Brandon Gardner talks to Jon Grover about How Red Seagulls, White Elephants and Golden Geese can show you your ideal customer. Inspired by Richard Tripp? (more)

Past and present reads. Bolded-titles were faves. See esp. Greatest Books (more)

I saw a toot from someone saying they suddenly couldn't read their Kindle ebooks that they bought more than 5 years ago - they had to re-buy them, then contact customer service for refunds! (more)

Daniel Schmidt: OKRs are not Strategy. It’s easy to be sloppy in our thinking when conceiving product initiatives. We often prioritize doing things that we “know” must be done (more)

Summary: create multiple short consistent documents of your current business strategy/product strategy, to help people throughout the organization make decisions, generate ideas, etc. (more)

Alistair Cockburn idea of recognizing that different Projects have different constraints, and therefore each needs it own methodology/process. (more)

an Agile Software Development methodology (more)

cf pattern matching

Tracking is separating students by what is assessed as academic ability into groups for all subjects[1] or certain classes and curriculum[2] within a school.[1][2] (The theory being that track assignment is based on academic ability, other factors often influence placement.) It may be referred to as streaming or phasing in some schools. In a tracking system, the entire school population is assigned to classes according to whether the students' overall achievement is above average, normal, or below average. Students attend academic classes only with students whose overall academic achievement is the same as their own... Many secondary schools now base track levels on course difficulty, with tracks such as basic, honors, or college-prep.[6] Public schools might track in terms of high, average, or lower ability. As noted by Oakes and Martin, "school policies determine three structural qualities of the tracking system: extensiveness (the number of subjects tracked and the type of distinct curricula offered); specificity (the number of track levels offered); and flexibility (whether students move from one track to another)". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_(education) (schooling)

Henry Farrell: After software eats the world, what comes out the other end? Not too long ago, my notions of the cultural consequences of Large Language Models (LLMs) were guided by a common metaphor of monsters of appetite. As Cosma and I and said in an article, “the political anthropologist James Scott has explained how bureaucracies are monsters of information, devouring rich, informal bodies of tacitly held knowledge and excreting a thin slurry of abstract categories that rulers use to “see” the world.” LLMs would do much the same thing to human culture. (2023-06-21) Farrell Shalizi Artificial Intelligence Is A Familiar-looking Monster (more)

Rob Horning: Enough about me. The thing to write about in the “tech commentary” space this week is Google’s NotebookLM, a tool that lets users explore a set of documents through an LLM interface instead of reading them. It was just one AI summarizing tool among many until Google recently added the ability to make it generate a podcast with AI voices bantering their way through the material it’s been given to capsulize (more)

Dan Shipper: Is NotebookLM - Google’s Research Assistant - the Ultimate Tool for Thought? I sat down with bestselling author Steven Johnson to see if we could come up with a concept for his next project—using AI. We loaded 200,000 words of interview transcripts that NASA conducted and all of Steven’s reading notes since 1999 into NotebookLM, Google Labs’s personalized research assistant. (podcast notes) (more)

Steven Johnson: Revenge Of The Humanities. Last week I had the honor of delivering the commencement address at my youngest son's high school graduation... the somewhat paradoxical idea that, thanks to the AI revolution, we are entering a period where it will be a great time to be a humanities major with an interest in technology. (more)

A carbon footprint (or greenhouse gas footprint) is a calculated value or index that makes it possible to compare the total amount of greenhouse gases that an activity, product, company or country adds to the atmosphere. Carbon footprints are usually reported in tonnes of emissions (CO2-equivalent) per unit of comparison. Such units can be for example tonnes CO2-eq per year, per kilogram of protein for consumption, per kilometer travelled, per piece of clothing and so forth. A product's carbon footprint includes the carbon emissions for the entire life cycle. These run from the production along the supply chain to its final consumption and disposal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_footprint cf Carbon Accounting

Ed Zitron: The Rot Economy. At the center of everything I’ve written for the last few months (if not the last few years), sits a cancerous problem with the fabric of how capital is deployed in modern business. Public and private investors, along with the markets themselves, have become entirely decoupled from the concept of what “good” business truly is, focusing on one metric — one truly noxious metric — over all else: growth. (BigWorld) (more)

The Principles Of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald Reinertsen ISBN:1935401009 (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: AI #42: The Wrong Answer. With the year ending and my first Vox post coming out, this week was a natural time to take stock. I wrote my first best-of post in a long time and laid out my plans for my 501c(3). (more)

Jason Yip: The top 3 points you should have paid attention to in the Spotify Engineering Culture videos that aren’t Squads, Chapters, Tribes, Guilds. When it comes to product development culture, structure is the last thing you should be worried about, not the first. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: The Leopold Model: Analysis and Reactions. This is a post in three parts. The first part is my attempt to condense Leopold Aschenbrenner’s paper and model into its load bearing elements and core logic and dependencies. Two versions here, a long version that attempts to compress with minimal loss, and a short version that gives the gist. The second part goes over where I agree and disagree, and briefly explains why. The third part is the summary of other people’s reactions and related discussions, which will also include my own perspectives on related issues. (2024-06-01) Leopold Aschenbrenner's AGI Situational Awareness Paper (more)

aka AI Alignment, AI Alignment