Better Futures
Imaging better futures ⓧ The "Personalization" fail ⓧ Hype & Reality in Hollywood
👋 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 ⚡
There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening—Marshall McLuhan
📚 Reading
Imagining better futures with ‘Assembling Tomorrow’:
Nearly everyone designs with good intentions, but eventually, everything breaks. While we can’t prevent all breakages, we can use design techniques to spot gaps and find opportunities if and when things break down. We may not anticipate exactly what will break, but by anticipating breakage, we can ensure smarter designs that build in speed bumps, sharp curves, and mandatory pauses to slow the speeding train and stave off catastrophe.
Carissa Carter, Scott Doorley—Standford Report | 5 minutes
Will personalization fail (by 2025)?
Behavioral data is a window into the effectiveness of our own designs, NOT our customers situations, emotions, culture, relationships or needs […] At the heart of why personalization fails is a story we have been telling ourselves for years: that our own channels and our customers are the same thing. Creating the questionable assumption that our own products or websites are a reliable reflections of what people need.
Helge Tennø—LinkedIn | 4 minutes
Fear and Loathing (and Hype and Reality) in Los Angeles:
What are AI video generators good for then? A lot. They will be most effective for use cases that work within their constraints or even exploit them. This includes basically everyone with lower production-value standards than big budget Hollywood series and movies: […] the vast number of creators who would love to tell compelling stories using video, but who would never even consider doing a physical shoot and painstaking post production work.
Doug Shapiro—the mediator | 31 minutes
🎧 Listening
Why Nvidia Will Enter the Model Space & Models Will Enter the Chip Space:
Chat bots and agents are kind of becoming different species of technology: they'll be useful in very different ways and what they need to be useful are super different […] Having hallucinations in chat bots and image generators is like a really good thing […] But agents, on the other hand, if you want something to go consistently, […] you do not want that thing to go randomly hallucinate and like make up stuff along the way. And so these things are speciating in an interesting way right now.
David Luan—20VC | 58 minutes
Building Netscape & the Birth of the Browser
It's kind of the opposite of what's happening with AI in universities today, which is They're not only underfunded to do AI but the there's a push among the big tech companies to enact legislation that would essentially outlaw AI in universities by eliminating open source, so full credits Al Gore for doing the right thing because it's clear that that wasn't obvious.
Ben Horowitz—a16z | 115 minutes
Banana In the Smoothie:
If you're going to make a premium anything, you have to do a lot of things that are not economic necessarily. You've got to make stuff for the love of it. You've got to go really, really deep. And you have to have a team of people that are not just sort of slavish to the kind of membership economics or getting more traffic. You've got to do it because you love it and you care. And you do the unnecessary things that attracts people that love it too.
Troy Young—People vs Algorithms | 49 minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago—Hallucinations in AI
2️⃣ years ago—Strategy in an Age of Uncertainty
3️⃣ years ago—Against Scarcity