👋 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
Twilight of the hegemon:
One of the upsides of being a reporter is you start to understand very early that the organizations running things aren’t as impressive as the image they project. Much of the world is held together by duct tape and run by organizations that are dysfunctional in their own ways, filled with a weird mix of the impressive and plenty of careerist mediocrities.
Brian Morrissey—The Rebooting | 4 minutes
Open Source AI Is the Path Forward:
Llama needs to develop into a full ecosystem of tools, efficiency improvements, silicon optimizations, and other integrations. If we were the only company using Llama, this ecosystem wouldn’t develop and we’d fare no better than the closed variants of Unix […] This approach has consistently worked for us when we stick with it over the long term.
Mark Zuckerberg—Meta | 11 minutes
The End of Software:
SaaS, ARR, magic numbers–these are all shorthand to understand the old model of business building in software, one where the expense associated with creating software was a moat. The invisible hand has been stayed in software for a long time, but LLMs will usher in its swift, familiar corrective force. Majoring in computer science today will be like majoring in journalism in the late 90’s.
Anonymous—Google Docs | 3 minutes
🎧 Listening
Systems Thinking, Builders vs Gardeners, and Working In Large Organizations:
The people who are best positioned to have the largest leverage, have one foot inside the system and one foot outside the system. So they are able to see the system from the outside as a particular assemblage of a thing that can be influenced. And they're also inside the system enough to influence it and figure out where the leverage points are within it […] Especially large organizations bend all the participants to its emergent logic.
Alex Komoroske—Eric Jorgenson | 78 minutes
Artificial Intelligence:
Every time I evaluate a new technology throughout my entire career, I've just had one question that I've wanted to answer, which is, what can I build with this that I couldn't have built before? It's worth learning a technology, it's worth adding it to my tool belt, if it gives me new options, if it expands that universe of things that I can now build. The reason I'm so excited about LLMs is that they do this better than anything else I have ever seen. They open up so many new opportunities.
Simon Willison—PyCon US | 43 minutes
The Network is the Media:
When something immediately happens, let people on Twitter speculate. I think that there's a really good lane for packaged media and that's what it is at the end of the day. It's always going to be slower. It's always going to be less interesting and trying to out-Twitter Twitter is dumb.
Brian Morrissey—People vs Algorithms | 70 minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago—Tragedy of the Uncommon
2️⃣ years ago—The Great Fiction of AI
3️⃣ years ago—A Project of One's Own