Getting 1% better daily leads to a 37x improvement in a year — do things that compound. Focus on the systems not the goals.
Bits
September 7 – 13
It’s a proxy for a sense of ownership on outcomes, and all that matters is contribution to an outcome.
Learning orgs: an organisation that can learn faster than its environment changes will outlast one that cannot. Learning is about expanding the organisation’s capacity to create the future it says it wants.
Many companies will have their own (configured) harness that uses open-route models, which will route to the best model for its needs.
Counter-positioning as an ability to do things that the incumbent couldn’t do without harming their own business.
can Challenger A do X because it makes its money somewhere completely different from Incumbent B?
It’s a useful test of AI in the consumer space. Giving everyone on earth access to a powerful computer that can just do computer-like things for you. Asking “What new software will exist” or “where is the superintelligence” is the wrong question — asking what a computer can do for people is the right question. You don’t need to create software, you can just ask the computer to do the thing.
One of the ways to think about UBI and its alternatives: giving people a stake in the outcome can lead to wealth creation and a better sense of ownership. I understand why this is not more common — capital takes the risk, not labour — but it’s shortsightedness, norms, and administrative friction that it’s not more common.
July 27 – August 2
If you pray sometimes, then you are just an atheist who’s also fearful. If God exists, the only coherent response is to reorganize your entire life around that fact, as priests do. AI is the same. When tech companies spend hundreds of billions on capital expenditures to add sparkly AI features to Office, Gmail, and Instagram, I only see fearful atheists — guys who don’t believe in AI but pretend just in case.
Apple is the most powerful tech company in the world right now because it’s acting according to what it believes.
Protopia is interesting because it treats progress as a compounding mechanism rather than a solved state. The point is not that the future becomes perfect. The point is that small improvements, repeated, expand the space of possible lives.
June 29 – July 5
A beautiful profile of a man that illustrates the simple idea that a business should be good for its craftspeople and its customer. That there is beauty in the everyday pursuit of profit. A reminder that you can be both a humantarian and a capalist – that they’re one and the same. A good business is always good for humanity. You don’t have to direct your trade towards ever increasing profit margins at the expense of quality, human wellbeing, or the customer. You can make wonderful things and be a wonderful leader, while pursuing profit. Over a long enough timeline all that is left is the indelible mark you made on the lives of others.
Basically, what is human dignity made of? If we work together, say, and, even with one look, I make you understand that you are worth nothing and I look down on you, I have killed you. But if I give you regards and respect — out of esteem, responsibility is spawned. Then out of responsibility comes creativity, because every human being has an amount of genius in them. Man needs dignity even more than he needs bread.
Pairs well with DHH’s retort: man needs more than bread to survive.
June 22 – 28
Most technology breakthroughs start out looking like toys. This is true even when you’re spending $xx on playing with the new cool thing. Sometimes these find pmf (drones) and sometimes they don’t (web3, blowing through uber budget)
We live life in two modes
Colour: In the moment happiness, reflection, introspection, fun
Movement: Building things, learning, exercising
Not everything fit squarely in one bucket, but you can develop a general intuition to if you’re focused on colour (playing with kids) or a moment of movement (working)
There are many ways to think about the purpose of life, but the idea of choosing a good quest (as opposed to a bad quest or perhaps worse no quest at all) is something we should talk about more openly. I’m reminded by this idea often and again in a recent post by Packy at Not Boring.
“Then we got Agents, and we forgot the lesson. We decided that we needed to throw these pseudo-humans at everything, because everyone else was. Agents are great at some things, but they’re not the right shape for a lot of others.”
Engineers don’t know what to build because they don’t do the work. Most of the process-driven work we’re describing exists as a combination of written rules, which Agents can ingest, and then like 3,000 tacit rules and sub-rules that live in people’s heads, in offices around the country, far away from the engineers’ San Francisco desks. AI can only evolve what it can touch, which is why it’s been great at coding but has largely failed to do useful things in the enterprise.
June 8 – 14
Jony Ive, on designing the interior of the Ferrari Luce:
“I just love learning more than I love being right,”
“At the end of a project, there’s two products — there’s what you designed and what you learn.”
When you think about each component removed from its context, that each dial and knob should in itself be beautiful – not necessarily as an aesthetic pursuit, but because its beautiful in its essential form.
The purpose of life is novel experience.
No bits match that search.