Leverage
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... See more
Packy McCormick • Excel Never Dies
I need a good image to symbolize the Whispering Earring
it’s only going to become more relevant https://t.co/SWNMrqHpev
Convenience can indeed become a burden
The Death of the Junior Developer
sourcegraph.com
AI adoption and capabilities are distributed bimodally across industries.
Writing-heavy professions like writing, law, software are feeling it first. It doesn't feel that way because other industries are still untouched. That may continue for long or it might not.
It's always calmest before the storm
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.
Ben Landau-Taylorx.comTechnological 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 History of Mathematical Tables: From Sumer to Spreadsheets | Oxford Academic
academic.oup.com
And the uncredited bioweapon
In Defense of Progress
ayokan.me
What Alan Kay has been emphasizing, and which is now at the heart of Bret Victor’s design philosophy, is that the computer is a “dynamic medium.” The essence of a computer is not the keyboard, the mouse, and the screen. It’s computational and responsive capabilities that don’t exist in a static medium like paper. We should use this dynamic medium... See more