Johann Van Tonder
@jvt
20 years in ecommerce, now CEO of a CRO agency. Probably doing analysis in R or building stuff with AI. Or walking on the beach. Yeah, probably that.
Johann Van Tonder
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” — Stephen Hawking
What were their roots? Why had the company started? How did their backstory influence the work they did today and how might it affect their aspirations for the future?
Bernadette Jiwa • Story Driven: You don't need to compete when you know who you are
I am aiming to be as optimistic as I possibly can because a big dose of optimism is required to make better things
Eliot Peper • The Thursday Murder Club
Quotes and Motivation
To a certain extent we are wasting our time. We have a perfect model of the world—it is the world! But it is too complicated.
data science and Quotes
“The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.” — Mark Manson
Quotes and Psychology
“From this point on, the intelligence of LLMs… will only continue to improve. Human intelligence will not.”
OpenAI’s paper on using AI to debug AI code
Quotes and Generative AI
“First the people running the old system don’t notice the change. When they do, they assume it’s minor. Then it’s a niche, then a fad. And by the time they understand that the world has actually changed, they’ve squandered most of the time they had to adapt.”
Daniel Goleman • Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence
Original quote is by Clay Shirky
Most people never pick up the phone, most people never ask. And that’s what separates, sometimes, the people that do things from the people that just dream about them. You gotta act. And you gotta be willing to fail. —Steve Jobs
Noah Kagan • Million Dollar Weekend: The Surprisingly Simple Way to Launch a 7-Figure Business in 48 Hours
Meta AI released LLaMA ... and they included a paper which described exactly what it was trained on. It was 5TB of data.
2/3 of it was from Common Crawl. It had content from GitHub, Wikipedia, ArXiv, StackExchange and something called “Books”.
What’s Books? 4.5% of the training data was books. Part of this was Project Gutenberg, which is public
AI skepticism and