This is where I save interesting links.
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You Are Not Late
A good day to re-read this Kevin Kelly essay from 2014.
I think I believe he’s right. The internal disagreement (cope, perhaps) I felt reading it is that the big things we’re inventing right now, the things exciting everyone and causing $1 trillion IPOs, are created by a few big companies with a ton of capex.
So, the inverse signal to that is probably something like: set your targets lower than $1 trillion but higher than where you are not and move towards it by using the exciting realities available to you to get there.
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Traditional Georgian Dance to Future
Today’s my birthday. 33rd year – the Jesus year – is nigh! I think I’ll live this year with the attitude of this video. It’s simply wonderful.
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Also, there is an infinite amount of content (signs h/t Baudrillard) to be created. Many, many of them of unbelievably imaginative and interesting; such as these Georgians dancing to Future.
Sadly, one needs to be incredibly skilled to ignore, or better yet to never see, the 99% that is a waste.
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The year is 2028
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Is AI Going to Destroy Our Lives or Not?
https://substack.com/home/post/p-199200508
Great post on what is materializing and what is not, and maybe how it’s a particularly challenging time to be 18-25!
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AI disproves an Erdos problem
A claim from OpenAI about this being the first time “that a prominent open problem, central to a subfield of mathematics, has been solved autonomously by AI.”
And here’s a Marginal Revolution post with some outside commentary.
My understanding is that this is: 1. a big deal and 2. a great setup for the AI to have solved because Erdos already had a solution that the AI disproved, which probably could have been disproved by a human mathematician if they’d been sufficiently interested in exploring whether Erods’s solution was in fact correct forsaking other endeavors to do so.
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r/birdwatching
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Philosophers at AI labs
Maybe about a year ago, I remember telling Michael that I thought it would make sense for the big AI companies to hire philosophers. That philosophers might be one of the last “jobs” left.
A thousand other thoughts or predictions, if you can call this remark one, since then have not come to pass.
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It is Sunday
This is possible, it would just take a higher standard for what spending your money and your time means. And by “you” and “your”, I mean me and mine.
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My pendulum swings
After about two months now of using AI very heavily, exploring new coding and agent tools, I am again swinging back towards a very Wendell Berry-esque feeling towards all of it.
At the same time as my usage has been going up, this very interesting nostalgia for the 90s and early 2000s has come into view. The algorithm is pumping this for me, sure, but I am also connecting with a pre-algorithm world where things just felt easier. Easier, or more free, is how I’ve come to express it.
This world right now, seems to me of and for and by the algorithm. It doesn’t have to be that way, but you must work hard to make it very much not that way.
The algorithm can be literally that – what X/Twitter or TikTok is showing you – but it is also just the convenient and expedient things that leave you feeling at the end of the day that you have not done a thing and that you are certainly disconnected or detached from whatever things others around you have done.
What I mean is, in the world of the algorithm something is always happening but you are just observing it. Being fed it.
You aren’t creating it or participating in it.
You have to work so hard to be a full participant in your life. Always have. AND, I the digitally connected world – the super world – makes it even harder.
That’s why my pendulum is swinging back. Because when I use these AIs consistently for days and weeks and months, I don’t know what I really have to show for it.
Meanwhile, I have planted 13 trees in the backyard over recent months and they have started to bloom. I can see the connection I have to them, and I understand the connection they have to the greater environment, and that gives me a greater sense of my connection to God and to land I live on and to my family and community.
I admit this style of writing is very emotional and slapstick, and perhaps confused. I mean to say that I go through these ebbs of thinking that I really need to keep up and understand this stuff, while using it to try and make some money (possible) in a time where that would be quite useful. But I don’t enjoy that process all that much when I come to the end of a month of heavy use of it. I’m not sure it’s worth it.
I do know that planting the tress was worth it. That playing tennis with Sadie and going to Trailhead after was worth it. That riding bikes and scooters with you guys (Greta and Shepherd) was worth it. All real and making me better in this world!And so my pendulum swings back. Wendell Berry writing about why he’ll never buy a computer comes back around to making great sense.
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Why ‘Cost Disease’ Is the Secret Force Behind America’s Toxic Solitude
Interesting post on a fix to the “anti-social century” maybe being possible through social subsidies.
Through the lens of Baumol’s cost disease.
We’ve gotten more isolated because technological progress in social areas drives us to spend more time alone: Netflix is cheaper than a movie theatre, etc. etc.
Would be interesting to see a small sized town (<100k people) try some of the solutions he mentions.