Identity? Crisis?

The Programmer Identity Crisis ⓧ What Sora 2 will birth ⓧ Mental models are destiny

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 – 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 to read and three to listen to—no fluff, just stuff ⚡

📚 Reading

The Programmer Identity Crisis:

Reaching for LLMs rather than people when we need a pair programmer, someone to ping pong solutions with, prototype, sketch architectures with, or help answer expert questions about esoteric parts of the codebase. We no longer require onboarding buddies, mentors, or peers; instead, we can talk to machines. With LLMs, avoiding human contact is so easy that it might just become the norm. The future really is bright…

Simon Højberg | 12 minutes

The Grease on the Barbarian’s Axe:

If the printing press birthed the citizen-reader, what will Sora 2 birth? If democracy depended on citizens who could deliberate, what happens when deliberation is offloaded to machines that simulate it for us? If our attention once constructed shared public worlds, what happens when each person inhabits a bespoke hallucination channel?

Greg Ceccarelli—Meditations on Tech | 6 minutes

Your data model is your destiny:

Every founder has a data model, whether they realize it or not. Either you choose it explicitly or it gets inherited from whatever you’re copying. Most founders never articulate it. By the time the architecture solidifies around these implicit choices, it’s nearly impossible to change … at the extreme ends of markets—where you’re toppling multi-billion-dollar incumbents or creating entirely new categories—a distinctive data model becomes a critical and non-obvious edge.

Matt Brown | 7 minutes

🎧 Listening

OpenAI’s Consumer Playbook:

What I see people like OpenAI doing is selling a beautiful story that sounds like it might be high margin and might be lock-in and might be well branded but then in practice, just hoovering capital extremely cheaply as equity and flipping around and buying infrastructure … Lots of computers in a pile is valuable, and it probably won’t depreciate as fast as people think. But the actual businesses that break out of these?

Sam Lessin—More or Less | 58 minutes

Product Market Fit isn’t hard. It’s misunderstood:

If you’re building an AI product today, you’re competing against ChatGPT, not technically, but in people’s heads. That means your product has to feel 10x better for the same use case. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter. It’s more true than ever because the more ChatGPT grows, the more people use ChatGPT, the more people think they can do what they want to do with chat GPT, whether ChatGPT can do it or not.

Hiten Shah—Earned Secrets with Varun | 41 minutes

What is Intelligence?

Why would a brain evolve to be computational? I think that one of the big insights that we’ve had on the team is that it’s really not just the brain that evolved to be computational, but life itself that is computational. That’s something that I know takes some getting used to as an idea because we think about life as being the exact opposite of computers: it’s squishy, it’s wet, it’s unreliable, it doesn’t run anything like a program so what on earth do I mean when I say life is computational?

Blaise Agüera y Arcas—The Long Now Foundation | 72 minutes

💎 Timeless

1️⃣ year ago—Five New Thinking Styles for Working With Thinking Machines

2️⃣ years ago—Provocation-driven development

3️⃣ years ago—AI and the Age of Creative Superhumans