Abandonware
To all junior engineers: build wigwams, what language models do not (and, can not) get, and machine seductions.
👋 🎄 On time for your Twelvetide: 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 ⚡
Thoughtforms will be taking a break through the end of the year. Back on Friday, January 5th.
📚 Reading
I hereby pardon all junior engineers:
But unfocused collective efforts produce rube-goldberg communes and abandonware ghost-towns. Wigwams will continue to rise and fall in the shadow of battleships until engineers recommit to quality craftsmanship and intentional tinkering. We must organize sustainable communities around stable design. We must make better maps and learn better manners.
Taylor Troesh | 9 minutes
Are AI Language Models in Hells?
We, as humans, […] pause and consider: does this word really stand for the thing I want it to stand for? Does this sentence capture the real experience I’m having? Does the tether hold? Where a language model is concerned, words and sentences don’t stand for things; they are the things. All is text, and text is all.
Robin Sloan | 6 minutes
Seduced By The Machine:
Increasingly we also have our goals defined for us by technology and by modern bureaucratic systems (governments, schools, corporations). But instead of providing us with something equally rich and well-fitted, they can only offer us pre-fabricated values, standardised for populations.
Ian Leslie—The Ruffian | 8 minutes
🎧 Listening
Make Number Go Up, and The Problem with Nonprofits:
There just seems to both cases to be a real misalignment between the governing structures and all the different constituents or what these entities actually do […] In this moment of incredible tension in society and when people are being polarized and pulled apart in different ways, it seems like so many different kinds of organizations are vulnerable to these fissures If you just don't have a very clear sense of who's in charge.
Jessica Lessin—More or Less | 53 minutes
Hijacked Histories, Polarized Futures:
Long-term thinking requires a radically new temporal framing. Not a march of progress, not the end of history. You know, we live in interesting times. We don't know how things will turn out. But pay attention because if we don't pay attention and if we don't participate, other people will decide for us
Abby Smith Rumsey—Long Now | 56 minutes
Thinking on fundraising, goals, growth, and more:
[G]o big or go home, raise a bunch of money and get huge and unicorn status and the whole thing. That's a way. Just know though that basically almost nobody makes it that way. Really almost nobody really makes it that way. There's a lot more room to make it and to build a successful business if you throw out that outlier and look at all the other places you can land as a business.
Jason Fried—Lenny’s Newsletter | 94 minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago: Management as Video Game Design
2️⃣ years ago: The internet is changing us profoundly. We aren't sure into what