Robin's Interesting Thoughts

It can get lost amid the AI excitement that there are other shortages in this world besides brainpower.

“Aren’t we entering that era where we’re all just creating content for each other?

“[When you] wash your hands [in] some building, you don’t have to say, ‘Well, I hope this building has clean water that won’t give me cholera.’ … because there are standards for that.”

I finally read The Mom Test, a lovely little book about how to do effective customer research for startups.

The mistake that engineers sometimes make is that they assume by destroying [inefficient] institutions, you would necessarily be able to replace them with something better, which is not always the case — and it also ignores a lot of the wisdom that accret…

I’m surprised how often I hear well-informed people argue that modern AI models are still “just repeating things that are in the training data.”

Something I hear a lot in debates about AI are variations of: “sure, this chatbot can [do online research, tutor you in chemistry, search for drug candidates, …], but it’s not really intelligent.”

One of my photographs was recently featured in the Seattle Times.

“Spirituality is recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to each other by a power greater than all of us, and that our connection to that power and to one another is grounded in love and compassion.

Sometimes it’s not very helpful to optimize a model.