zoia.org

Thanks to Daring Fireball, I discovered the Eliza Archeology site. As the site explains: ELIZA is the original and highly influential chatbot that launched the genre of human-computer interactions using text-based agents. It was created at MIT in the 1960s as part of Project MAC by it’s designer and programmer, Joseph Weizenbaum. ELIZA not only allowed Weizenbaum to develop a mode of interaction with computers that is highly interactive, it also contributed to the way in which people were…

Cory Doctorow in The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, commenting on Vocational Awe, a term coined by librarian-theorist Fobazi Etthart: Vocational Awe. The process by which employees exploit their workers’ sense of duty to the people they serve to get them to accept brutal working conditions. For most professionals prone to vocational awe (…) those terrible conditions include low pay. You can reply to this post by email.

Seth Godin writing about Degrees of Freedom: Professionals and organizations that use AI to save time, cut costs, and lay people off are taking a lazy road to failure and irrelevance. Those who use it to do harder, braver, and more powerful work, who figure out how to create more value and charge more for it, and who end up hiring more people to do so, will be defining our future. You can reply to this post by email.

Every year in June, Apple holds its World-Wide Developer Conference (WWDC). The event opens with Apple’s WWDC keynote, where Apple executives announce major technology improvements for the Apple ecosystem both in hardware and software. As always, WWDC attracts expectations from both pundits and Apple geeks. Some things to note: John Ternus, Apple’s announced next CEO, didn’t appear on the pre-recorded video. Also, announcements were centered around software. No new hardware announced this time.…

Taylor Pearson commenting on AI. We are very much in the “kit phase” of AI with custom GPTs, niche agent scaffolds, individual tinkerers wiring LLMs into their own workflows. It’s not clear what the ‘productized’ version of these tools will look like. You can reply to this post by email.

Simplenote is a fast, lightweight app for taking notes, with just the essentials: basic text editing, syncing across devices, and the option to share notes for collaboration with other Simplenote users. Fred Cheng and Mike Johnston created the first version of Simplenote in 2008. While building the product, they developed a sync engine. This sync engine would become the basis for Simperium, their cross-platform data syncing service. Simplenote became popular because of its straightforward…

Some pages on this blog about books and reading that you may not be aware of: Books I’ve read through the years Boook reviews About reading and its benefits You can reply to this post by email.

Byung-Chul books always have a high signal-to-noise ratio. His reasoning goes to the point, without wasting time on anecdotes or stories to illustrate the topic. The Transparency Society is no exception. The author denounces transparency as a neoliberal dispositive and extracts the consequences from different perspectives. In the Transparency Society, transparency is enforced and a mean of control. Bentham’s Panopticon Byung-Chul Han compares in different moments the society of transparency to…

The point of reading a book is not extracting information but having a conversation with the author and thinking about what the author is proposing. Paraphrasing David Kadavy, it’s about answering the questions you had in mind when you opened the book. Ezra Klein, quoted in Brain Food (Farnam Street’s newsletter): Part of what is happening when you spend 7 hours reading a book, is you spend 7 hours with your mind on the topics in the book, grappling with them, drawing connections, having…

Shane Parrish, reflecting on feedback, says that nobody likes a difficult conversation. So, many times bosses care more about how the conversation feels than about whether the problem gets solved. This is selfish. Also, says Parrish, when receiving feedback, many people focus on how they feel about it and not on the substance. Deep down, they don’t actually want direct feedback. Marshall Goldsmith popularized the term feedforward applied to coaching. While feedback evaluates past behavior,…

Thanks to AI, building a prototype for an application today is faster and easier than ever. The strategy for launching a product has been “validate before building the solution”. Today building costs have collapsed and you can build a prototype in a short time and use it to help validate the idea. But this surfaces another problem. When building was expensive, you couldn’t afford skipping the problem definition work. Now that the friction is gone, the temptation is to skip thinking about the…

I had a conversation with Claude about the current state of Web Browsers, from a user’s perspective. Then I asked it to summarize the conversation in a table. (Just in case you were wondering why Chrome is not your best choice.) Category Dimension Safari Chrome Firefox Brave Engine WebKit Blink (Chromium) Gecko Blink (Chromium) Memory 10 tabs All four within ~1.5–2.5 GB; differences negligible 30+ tabs Lightest Heaviest Moderate Moderate Privacy Default tracker blocking Strong (ITP) Weak…

I read this book because I’m always trying to improve my focus and memory, and I read a review where it was recommended as a great book for that. I liked the chapters about Memory Palaces, they are well written and insightful. However, around 70% of the book is about the author’s life. I understand that he included his story in the book because the techniques described helped him not only improve his memory but take himself out of the very dark place he was into. Just don’t advertise the book…

A great conversation with Jessica Livingston, Paul Graham, and Carolynn Levi about the early days of YCombinator. Stories from a more candid era.

A basic principle in business is that your revenue must cover your costs, and ideally leave some margin for profit. One of the keys of understanding Venture Capital-funded startups is the time-frame. Startups raise money at different stages in exchange for equity, and use that money to build their offering and grow their user base to a point where they can achieve “escape velocity” and start to actually gain profits. Once funding is raised, the goal for investors is that the startup either ge...

Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything – John Kenneth Galbraith (quoted in Poor Charlie’s Almanack) H/T: A Learning a Day.

I read this book because I liked The Almanack of Raval Navikant, also by Eric Jorgenson, and because it’s Elon Musk. Like Jorgeson previous book, The Book of Elon is a recompilation of Elon Musk’s tweets, interviews, etc. As the book’s webpage explains, it’s about “Elon Musk’s Most Useful Ideas, in His Own Words.” The texts have been edited and arranged by topic, and aside from a few questions interespersed in the text to give context, there is no comment or interpretation by Jorgenson. Whate...

When I was 13 or 14, I learned to code in Assembly Language for the 6502 processor that came with most of the personal computers of the time: the Ataris, Commodores, and Apples. Assembly Language is the set of mnemonics used to program the CPU, that are converted to machine language, the raw bytes that CPUs actually understand. I learned tricks to save a few bytes and machine cycles here and there—computers were pretty limited at the time. I knew about byte order, most-significant and least-s...

Elon Musk on reading books, in The Book of Elon by Eric Jorgenson: Read books, because the data rate of reading is much greater than when somebody is speaking. What’s the output rate of speech? A couple hundred bits per second, maybe a few thousand per second if you’re going full tilt. You can get several times that by reading. The main reason I didn’t go to lectures in college was because the data rate was too slow.

Great article by Paul Graham on branding, design, status, quality, and creating scarcity using the Swiss watch industry as an example: The Brand Age.

This is a well-known quote from Schwarzenegger’s book Be Useful: Seven Rules for Life. Even so, it’s worth remembering it from time to time: I have a rule: no complaining about a situation unless you’re prepared to do something to make it better. If you see a problem and you don’t come to the table with a potential solution, I don’t want to hear your whining about how bad it is. It couldn’t be that bad if it hasn’t motivated you to try to fix it.

Given a choice between something simple and something complicated, choose what is simple without hesitation; sooner or later, what is complicated will almost always lead to problems. Moitessier held the world’s longest recorded nonstop solo sailing voyage. His approach to sailing was a ruthless simplification of everything on his boat which facilitated maintainability. (The quote is from Steward Brand’s excellent book Maintenance of Everything, Vol 1.)