Sterling Proffer
@sterling
Sterling Proffer
John Muir Misquote: When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world - but the correct quote is actually -...
vault.sierraclub.orgThe “good computer” which Graphcore, a British chip designer, intends to build over the next few years might seem to be suffering from a ludicrous case of nominal understatement. Its design calls for it to carry out 1019 calculations per second. If your laptop can do 100bn calculations a second—which is fair for an average laptop—then the Good... See more
Huge “foundation models” are turbo-charging AI progress
Product teams by nature are power users of their own product. The parts of the product that the product team uses, tend to automatically get improved as the pain is right in front of them. But this leads to building for yourself (or your friends). While that can feed the ego, if you are only building for yourself or power users, you won’t grow. You... See more
Bangaly Kaba • The Adjacent User Theory
In the past thirty years what it means to be an artist has dramatically changed.
Before the internet, being an artist meant operating in a very specific area where the gatekeepers, critics, and ways of doing things were well-structured and defined. You as the artist plugged into this system if invited (most artists... See more
instagram.comAll modern machine-learning models are based on “neural networks”—programming which mimics the ways in which brain cells interact with each other. Their parameters describe the weights of the connections between these virtual neurons, weights the models develop through trial and error as they are “trained” to respond to specific inputs with the... See more
Huge “foundation models” are turbo-charging AI progress
The cycle is dizzying and numbing: The allure of authenticity invites fascination and then, inevitably, skepticism. All along, truth and trust aren’t celebrated; they’re destabilized.
Spencer Kornhaber • TikTok Killed the Video Star
music and
On TikTok, new songs surge or flop based on how effectively they entice users to perform some slapdash feat: a simple dance, a costume change sourced from the bedroom closet, a cute or cringe confession. With a booming, young user base, TikTok has become a music-promotion ecosystem of extreme importance. That ecosystem thrives on calculated... See more