Leverage
When the first steam engines were introduced, the owners had a really hard time finding people to operate them who wouldn't get drunk in the middle of the day, fuck up, and wreck the machine.
Technological change is only possible with societal (behavioral) change
To use databases, you need to be able to think about your data in a structured way. The people who could do that gained most of the leverage from using databases. The folks who made it easy for people to transition to databases (ERPs and Co) captured the rest.
AI systems are fundamentally scalable decision making engines. And data is the oil required to power it. If you want to properly leverage AI, you need to make sure you're fueling it with the best refined data.
Otherwise, you're no different than the drunk trying to reliably operate complex machinery. The only repeatable part of that is injury.
the fastest path to being perceived as a “genius” (commonplace hyperbole) is to read books that your peers aren’t reading. this will not be a universal perception, but it’s nonetheless a very strong effect that’s amusingly underutilized
Similarly, when everyone is saying the same things, simply asking why becomes revolutionary.
AI is the new plastic
notion.so
There is beauty to naturally occurring material… and thought
This talks about value capture by focusing on the most critical point of leverage
It's becoming increasingly evident that in many circles, AI is not perceived as merely a technology, but as "something else" entirely. This misconception is exemplified by the recurring debate: "Humans vs AI." To illustrate the absurdity of this framing, let's replace "AI" with "technology":
"Humans vs Technology"
This reframing immediately highl... See more
Excel may be the most influential software ever built. It is a canonical example of Steve Job’s bicycle of the mind, endowing its users with computational superpowers normally reserved for professional software engineers. Armed with those superpowers, users can create fully functional software programs in the form of a humble spreadsheet to solve p... See more
Benjamin Rollert • Excel Never Dies
The History of Mathematical Tables: From Sumer to Spreadsheets | Oxford Academic
academic.oup.com
llms are trained on internet-scale datasets, but their effects are not like the internet.
calculators — or tables that can be calculated on (llm + rag) — are better analogs.
the rise of spreadsheet applications allowed professionals to migrate their tables to spreadsheets. eventually, they put even fancier wrappers around their spreadsheets in vertical applications.
In Defense of Progress
ayokan.me