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
2024-11-15
A message from my sponsor
Macro Oceans received a grant to use kelp for sustainable aviation fuel. From the oceans to the skies!
Things I learned
78 percent of Christmas hits were penned before 1990. From Can’t Get Much Higher. Also: “According to a report by CNN, about 52% of adults said they celebrated Halloween in 2005. In 2012, that percentage had jumped to around 72%. Over a decade later, ~the New York Times related~ that that percentage has slowly crept up closer to 75%.”
Transplant recipients can inherit memories and preferences from their donors from Adaobi Adibe. More on this here and here.
Worth your time
Getting materials out of the labby Ben Reinhardtin Works in Progress. Lots of this resonated for me in my work at Macro Oceans, even though our materials aren’t novel in the same way that say carbon fiber was in the 1960s. There’s an interplay between unique functionality (what the material does), scale (your ability to produce consistently), and price at each step along the journey. The art is picking use cases where your unique functionality isn’t blocked by your limited scale and high price.
Robert Twigger on practice:
I know from my own experience of studying martial arts in Japan that intense study brings rewards that are impossible to achieve by casual application. For a year I studied an hour a day three days a week and made minimal progress. For a further year I switched to an intensive course of five hours a day five days a week. The gains were dramatic and permanent, resulting in a black belt and an instructor certificate. Deep down I was pessimistic that I could actually learn a martial art. I thought you were either a ‘natural’ or nothing. Then I saw natural athletes fall behind when they didn’t practice enough. This, shamefully, was a great morale booster.
The global wars between ant super colonies.
"Social media basically brought us to something like an oral culture" and more from Katherine Dee.
The Marginal Revolution Podcast on Crime in the 1970s. They were somewhat pessimistic as the episode ended, but it made me much more optimistic about America’s future. The resilience of our society is really underrated.
AR binoculars that automatically identify birds anywhere in the world. Stupid great product idea.
Observations
Product market fit provides gravity for a business. Before you have it, moving in almost any direction might be a good idea. But after you have it, you’re either going to double down on what’s possible or expand into the adjacent possible. All the moves are directly related to your current momentum.
“For an increasing proportion of software it’s more helpful to think of it as content rather than software” — Daniel Kuntz
“The difference is that I just get to be really stubborn about making things as good as we all know they can be.... But the real big thing is: if you’re going to make something, it doesn’t take any more energy — and rarely does it take more money — to make it really great. All it takes is a little more time. Not that much more. And a willingness to do so, a willingness to perservere until it’s really great.” - Steve Jobs
Sometimes caution is the riskier choice.
Politics is made up of both style and substance. I remember Tom Holland of the Rest Is History saying that Roman political parties didn’t break down on policy lines the way that ours do but on style: a conservative style vs a progressive style.
You can just ignore things.
Prizes are an under used way of incentivizing behavior.
ABP.
2024-09-09
How the psychiatric narrative hinders those who hear voices | Aeon Essays - an exploration of the “Targeted Individual” community, people who hear voices in their heads. Weird, wild, and a bit scary.
How to beat AI at Go - humans are able to beat the best AIs at Go by finding failure cases they aren’t prepared for. This is the future of warfare.
Palmer Lucky profile: such a great reminder that anything is possible with hard work and determination. Similarly, Casey Handmer on how entrepreneurship has changed the way he thinks.