andrej Karpathy, Andrew Ng, and Simon Willison have earned my trust over the years so I pay heed. Andrej’s recent X about the spiral of model improvements but going in the opposite direction wrt size was also quoted by Simon: Therefore, the models have to first get larger before they can get smaller, because we need their (automated) help to refactor and mold the training data into ideal, synthetic formats.
Bob Ewing: The Undelivered Eulogy for Apollo 11. Nixon was prepared with a speech in the event the astronauts remained on the moon. The speech was written by William Safire, and Ewing describes the tools of rhetoric that were used in it: anaphora (repetition of phrase at the beginning of successive clauses), antithesis (contrasting ideas in phrases), epizeuxis (repetition of a phrase for emphasis).
Lateral Reading, a concept I was unaware of until I read it on Tracel Durnell’s Weeknotes today, is fascinating. A study involving students, historians, and fact checkers, and their ability to smell out
Podcasts
Hidden Brain: Changing our Mental Maps A conversation with Norman Farb, psychologist and neuroscientist at University of Toronto. Our reliance on Google Maps can get us lost, as the opening story about a couple who got lost in the Australian bush. The maps are not the territory. This is a fascinating conversation about the implications of our internal maps on the way we navigate the world.
On the What’s it to be like podcast, two episodes this week: a high school principal and a mystery novelist.
I tried out a new podcast this week: Future Learning Design. I listened to a conversation on An Indigenous Renaissance with Dr. Marie Battiste, a Canadian First Nations human. Language is an abstraction, and we often forget that. The wisdom of traditional civilisations were/are dismissed as "primitive" by a euro-centric view, over the last few generations. The violence pervades education too, is Dr. Battiste’s position.
Quotes
So much of knowledge/intelligence involves translating ideas between fields (domains). Those domains are walls the keep ideas siloed. But LLMs can help break those walls down and encourage humans to do more interdisciplinary thinking, which may lead to faster discoveries. And note that I am implying that humans will make the breakthroughs, using LLMs as translation tools when appropriate, to help make connections. LLMs are strongest as translators of information that you provide. BYOD: Bring your own data! –Benj Edwards,
“Conjure a positive, expansive outlook by creating a ‘luck diary’. Record a good thing that happened that day, or something bad from the past that’s not happening anymore.”
-Richard Wiseman, Author, The Luck Factor
In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.
– Mortimer Adler
Words
Aporia:
- A figure of speech in which the speaker expresses or purports to be in doubt about a question.
- An insoluble contradiction or paradox in a text’s meanings.
- A figure in which the speaker professes to be at a loss what course to pursue, where to begin to end, what to say, etc.
- An expression of deliberation with oneself regarding uncertainty or doubt as to how to proceed.
Elide:
- Omit (a sound or syllable) when speaking.
- Join together; merge (large chunks of time are elided in a movie)