💬 Quotes
🔗 We Are Living in Pinocchio’s World
The grifters and the hucksters and the influencers selling impossible things succeed because audiences reward certainty and punish doubt. They honor confidence and resist complication. A clean story about a genius who will fix everything travels faster than a difficult story about tradeoffs. The Field of Miracles stays open because people keep wanting to bury their coins there.
💬 Om
Trust isn’t something a brand builds with an ad campaign. It’s what’s left if the marketers don’t ruin it.
Curiosity isn’t simply what’s left after a complete education. It’s still there if the system doesn’t ruin it.
Musicality isn’t a feature you add to an amplifier. It’s what’s left when you stop ruining it.
Customer delight isn’t something we add to our projects. It’s what’s left if we don’t ruin it.
Satisfaction in our work isn’t created by the boss. It’s what’s left if they don’t ruin it.
Reminds me of two connected thoughts that I have always liked …
How do you make a statue of an elephant? Get the biggest granite block you can find and chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.
💬 Too many people to name. [🔗 Why](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/06/22/chip-away/)
Music is the space between the notes
💬 Coltrane, Mozart, Debussy… take your pick ...
🔗 Honestly, Stop Saying Honestly
We already killed the slop in our writing . The em dash, “delve,” “tapestry,” “in today’s fast-paced world” - the measured lexicon of words that spiked in published text the moment the models got loose on it. “Delve” alone rose about 1,500 percent in scientific abstracts between 2022 and 2024. These words are not wrong. They are tells. A reader sees three of them and stops trusting the page, even when the substance is fine.
💬 Adventures in Claude
Two Thoughts
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Very self aware 😂 and interesting to see how anyone can control the LLM’s output if they spend time on the problem - something which we don’t typically do - used as we are to our world of ‘instant gratification’.
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Just a couple of months ago 🖇️ I wrote: “but no one can deny that we have seen a bucket load more of them ( (em dashes) ) since LLMs turned up.
Jeremy Keith [ @adactio ] writes 🔗 here and quotes 🔗 Time
What is being mechanized by AI is our tastes - our ability to discern quality (or originality)
💬 Ray Nayler
Might I suggest that we have been doing that all by ourselves for decades - if not forever?
Tech accelerated it and now AI is certainly moving it into hyper drive - because that is what AI does.
🖋️ Just One Story From The Aftermath Of Maui
This is a repost from August 2023. Life has moved on for the world - but for those caught up in it all it is their new reality. Just a reminder that whilst the news moves on at speed - reality takes time.
🔗 Scripting News: Is Bluesky on the web?
But it doesn’t work the other way. They love it when you send people to their site, but not so much if you want to send them away. Sending people away is a sensitive concept to Bluesky’s investors. Why would you do that? This is not a new point where the web and silos disagree. The web says “let them go” and the silos ask “do we look like idiots?”
💬 Dave Winer
I am clearly missing the nuance here.
I syndicate to BlueSky - and in Bluesky I see …
I click on that link and am taken to my blog
Question
What is not happening?
🖋️ Caveat - Not My Words ...
… but there for the grace of whatever power you hold true - do we all go. Sometime sooner. Sometimes very much later. But go we do. Few have the power to control ‘when’.
🖋️ They Buried Smiths. Now They Might Have To Bury TG Jones
The rebranding of WH Smith to TG Jones led to large and rapid declines in revenue - which means that the buyer of the brand did not actually undersatand what they were buying.
🔗 Anthropic, AI and The “Numbers” Problem.
A $40 billion run rate with 40 percent net revenue retention is a different company from a $40 billion run rate with 130 percent net revenue retention. From outside, the two are indistinguishable. The valuation gets the same multiple in both cases. The first company is worth a fraction of the second. This is not a small problem. It is the entirety of the problem.
💬 Om
It’s not an earth shattering observation. Anyone in ‘the business’ knows this. So it isn’t ignorance - it is deception.
