Jason Shen
@jasonshen
Exec coach helping founders and creative leaders rebound and reinvent so they do more of what matters most.
Jason Shen
Are you familiar with the midwit meme? So, it’s this bell curve with a guy who doesn’t think very much, then someone who has average intelligence but thinks it’s superior, and then the guy who’s kind of transcended everything and is very intelligent and actually thinks in the same way as the guy who doesn’t think very much. So for me, I think I st
... See morefrom "AI for wonder": An interview with Michelle Huang, artist by Michelle Huang
His core takeaways were:
- Human desire is infinite so there will always be some work people can do. The question is will the work be meaningful and high value or denigrating and low value
- What humans will likely still do best is empathize with other humans, which enables us to persuade, inspire, entertain, and engender trust.
- People still want other pe
from 131: How to Be Human in the Age of Generative AI by Jason Shen
- If you’re totally lost on what to focus on getting better at, focus on braiding.
Narrative-style writing (fiction and nonfiction) has four major components:- Action: Things happening
- Dialogue: What people are saying
- Description: The environment around the people and events
- Interiority: The characters internal reactions to the place and action
And you co... See morefrom On Writing Better: 43 Things I Learned from My Insane 2 Years of Study
Nat Eliason on how to improve your narrative-style writing
- IF A GREAT MUSICIAN PLAYS GREAT MUSIC BUT NO ONE HEARS . . . WAS HE REALLY ANY GOOD?
It’s an old epistemological debate, older, actually, than the koan about the tree in the forest. Plato weighed in on it, and philosophers for two millennia afterward: What is beauty? Is it a measurable fact (Gottfried Leibniz), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or ... See morefrom Pearls Before Breakfast: Can one of the nation’s great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let’s find out.
Generative AI combines the encoding of vast corpuses of text and images—which act as training data—and a series of machine learning algorithms to turn text prompts into incredibly creative, intelligent, and useful visual and text responses.
I would rank this among the 3 most transformative pieces of technology I've encountered in my lifeti
... See morefrom 131: How to Be Human in the Age of Generative AI by Jason Shen
Third, I'm trying to learn more about how these Generative AI systems work more deeply and uncover their creative potential. You've seen my explorations with Midjourney through the cover images of many of the last few newsletters, including this one.
from 131: How to Be Human in the Age of Generative AI by Jason Shen
Chasing scale seems to be a kind of early life affliction. The more you chase it, the bigger the thing you chase gets. Perhaps it’s a natural desire to see how important we can be or at least how important our creations can be to the world (and hence how important we can be by proxy …). A desire to take on a seemingly insurmountable challenge, perhaps a noble one (though not always), and see if we can conquer it.
- Key features of the 2.0 release
- New text-to-image diffusion models using a brand new text encoder (OpenCLIP). Result: improved image quality, although not everyone likes the style.
- Super-resolution upscaler diffusion models which enhance the resolution of images by a factor of 4.
- Depth-to-image diffusion model which infers the de
from Lore AI Newsletter #7: Stable Diffusion 2.0 by Lore.com
2 Go to parties. You can't even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
from Black Swan author's rules for living - Boing Boing
Nassim Taleb on leveraging serendipity of social gatherings