Sterling Proffer

"The one unforgivable sin is to be boring."

If you were to study some of the most admired creative thinkers, writers, and artists to have ever lived, you would find that all shared a passion for their work, an intense desire to succeed, and an almost superhuman capacity to focus. Yet, when you look closely at their daily lives, they only spent a few hours a day doing what we would recognize... See more

Emergent properties are linked to another highly promising feature: flexibility. Earlier generations of ai systems were good for only one purpose, often a pretty specific one. The new models can be reassigned from one type of problem to another with relative ease by means of fine tuning. It is a measure of the importance of this trait that, within... See more

Humans are unique because we compete when it isn’t necessary. We could reason our way to more sustainable processes, but we use our intelligence to outsmart each other. We compete for fun, for ego.

In its early days, Substack primarily catered to a certain set of internet-savvy writers and journalists, lured by the promise of monetizing a direct relationship with their readers. But as it morphs from a niche publishing concern into a heavyweight start-up mentioned in the same breath as Twitter and Facebook, its user base is proliferating... See more