Friday Fodder #10
What's Trending? What's Transcendent?
Who needs parents when kids today can fall asleep bathed in blue light and lulled by the soothing hum of Nvidia-packed data centers? Also, robots.
Timely
AI’s $600B Question - I keep coming back to this article.. Nvidia is a 3 trillion dollar company off the backs of Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, X, OpenAI and untold others hoarding piles of very fast and hot matrix multipliers in large nondescript buildings near large power plants. LLMs are amazing devices but there still gaping holes in the market strategy for actually turning profit - aside from eating existing markets. One day GPUs will help lots of companies turn a profit. But in the meantime, a reminder for patience when evaluating net gains.
The Age of Abandonment - There is nothing as raw as the pain of a child. In our race to abandon traditional values, Freya India shows some of the pain children are bearing. Half of all 14 year olds in the UK don’t live with both parents. What does a world look like when children are taught that their parents won’t be there? Apparently we will trust nobody.
Prompt Design - One company that is actually working on turning a profit from the value of AI models is Cursor. They’re working to build a coding environment that has AI models built from the ground up. Arvid is one of their founders and here he analogizes prompt design to web design.
The Real Data Wall Is Billions Of Years Of Evolution - The more I know about the insane amount of data it takes to build a competent LLM, the more flummoxed I am by the fact that humans can learn what they learn with so little data. It’s really nuts. Here we have an idea that much of that learning loop - over billions of years of evolution - might be embedded in our DNA for us.
Open Source Corporate Takeover? - You might have heard that there’s a huge internet fight between Wordpress’s founder Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine hosting. If not, I’ll forgive you. Wordpress.org is an open source project with a smaller financial arm. WP Engine is a PE-backed profit-oriented company. They’re at war and it does not seem like there’s a chance of rapprochement on the horizon. It’s rare to see open source and corporate entities battle. Also WordPress still powers something like 44% of all websites and the community is really not happy.
Timeless
Why Buy A Rolex - As overall material wealth has continued to increase, it would be reasonable to think that brand power decreased. But the opposite has happened. If the pure economic side of this coin is Veblen goods, then Sherry Ning provides the emotive and personal flip side for why luxury is “a product that advertises the user”.
Are You Serious? - Unlike the author, I still worry alot about being taken seriously but I’ve resolved to be fine with this because it’s more important to maintain the wonder and excitement of feeling like a child. Seriously, this is an exceptional meditation on what it means to take something seriously. The ‘dynamic persistence’ of someone like Dashrath Manjhi - the Mountain Man - requires some time to truly process. Also, Pressfield’s War of Art is one of my favorite books.
The Static Site Paradox - This is one of the great ironies of technology: the normal users end up with this gloopy, complicated, expensive software racket that they don’t understand and power users have simple, free, elegant tooling that they can handle somewhat effortlessly. I run a custom Gatsby setup for my personal website with deploys triggered by Github webhooks and hosted for free on Netlify. I’ve never appreciated that more, but I’ve never been more sad for the state of what programmers give to everyone. We can do better and this makes a great target.
Can LLMs Generate Novel Ideas? - One of my longstanding beliefs is that LLMs are primarily an enhancing technology rather than a replacing technology. In other words, they will help us craft better ideas but won’t come up with the ideas on their own. That view as eroded slowly over time and this paper is just helping nudge it over a cliff.
Books
Extinction of Experience by Christine Rosen - This is the first book recommendation I’ve given where I haven’t finished the book! It just hits the mark on every page. Technology isn’t just making us more addicted or less distracted, it’s changing the very nature of our interaction with reality. Rosen’s is the best argument around this I’ve read yet, with banger sentences like “We relate to our world through information about it rather than direct experience with it.” Woosh.
Tweets
Cheers!