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Mistakes rooted in forward motion

Jason Fried of Elon Musk, via his Twitter:

I find most of his business decisions snugly wrapped in *practicality*.

Much of the stuff that’s branded risky actually feels like risk reduction to me. Like most things, it depends which lens you look through. Bold, simple, and practical is how I see it.

Many of the decisions appear reckless if you’re peering through the antique monocle of corporate America. Musk looks through a telescope. The focal points are entirely different.

Looking at what he’s done, and what he’s doing, traditional corporate America has actually taken the riskier route – fear, marginal decision making, complexity, and mediocrity slathered in marketing.

Mistakes come in all shapes and sizes, but the ones that come with slow decisions, committees diluting responsibility, sloppy cost control, and the prerequisite of pseudo-certainty before making a move are the worst kinds. Musk doesn’t make those kinds, his critics often do.

His mistakes are real, and, like all mistakes, have real consequences, of course, but they’re rooted in forward motion, rather than anchored in preservation of what was.

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Best advice from your profession

From the ‘Recommendo‘ newsletter:

Someone on Reddit asked “What’s your best advice from your profession?” and below is a summary of the most upvoted answers. — CD
Doctor: Never be afraid to get a second opinion. If your doctor is offended, that’s one more reason to get one.
Auto insurance adjuster: Get a dashcam to protect yourself in case of accidents or disputes.
Government worker: Find life satisfaction outside of the workplace.
Sales: Never celebrate until the money is in your account, regardless of how many times the client said yes or if there are signed documents.
HR: Underpromise, overdeliver, and keep your mouth shut to maintain a good reputation at work.

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“Wherever you get your podcasts”

When a podcast host says, “Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts,” they refer to a key aspect of this medium. Currently, the processes of creating, publishing, and discovering podcasts are inherently open.

By open I mean anyone has the ability to create a podcast and distribute it through various directories, such as Apple’s and Google’s. Listeners can use their preferred podcast app to find, subscribe, and listen to podcasts. Look at the variety on the Apple App Store:

This stands in contrast to Spotify’s approach, where they’ve introduced a comprehensive podcast ecosystem. This includes exclusive agreements with creators like Joe Rogan, resulting in podcasts available only on Spotify, inaccessible through apps like Overcast.

Similar to email, podcasts remain among the few mainstream Internet media forms that maintain an open structure, enabling unrestricted creation of content and consumer experiences.

However, we shouldn’t take for granted that podcasts will always thrive within this open ecosystem of multiple catalogs, discovery engines, and apps. XMPP serves as a cautionary example.

Amidst today’s plethora of messaging apps, it’s easy to overlook that in the late 1990s and 2000s, any application could communicate with other chat platforms as long as they adhered to the open XMPP standard, with one popular variant known as Jabber.

The Jabber home page in 2013.

Even Google’s former chat application, Google Talk, was an XMPP-based service. Consequently, users could choose from a variety of apps, including early mobile options, to connect with the service before Google launched its own app on new platforms.

Those days of chat apps working seamlessly together are gone. Email & podcasts remain open, both even experiencing a recent renaissance – but it isn’t guaranteed.

The object of this post is more to build awareness than prescribe specifics – that’s later.

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AI’s about to make knowledge infinitely personalised by making it infinitely malleable

In a conversation with a friend about generative AI and autonomous agents, I wondered if one could create a pipeline to evaluate if any given article on the web would be interesting to a me:

I have years’ worth of articles that I’ve saved and then read on the read-later service Instapaper. I know which ones of them I found interesting. I could use this text as training data for an AI.

Then I could ask the AI to compare the text of any potentially interesting article I found on the web with the data it has already analysed and output a suitability score – a probability of me actually finding the article worth reading.

If I said yes, it could add it to Instapaper and to its training data set.

This is deeply personalised. One person’s Instapaper/ Pocket/ Evernote/ Safari Reading List is likely to be very different from another’s.

It’s also the kind of work that AI could improve human quality of life with. With the explosion of published material on the web, there’s also an abundance of articles, posts, Twitter threads that I’d find interesting. But even as this grows exponentially, my capacity to discover, evaluate and read is linear – in fact, it has a hard limit of both time and cognitive capacity. This is where I’d like technology to do a priori prep work for me.

Over time this could get interesting.

A generative AI could take articles of topics I like but which are poorly written (subjectively) and rewrite them to make them more appealing to me.

An AI could also expand to other media – it could extract audio from YouTube videos or podcasts, convert to text, feed it into the same suitability analysis as above and recommend whether I’d like to listen or watch them.

It could give me the option to read a podcast or listen to an article or switch between them at will.

It could sequence articles in such a way as to introduce a new topic to me and educate me step by step about it.

AI is right at the point of making knowledge infinitely personalised by making it infinitely malleable.

The next several years are going to be fun.

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Less petrol vs electric, more private vs public

"Norway says it isn’t hoping to simply replace ICE engines with electric counterparts 1:1 but motivate people to get out of their… vehicles and walk, cycle, and take public transport, the latter which was particularly hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic."

