iPad Goat Ears
Links and strange finds from the World Wide Web
Relative to your interests
28 slightly rude notes on writing - “All emotions are useful for writing except for bitterness.” // “Somehow, whenever I finish a draft, my first few paragraphs almost always contain ideas that were necessary for writing the rest of the piece, but that aren’t necessary for understanding it.” // Lower down, that first part to delete is called "the windup." I call it "throat clearing." Either way, try to cut it and Mento-memo your way to the conclusion in the first sentence. This is, apparently, American-style, according to The Culture Map. Indeed!
A behind the scenes glimpse of the launch of GPT-4 - Fun anecdotes about OpenAI figuring out that ChatGPT was a big deal, and then marketing around it. // “Another little detail about the launch video is that we didn’t use titles for any of the OpenAI employees. Even to this day OpenAI is an incredibly flat organization. I watched a DeepMind video where every talking head had a title and it seemed like a caste system. While I don’t know if that’s really how it is there, I wanted to show that at OpenAI titles didn’t matter all that much. The one exception to titles were the people from Microsoft that appeared. I was given very specific instructions from them about titles. Microsoft even flew one of their execs down on a private jet so he could be in the video.” // Considering the goodwill and share value that Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI likely brought, well worth it.
The Titan Who Couldn’t Let Go - Founder mode case study: “There’s a pattern here, and it’s bigger than Hughes. Obsession works–in short bursts, in narrow contexts, with clear feedback loops. But scale it up, let it harden into infrastructure, and it starts to rot the system from the inside. Hughes structurally disallowed any process he couldn’t control. That works in a cockpit. It fails in a boardroom.”
Getting things “done” in large tech companies - If the executives don’t know you did something cool, you didn’t do something cool. Legible.
VMware’s Kubernetes Evolution - a fuller history would be interesting to read.
Oxide’s Compensation Model: How is it Going? - You know, I bet it has the effect of encouraging people to focus on the product as the product instead of the product as their comp. // Of course, the next step is to publish and then equalize the cap-table, but, hey, we can’t go full socialist.
William Gibson - September 1997 interview.
It’s time we stopped asking for vases. - “Most people cram their AI prompts with so many rules that they predetermine the answer.”
Has DOGE missed its opportunity? - This is general advice for digital transformation, too. // And, on the actual focus,I mean: who could have predicted this outcome…
PepsiCo taps AWS to accelerate digital transformation, AI adoption | CIO Dive - ”Enterprises across industries are facing ballooning cloud bills as AI adoption drives up costs. Nearly 3 in 4 IT pros blamed the AI boom for ‘unmanageable’ cloud bills last year.” // When it comes to “we’re paying too much” things like this, I often wonder: do you mean something more like “unexpected” or even “we’re buying a lot because its useful.”
mobygratis - Free Moby music to empower your creative projects - Free to use as long as you don’t promote right wing politics or eating meat, dairy, etc.
Wastebook
“Let's not build that panopticon!” AI not as earth-deadly as previously thought?
“The first upload to my homepage (melonking.net) in 2016 was a story about a goat who trades his ears for an iPad, but recovers them again when he realises that the iPad can be broken in two, and remade into cyborg ears that fuse the best of what he had lost and what he had gained.” Finally, a practical use for iPads.
“It is a bit like modern Americans staking out Mount Vernon and destroying the risen corpse of George Washington.” M.T. Black.
“white male Christian cisgender macho MAGA man” Only lacking a geographic label.
“WE DIDN’T GENTRIFY SPITALFIELDS SO YOU COULD MICROWAVE YOUR DINNER.” Warren Ellis.
“In the wild Mantichora resemble the worst house cats, lazy, mercurial, and cruel, they torment their prey, sometimes even forgetting about it and letting it crawl away broken to die.” Not very friendly.
“Try to match the user’s vibe” System instructions.
“my pain wasn’t because I was weak or broken. It felt terrible because it was terrible.” ChatTherapist.
“I would rather have thinner relationships with ‘the perfect people for me’ than regular bear hugs and beer guzzlings with ‘people who are in the 87th percentile for me.’” Thinking percentiles.
Only experts fear what can replace them.
“The Politics of Symmetry” Taylor.
“Zavagor stole an amulet off of a drunk panda-man and got a cryptic message from his demonic patron: ‘The gargoyle needs iron. The circle is wooden.’” Not helpful.
“What happens when the bodies of children get older but stay the same?” Artful Dodgers.
“Vernacular institutions”: They are more useful than they are legible.
Charts
I like 100% area/bar charts. If you have enough periods of previous data, they’re great for showing a growing trends. Here’s a recent one:
And, here’s the chart that me like these 100% area charts, from 2012. It’s showing percent of units shipped per year per PC type (so, market share by unit, not revenue1):
The genius of this chart, though, is re-thinking what data belongs in the chart. At the time, thinking of “smart phones” as competitors to PCs was not normal. But, once you do think of them as the same - as we do now when it comes to this kind of strategic thinking - you see something incredibly dramatic. That chart tells a lot of interesting stories.
Conferences
Events I’ll either be speaking at or just attending.
Tanzu AI workshop, Palo Alto, CA, May 13th, speaking. CF Day US, Palo Alto, CA, May 14th, speaking. NDC Oslo, May 21st to 23rd, speaking. SREDay Cologne, June 12th, speaking (10% off with the code CLG10).
Logoff
Busy week next week. Travel to Palo Alto for two talks (see above), a podcast recording, and then all the usual.
That distinction is also an important one to me. When it comes to making money, market share by revenue is great, sure. You’re saying how much money you’re making versus your competitors. But, that doesn’t tell you how widely used something is. When you’re tracking trends, knowing units is much more important. You want to know how much something is happening, not just how much money people are making off it.