Also important … Om gets to it in a paragraph to get to where Ed Zitron arrives after a 20 minute monologue. Am I wrong?
I wouldn’t worry too much about CBS becoming another Fox News. Roger Ailes, who created Fox News, was a genius - an evil genius, but a genius nonetheless in the practice of manipulating the medium of television for political ends. Bari Weiss is not this sort of genius. Rather than being transformed into a sophisticated right wing propaganda operation, it is more likely that CBS News is just made dumb and pointless.
💬 Hamilton Nolan
Which is why I dislike this whole trend of digital twins, that has become gospel in Silicon Valley. The Wall Street Journal recently wrote about how prominent names in the industry are creating digital twins, because they are just so busy and it is better for the rest of us to engage with a copy.
💬 Om
The problem with modern tech is that they don’t have any historical perspective. Did they never see 🔗🎬 Multiplicity
Congrats to my friend Manton Reece, a San Antonio fan, for their victory in the Western Conference last night. The Knicks will be playing them starting on Wednesday for the NBA championship. Knicks representing the east, Spurs for the west.
💬 Dave Winer
@dave / @manton - I am thinking ‘Cage Fight’❓
Or is that a spectacle strictly reserved for tech billionaires running surveillance states?
I am often accused by Jax of being a ‘music snob’. ‘No’. I say. ‘I just know what I like’. According to Lin Fisher who writes: 🔗 I Confess, I’m a Snob seems to agree. Music is just one domain she looks at. Another is food .. on which topic Jax is an absolute ‘snob’ - though of course being a gentleman, I would never bring it up.
In fairness to Jax, she sent me the link.
One kind of snob looks down at others.
The kind I’m describing looks inward at self.
One is about superiority. The other is about alignment.
And the difference between the two is everything.
💬 Lin Fisher
I’ve hesitated at calling FeedLand a feed reader.
💬 Dave Winer
🔗 Read his post - I know what @dave means - one of the ‘category design’ conundrums.
Use a category name that everybody understands - or at least ‘thinks they do’ - and you are one of many - competing with all. Use a new name - and forever be answering ‘what’s that then’?
Wrestling with exactly that with a product we are beginning to roll. #StillThinking #NotCommitted
🔗😂 Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Not in the cartoon ….
This is what is meant when AI Alignment researchers refer to “PhD-Level Intelligence.”
💬 Zach Weinersmith
… it’s his usual additional punchline - with emphasis on ‘punch’ today.
🔗 Day 3: Einstein Made Us A Loaf - LLBBL Blog
Philosophers Hilary Putnam and C.W. Rietdijk worked this out in the 1960s. Their argument, roughly: if my “now” overlaps with your “now,” and your “now” overlaps with someone else’s, and that someone else’s “now” overlaps with an event in my future, then by transitivity that future event exists right now. Not metaphorically. Actually exists.
💬 'Logan'
Now read: Day 4: Does the Future Already Exist?
A paywalled Atlantic piece - but not paywalled on the Wayback machine: 🔗 The Lure of a Fully Randomized Life
When I first learned about Max’s experiment, I thought he had found a convenient way to dodge taking responsibility for his decisions. Sorry, the computer made me do it. But I came to see that no matter where the algorithm sent him, Max had cultivated an admirable equanimity about where he ended up. He’d traded the security of knowing exactly where he was going for the serenity of being present wherever he arrived.
💬 Simone Stolzoff
The whole piece reminded me of 🖇️ The Diceman
Ben seems to think the IPO is a good idea .. (His paraphrased conclusions)
1] Musk … has already pushed humanity forward on multiple vectors, including electric cars, self-driving, reusable rockets, satellite Internet, etc., and I’m excited to see him try and do more. 2] Musk is proposing an alternative path to unlimited compute is a relief. 3] This IPO is a return to what an IPO should be: the opportunity for people to contribute capital to actually build the business, and to benefit if it works out.
💬 Ben Thompson
Sure there are some nuanced caveats.