A comment on Hacker News, where I discovered this article:

"The usual fare is to keep maintaining and upgrading the road network with only automobiles in mind and then act surprised when people keep choosing the mode of transportation that the infrastructure was built around."

The real shift shouldn’t be as much about privately owned petrol cars vs electric cars as about a shift from private transport to (efficient, electric) public transport. As has been said, real progress isn’t when the poor have access to cars but when the rich take public transport.

With public transport like trams and trains we’ll not only see a reduction in noise and microplastic pollution but a reduction in road sprawl and increase in urban density, meaning more areas of town become easily accessible to residents.

Related: 70% Bombay-Poona ‘Shivneri’ buses are now electric; remaining diesel fleet to be replaced by Diwali 2023.

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8 September, 2023 07:46

During her eight-decade long career, Bhosle has not only established herself as a musical giant but also as a versatile artiste. Yet, she believes that her "connection with music has grown stronger" with age. "I no longer just sing a tune, I feel the notes surging through my veins. It’s almost like I see the music. It’s difficult to explain. One has to feel it to understand it," says the 1933-born singer, who is the daughter of vocalist late Deenanath Mangeshkar.

Asha Bhosle turns ninety. She’s sung since 1942 as a little girl and has witnessed first-hand essentially the entire lifespan of the Hindi movie industry to date.

I’d love for someone to interview Asha over the next year for an extensive oral history of the industry, at least its music. Few from that era around today – Anandji, Laxmikant, Gulzar and Asha’s brother Hridaynath being a tiny handful.

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My own personal World Book

The writer Jason Kottke, ten years ago on why he writes his all-encompassing blog:

A friend of mine says, “Nostalgia is death,” but I hope my approach is more than pining for the olden days of weblogs. Kottke.org is a way for me to relate to the world as a whole person, communicate with like minds, celebrate knowledge, and, yes, to write my own personal World Book.

The last two resonated strongly with me. The intersection between myself and the world is a tiny fraction of a percent of the world. And what I write is a tiny fraction of a percent of that. That infinitesimally tiny experience of the world, communicated through this site, is (to me) incredibly rich.

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Their art didn’t need more time; their time needed their art

From a quote from a Kottke.org post:

It turns out, not doing their art was costing them time, was draining it away, little by little, like a slow but steady leak. They had assumed, wrongly, that there wasn’t enough time in the day to do their art, because they assumed (because we’re conditioned to assume) that every thing we do _costs_ time. But that math doesn’t take energy into account, doesn’t grok that doing things that energize you gives you time back. By doing their art, a whole lot of time suddenly returned. Their art didn’t need more time; _their time needed their art_.

Jason in his own post goes on to say:

a few years ago I shifted my thinking around time & energy. I noticed that when I thought or said “I don’t have time for this”, what I really meant was “I don’t have the energy for this”. Obviously I have time to do all sorts of things — I spend many hours during the week in front of the TV or on my phone watching/reading garbage — but it’s actually the energy that’s the issue.

My experience is that we are collectively going through chronic mental exhaustion. Between info hungry work, and social media, and chats app, and the anxieties and attention they all demand and the anxieties they create, we no longer have the mental energy to even look forward to our art, our interests.

Like Kottke and the people he quotes, life may need us to forcefully make time for it so as to gain some mental and emotional bandwidth back.

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City in four dimensions

From Reddit comment about the Chinese city of Chongqing:

The og city of Chongqing was built along the Yangtze River hemmed in by mountain plates. In the 20th century, the city-long a local hub between Qinghai/Sichuan/Southern China-sprawled like wildfire, from the riverside it crept up to the mountain plates, with mountain residents finding it onerous to haul ass down to the city center and vice versa. By the 1980s-2000s, high rises began to be built, some of which met level with the mountain districts. The mountain citizens couldnt be assed to travel all the way downriver to get to these buildings so what did they do? Connect the upper floors & rooftops with a series of skyways, walkways, and eventually metro-rails. In the process the nearby mountains got hollowed out for tunnels to serve skyways and metrorails.

End result: Chongqing becomes a multi-layered city. Where instead of just thinking in 4 directions, you also have to worry about which “floor” you are at in the city.

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You can’t just do code

The inventor of the programming language C++ talks about an education beyond just technology:

So you can’t just do code. You have to do something about culture and how to express ideas. I mean, I never regretted the time I spent on history and on math. Math sharpens your mind, history gives you some idea of your limitations and what’s going on in the world. And so don’t be too sure. Take time to have a balanced life.

There are many lenses one can choose from to look at life. Having a good set of them and knowing when to use which one is a skill acquired through a broad education.

I read this in the context of the Open AI creator Sam Altman’s comments on the movie Oppenheimer:

i was hoping that the oppenheimer movie would inspire a generation of kids to be physicists but it really missed the mark on that. let’s get that movie made!

It wasn’t meant to be a movie about science – but Altman doesn’t seem to realise that. This is a problem of lenses.