Leverage
Hydroelectric Design With Turbines In The Middle Of The Lake
youtu.beDams for rice fields!
AI is the new plastic
notion.so
There is beauty to naturally occurring material… and thought
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
Alan Chan • My Vision: A Forgotten History
And the uncredited bioweapon
Fascinating historical case of technological and strategic advantage: 400 Spaniards conquered the 6-million Mexican Empire, and just 180 soldiers overwhelmed the 10-million Incan Empire.
Will AGI bring the same kind of strategic advantage, potentially decisive? https://t.co/vqf7eNpICI
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.
In Defense of Progress
ayokan.me
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.
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