👋 🎄 On time for your Twelvetide: this year’s last round-up of remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture.
Three articles and three podcasts wrestled from this week’s relentless algorithmic feeds and icky click-bait chum. No fluff, just stuff⚡️
Thoughtforms will be taking a break through the end of the year. Back on Friday, January 6th.
📚 Reading
Management as Video Game Design:
[B]eing a manager is as much like designing a video game as it is playing a video game. The art of designing a video game is the art of designing context and incentives that enables a player to achieve a goal. That’s all it is [..] How do I design an environment in which the team I’m overseeing focuses on the right problem and delivers the right outcome 90% of the time?
Nicholas Moryl—Medium | 7 minutes
European Digital Sovereignty:
All societies ought to strive for digital sovereignty. For the power and dignity of self-determination, according to the norms and laws of their culture. Independently of staying in the good grace of foreign powers. Without digital sovereignty, we cannot claim to be free in the 21st century [..] But out of the rubble of the dot-com bust rose the centralization of all essential services. And from that, our present gilded age for digital monopolies.
David Heinemeier Hansson | 11 minutes
Not This Again:
The tools place themselves in the foreground, and users become “prompt engineers” rather than writers or artists. The models themselves become the influencers, the celebrities, even if they are transforming what you bring to them into what their algorithms make of it, as in the case of the app Lensa, which uses a person’s selfies to produce fantasized images of them — not the user’s own fantasies, but some grim reflection of society’s fantasies of who they should be.
Rob Horning | 7 minutes
🎧 Listening
Corporate Transparency, Open Source Philosophy & Remote Work:
Disagree, commit, and disagree. Some other companies do disagree and commit; really important that you can disagree, and then if a decision is made that you work to make that decision effective even if you don't agree with it. At GitLab, [..] you can keep making the case that the decision is wrong. The most important decision in our history was something the co-founder said no to.
Sid Sijbrandij—Cartoon Avatars | 60 minutes
How to lead Windows and Office:
Turns out that TCIP/IP was the first thing that the company had to wrap its head around as not being a thing that you make go away but a thing that you completely have to pivot around. If you don't do TCP/IP, you're not in the Internet game because the Internet is not transport-independent which was not at all how we thought about networking [..] we'll commoditise the protocol.
Steven Sinofsky—Good Time Show | 115 minutes
What Chat GPT is - and isn’t:
I would say a larger portion of people in AI think that this is a little bit like looking at the Wright brothers' Flyer and saying, "this thing might go into orbit." To which the answer from the aircraft engineers would be, we don't know if it's theoretically possible to go into orbit. Presuming it is, it's not going to happen with canvas wings and 2-horsepower propeller engines. It would need to be some totally other thing.
Benedict Evans—Danny In The Valley | 47 minutes