Programmable Organisation
Mourning Google ⓧ The Trough of AI Disillusionment ⓧ Life in the Algorithm
The past is written, but the future is left for us to write. And we have powerful tools, openness, optimism, and the spirit of curiosity. All they have is secrecy and fear. And fear is the great destroyer — Capt. Jean-Luc Picard
👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture. Three reads and three listens; no fluff, just stuff ⚡
📚 Reading
Mourning Google:
Google has lost its edge in search. There are plenty of things it can’t find. There are compelling alternatives. To me this feels like a big inflection point, because around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry. They exhibit creative energy and strongly-flavored voices, and those voices still sometimes find and reinforce each other without being sock puppets of shareholder-value-focused private empires.
Tim Bray | 5 minutes
Don’t Fear the Coming Trough of AI Disillusionment:
Think of the way computer languages evolved to create more abstraction layers between the user and the underlying code operations, so that we could do more with less. Extrapolate that trend line out towards natural language controllers and you can imagine a programmable organisation where you can spin up a team space, apps and design and build the processes needed to operate, simply by describing what you want.
Lee Bryant—Post*Shift | 6 minutes
Life in the Algorithm:
Where does computing end and culture begin? After all, there would be no Facebook without Zuckerberg and Saverin, without Harvard and its servers […] the cult of white male American nerdery and its fantasy of revenge; without bandwidth and fiber-optic micro cable, venture capital and patents, legislators and workarounds, data storage and content moderation, Foxconn and its wage slavery, and so on and so on.
Anna Shechtman—Yale Review | 25 minutes
🎧 Listening
Open Source LLMs:
You've got to get to that point where the LLM says something really obviously wrong to you as quickly as possible because the one of the many threats of this thing is that people get this sort of science fiction idea in the head […] This is some AI that knows everything about everything and cannot make any mistakes, which couldn't be further from the truth […This] really helps because it inoculates you a little bit against the sort of the way these things can bewitch you.
Simon Willison—0xide | 93 minutes
Marc Andreessen:
At some point a lot of businesses basically stabilise and you just have a certain number of record labels or a certain number of movie studios […] Tech never stabilizes like that. It always kind of looks like it's stabilised and then there's some earthquake in the form of disruptive technology change and then everything gets kind of tossed up in the air and kind of redone. And these platform shifts happen actually quite regularly; like every five years.
Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin (Apple, Spotify) | 192 minutes
The Great App Store Debate:
The GPT app store has no distribution advantage […] it looks a lot like what the Facebook API directly looked like before we built Facebook platform. There's a lot of kind of interesting utilities; they're cute, but they aren't really profoundly impactful new things […] And so you have to, anytime you're looking at one of these new platforms, ask this question, is there a real distribution opportunity for developers or not?
Dave Morin—More or Less | 47 minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago—Google vs. ChatGPT told by aglio e olio
2️⃣ years ago—The five Levels of Hype
3️⃣ years ago—The Innovation Farm