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
When you believe, "Even if I don't succeed with this business, I'll still have a great life" ... then you are in a much better position to give it a try.
James Clear • 3-2-1: On being bigger than your problems, personal responsibility, and inner circle friendships
A lot of very smart people work in strange ways / with a lot of quirks (e.g. contemplating for hours and appearing to do nothing, while then suddenly having 100x output burst). This usually makes them not a great fit for traditional corporate world, where you often have to fake…
Laura Wendelx.comEven Thomas Watson is reputed to have said, in 1943, “I think there is a world market for about five computers.”
Nicholas Carr • The Big Switch
There is no credible evidence that Watson actually made this statement, it is almost certainly apocryphal.
IBM historians say a 1953 stockholders’ meeting is likely the origin: Thomas Watson described a business trip to gauge demand for IBM’s new 701 computer. He said “we expected to get orders for 5 machines,” but they returned with 18 orders.
“Fooling around with alternating current (AC) is just a waste of time. Nobody will use it, ever.”
• Thomas Edison (1889)
"A key challenge of (LLMs) is that they do not come with a manual! They come with a “Twitter influencer manual” instead, where lots of people online loudly boast about the things they can do with a very low accuracy rate, which is really frustrating..."
Simon Willison, attempting to explain LLM
Generative AI and
Yes.
Writing is not a second thing that happens after thinking. The act of writing is an act of thinking. Writing *is* thinking.
Students, academics, and anyone else who outsources their writing to LLMs will find their screens full of words and their minds emptied of thought.... See more
Choices like these cause migraine headaches. Tip to aspiring entrepreneurs: If you don’t like choosing between horrible and cataclysmic, don’t become CEO.
Ben Horowitz • The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
Motivation and Quotes
you haven’t really experienced AI until you have had three sleepless nights of existential anxiety, after which you can start to be productive again
Ethan Mollick • Which AI should I use? Superpowers and the State of Play
Generative AI and Quotes
AI will magnify the already great difference in knowledge between the people who are eager to learn and those who aren't.
Paul Grahamx.comQuotes and Generative AI