Token stream 2024-12-05
Worth your time
Literally worth your time:
Telling the time by sundial and history not only was custom, but also was understood as following God’s time. The idea of overriding traditional timekeeping because of the needs of the modern world seemed positively sacrilegious. “People…must eat, sleep and work…by railroad time,” wrote a contributor to the Indianapolis Daily Sentinel. “People will have to marry by railroad time…. Ministers will be required to preach by railroad time…. Banks will open and close by railroad time; notes will be paid or protested by railroad time.”
From Heather Cox Richardson on the standardization of time.
Skunkworks rules by Eric Gilliam:
- Reduce the bureaucracy to almost zero. Ideally, one person should have almost complete authority over day-to-day decision-making.
- Keep the team ruthlessly small.
- Whenever possible, only take on contracts where there is enough mutual trust with funders and subcontractors to work with them with a minimum amount of bureaucracy. If funder decisions cannot be made swiftly, the project is probably not worth pursuing.
I’d add: Build ambitious things on short timelines. And a bonus quote from Kelly Johnson: “The theory of the Skunk Works is to learn how to do things quickly and cheaply and to tailor the systems to the degree of risk. There is no one good way to build all airplanes.”
“‘Pristine’ landscapes simply do not exist and, in most cases, have not existed for millennia.”
“What makes a good business is industry structure.” — Cal Paterson on the business potential of LLMs.
What long context windows mean for how AI will change work.
AI and material design: AI_innovation. Very relevant to my work at Macro Oceans.
Things I learned
From Sapiens on the origins of suicide:
More typically, among today’s ~U.S. high school students~, 60 percent say they have considered killing themselves, and 14 percent have thought about it seriously in the past year.
Panda related merchandise made up half of all Atlanta Zoo merchandise sales — AJC
Between 1986 and 2018, 12.3M hectares of cropland in the United States was abandoned. Note that this figure does not include urbanization or development. Environmental Research Letters.
Musings
“It wasn’t that Dario had the best ideas, although he had plenty… he just ran 10 to 100 times as many experiments as anyone else. That’s when I knew he would do amazing things.”
From Dion Almaer, Principles of Developer AI Product Development. Reminds me of “quantity precedes quality.”
My latest AI hack for getting out writing more quickly (company project docs, blog posts): * Record an audio file where I dictate as much as I can about a project * Add that + any other relevant documentation to NotebookLM * Ask NotebookLM to write a first draft for me * Edit that into the shape I want it
I still end up editing out ~50-75% but it gets me passed the empty page as quickly as possible. I estimate I turn a ~half day writing block into something I can do on a 15-20 minute walk + a little computer organization.
People only decide to buy something when they really, really care about it. Otherwise it’s not worth the friction of getting out your wallet.
“The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.” — Marshall McLuhan via Gordon
“If you're not living on the edge you're taking up too much space.” — Stephen Hunt via Ade Oshineye
2024-12-05