2024 Week 30 - Weekly Notes

Time to build, or else AI Winter is coming. Latent Space on The Winds of AI Winter

This week has been quieter than other weeks. I’ve been doing less reading, fewer news articles, and honing in on more deep reading. I’m still enjoying Baldur’s Gate 3 with my wife. We have not been tuned in to House of the Dragon’s latest season. And somehow I have not been sucked into the spoiler zone either.

Around the technosphere

• The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming - This deserves to be analyzed and incorporated into my own thoughts about programming
• How Do Rocket Scientists Learn? (aka, knowledge management lessons learned at Goddard, NASA)

  Knowledge Management is usually a core component of organizational learning. Knowledge Management at Goddard is About People Knowledge Management is “better application of collective knowledge to the individual problem. So we need to develop some systems and do a little more work to share collective knowledge and make us smarter.” Social Media Can Enhance Learning (but relationships matter) > Learning in Public is Hard, but Worth It. If you share what you know and what you don’t know in the middle of a project, you give people an opportunity to share specific knowledge that can help you in the moment. If it works, this can help save time and money.

• MIT Technology Review -  AI trained on AI garbage spits out AI garbage - Whoop whoop. Garbage in, garbage out.
• Nikita Prokopov - Where Should Visual Programming Go?
  • This is an excellent exploration of where the visuals should be. Counter to those “text-based” developers. Sometimes visuals help.
• Tyler Hogge explans the Sell → Design → Build framework
  • Recommendation on Amazon - The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win by Steve Blank
  • I’ve certainly been in this trap before. I still think about what I want to build vs. trying to sell that idea first

    The only way to get a true signal in these conversations is to sell. By asking for money you shift from the niceties of a social conversation to an economic conversation, which activates a part of the brain in buyers that you care about: whether or not they will part ways with their money to use your product.

• Lea Verou - Forget “show, don’t tell”. Engage, don’t show!
  • Engaging the reader or audience is much more important as passive learning is not as great as active or tacit learning. We are all storytellers

    1. Always explain why something is useful. Yes, even when it’s obvious to you.
    2. Minimize the amount of knowledge you convey before the next opportunity to practice it.
    3. Prefer explaining in context rather than explaining upfront.

• Matthew Ström - Copying is the way design works
  • I’m putting together a set of tools for creativity based off “Everything is a Remix” and “Steal Like an Artist”.
• Book Recommendation on Amazon - Kent Beck: Tidy First?: A Personal Exercise in Empirical Software Design
• Elle Griffin - Every company should be owned by its employees
  • Employee ownership allows all workers, not just executives, to benefit from the company’s success.
  • Employee ownership allows workers to build wealth, which is difficult without ownership in a company.
  • Employee ownership provides a retirement savings account that is tied to the company’s performance.

### Around the World and back

• The American Scholar - Solitude and Leadership
  • An older gem, but one that’s worth revisiting every so often
  • Thinking for yourself requires solitude and concentration, not constant distraction.
  • Solitude can take many forms: introspection, focused work, sustained reading, and deep friendship.
  • True leadership emerges from solitude, not just conformity to a hierarchy.
• TV Recommendation - Soul of the Craftsman
• The New York Times - Newsom Orders California Officials to Remove Homeless Encampments
• WSJ - Alexa Is in Millions of Households—and Amazon Is Losing Billions (Archived post)
• WIRED - The Puzzle of How Large-Scale Order Emerges in Complex Systems
  • There are three types of closure that are key to understanding emergent phenomena in complex systems
    1. Informational closure: The lower-level details do not provide any additional information for predicting the behavior at the macro level.
    2. Causal closure: The macro level is self-contained in terms of causation - the lower-level details do not provide any additional control over the future behavior at the macro scale.
    3. Computational closure: The different levels of the system are hierarchically organized, with each level being a coarse-grained representation of the level below it. This nested structure allows the macro-level behavior to be predicted using only information at that level.
• Spillover of highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 virus to dairy cattle | Nature
  • New research suggests the highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1 virus behind an ongoing bird flu outbreak has the unprecedented ability for efficient and sustained mammal-to-mammal transmission.
  • The implications for this is huge! Potential mutations arise out of that could result in adaptation to mammals, spillover into humans, and potential efficient transmission in humans in the future!
• Ars Technica - At the Olympics, AI is watching you

Video of Note

David Perell interviews Harry Dry about copywriting. Harry’s website Marketing Examples is a trove of interesting copywriting to entice your customers.