Not Like That
Who (and where) are today’s Innovators, fundamentally not grokking A.I. and, yes, Software Development is some kind of Assembly Line
👋 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 ⚡
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
📚 Reading
Who (And Where) Are Today’s Innovators?
If the population of young adults is indeed declining due to demographic trends in developed economies, then fostering innovation (in all of its forms: efficiency, sustaining, disruptive), requires creating an environment that allows more individuals, not just young ones, to engage in the innovation process.
Nicolas Colin—European Straits | 11 minutes
The Fundamental Extrapolation Error:
When a person passes a bar exam, or a medical board exam, we think this is meaningful because we know there is a strong correlation between those results and being able to do the work of a lawyer or a doctor. When an LLM passes such an exam, it’s interesting, it’s remarkable, but there is no such correlation. Instead it can do a few fragmentary parts of those jobs very well, and the rest of them not at all.
Jon Evans—Gradient Ascendant | 5 minutes
Yes, Software Development is an Assembly Line, but not Like That:
The manufactured widget of software is actually the discrete user interactions with those features and pieces of software, not the features themselves. The assembly line in software engineering isn’t, as many think, the engineers producing features. Rather, it’s software producing value-creating experiences for users.
Jeremy Freeman—DevOps.com | 5 minutes
🎧 Listening
OpenAI, Amazon's Anthropic Investment, and the Roman Empire:
The biggest effect to me is that it's tempting me to start trying to code, tempting me to create because it just looks like it's so much easier. All of these things are things you could have, in theory, found a way to do with more time. But now, it's potentially an order of magnitude easier [...] the workflow is so much smoother, and things are so much faster, and you can iterate so much better.
Zvi Mowshowitz—Cognitive Revolution | 112 minutes
Why Your AI Startup is Probably Already Dead:
AI is hugely beneficial if you're tiny. Just as cloud is, massively empowering to be a small business. Crushing it; huge opportunity there […] Huge for the Adobe's, the Microsoft's, the Spotify's of the world, the dominant players. The middle [...] to build the next generation money-losing, go for scale startup, attacking an incumbent with AI as a differentiator, those are the losers. Those are not going to survive.
Sam Lessin—More or Less | 45 minutes
Viking Metaphysics, Contingent Moments, and Censorship:
Clutter is definitely underrated […] We know more, which is great. We can do more, which is great. That’s been true of every generation for a long time. We have to understand and look at the reasons that people in the past made their mistakes in order to be able to not do similar ones, and we need to go through the clutter to learn all that.
Ada Palmer—Conversations with Tyler | 64 minutes