Cam Pegg

This is fun and impressive and will take a chunk out of your morning if you let it: a map of every charted lighthouse, lighted buoy, and navigation light in the world (to be fair, the whole mapped.earth site is a massive time sink, not just this).

Worth a least a couple of moments’ thought: “I’d like to draw your attention to one thing that is worth considering: “we” are training LLMs on a vast swath of human creations, pushing models to write, speak, and fake-think like humans.

I guess this sounds like a less-bad legislative approach than things like youth bans?

New to me, but it’s been around for a while: Venkatesh Rao’s Discworld Rules.

I missed this when it was released, but HBR published the third installment of Marc Zao-Sanders’ How People Are Really Using AI series.

The question that stood out most to me in the World Economic Forum’s new briefing paper on strategic foresight is “What should never be delegated to AI, even if it can predict the outcome better than we can?”

“Abraham Maslow’s law of the instrument suggests that, to someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Yes, for the love of God, please put on headphones.

There’s nothing on Brad Feld’s list of the real luxuries in life that I disagree with (and I couldn’t agree more with item #1; time, and the ability to choose how you use it, is one of life’s biggest luxuries).

Back in May, Daniel Jalkut posted the most accurate assessment of pro- vs. anti-AI people I’ve seen: “My take on AI is, essentially, everybody who’s against is too against it and everybody who’s for it is too for it.”

The Book Prize Index is likely going to cost me a lot of money.

An unexpected (but very much appreciated) honor.

It is very smoky outside… I can’t imagine how bad it must be closer to the fires.

Happy birthday, little dog.

Written in the context of software engineering, but pretty much universally applicable: Why I Stopped Arguing With People.

Not really a “kid’s” book and not really an “adult” book either.

I’m going to set aside my distaste for portmanteaux for a moment (they’re terrible, and “lostalgia” is a truly awful word!)

The pedant in me loves this so much, especially calling out “less/fewer” and “begs the question.”

I’ve been more worried about the idea that AI-generated outputs represent a cognitive reversion to the mean, but the concept of “semantic ablation” is potentially even scarier; that when it’s used to refine an idea, AI actually strips it of its humanity.

All metaphors are imperfect.

I don’t love appending “-slop” to everything AI-related, but this Harvard Business Review article by Angelo Romasanta, Llewellyn D W Thomas, and Natalia Levin makes a solid point.

I’m just going to leave this one here for some light weekend reading (and also because “a clogged toilet of inefficiency” is an amazing turn of phrase).

(Note: This post is expands on the idea that that I wrote about yesterday) AI tools promise to redistribute work, but what actually gets redistributed is the burden of making that work functional.

A recent Haas School of Business study outlined in Harvard Business Review found that (surprise!)

Have you ever gone along with or even supported an idea you didn’t like, just because you thought it was what everyone else wanted, only to find out later that nobody liked it?

I’ve just finished reading Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI and would highly recommend it.

I’m absolutely stealing bits of this.

A few months ago, I mentioned the concept of “cognitive debt” (essentially, the idea that skipping the thinking to get straight to answers compounds over time, much like technical debt in software).

(There seems to be a bit of a theme emerging here… 🤔) Last week, I posted a link to an article on using AI for discovery, not just productivity.

There has been quite a bit of noise over the last few weeks about that MIT study that reportedly “proves” that using AI reduces brain activity.

In his recent Financial Times opinion piece, Carl Benedikt Frey highlighted a moderately uncomfortable truth about AI, productivity, and innovation.