Some more technical posts on science & math, engineering and product management, art & design, and technology.
Engineering and Product Management
- I wrote about agile product management when I was at AIG.
- I wrote about the great book on operations, The Goal, by Elihu Goldratt, has an excellent audio version. And there’s a video clip of Herbie’s hike.
Art & Design
- A wonderful video that uses Facebook Live’s time delay to build a song from its component tracks.
- In publishing, it’s common to put filler text in designs to avoid people focusing on the text. Normally you use Lorem Ipsum which is a standard Latin text. However, you can also use some other fun filler texts like Bacon Ipsum, Cupcake Ipsum, and more.
- Did you know that there’s a standard design to tell you if your gas cap is on the right or left of your car? This is useful for people like me that are always in rental cars.
- Sometimes there’s a button for a collapsed menu called a hamburger menu. If you click on the hamburger menu on the bottom of the page at Kottke.org you are sent to posts about hamburgers.
- The most famous medical map in the world, John Snow’s Cholera Map.
- There’s a non-standard punctuation mark called the interrobang which is a combination of a question mark and exclamation point. Normally I’d write it as “?!” but using HTML code “‽” I can make the interrobang symbol as “‽”. Isn’t that exicting‽
ChatGPT, OpenAI and LLM
- Here are some introductory level things I’ve been writing:
- Here are some conversations I’ve had with OpenAI (Bing)
- What are the limits of AI?, Robert Schlaff in conversation with OpenAI 4.0 with Bing Chat, July 23 2023
- How Can We Better Collaborate? Will AI Help or Hurt?, Robert Schlaff in conversation with OpenAI 4.0 with Bing Chat, July 30, 2023
- Will AI Make People Dumber?, Robert Schlaff in conversation with OpenAI 4.0 with Bing Chat, July 30, 2023
- Seinfeld scripts about jobs: Event Planning.
- AI Light Bulb Joke List. Bing Chat, October 2023+.
- Other Experiments with AI
- I tried using Bing Chat to co-write an article Was Sam Bankman Fried a Modern Day Robin Hood and found that it prompts my thinking and helps me structure things. At this point, it writes stilted sentences and makes up articles.
- This fiction experiment worked better. It wrote some pretty good fiction about my obsession with sports during, and only during the Harvard-Yale game. The Strange Case of Rob and Mr. Bulldog.
- Experts on LLMs
- Impromptu by Reid Hoffman is the best book I’ve found to prepare for the LLM future. Reid is a founder of OpenAI and shows how to practically use it across multiple domains.
- Can AGI Think? (Geoff Hinton). Less of a chat and mostly an extract of Steven Levy’s Interview with Hinton from Wired. August 2023.
- Can AGI Think? (Stephem Wolfram). TBD. This will be notes from Wolframs 2 big papers.
- What is ChatGPT and How does it Work by Stephen Wolfram — The best description of how ChatGPT works. It starts simple and gets very technical by the end.
- Will AIs Take All Our Jobs and End Human History—or Not? Well, It’s Complicated… Wolfram’s follow-up on the effect of ChatGPT.
- The prompt engineer guy…
- John Maeda. How to talk to computers. Design in Tech. Prompt Engineering.
- How to Speak Machine by John Maeda, written in 2019, this book goes very deep into how humans and machines work together.
- Older AI Notes. AI is an incredibly powerful tool. To understand how it works, there’s an explanation for kids that’s pretty good for adults. The New York Times explains Google’s AI transformation. Alfred Spector, the former head of Google Research, gives an insightful speech on the opportunities and perils of Artificial Intelligence. Dr. Michael Stonebraker is one of the founders of the widely used POSTGRES database talks about big data, which is a prerequisite for AI. Also, take a look at the TED talks by Pete Haas (my friend from Yale) and Cathy O’Neil (author of Weapons of Math Destruction) to see where we should be suspicious of AI. (From 2021)
- AI Computers Play Video Games. Google’s DeepMind can learn to play video games just by playing games and having no other training. And here’s a video of it learning to play Breakout. Here’s a video of OpenAI playing Hide and Seek…and breaking the Game!
Technology
- Human-Computer Interaction. In 2016, I wrote about how computers and people work together and how computers and people work together to solve hard problems. Gary Kasparov gave a great presentation on how computers and humans can partner together to beat both the best human players OR the best computers. Kasparov also did a great write up of his thoughts in the New York Review of books.
- Apple
- Steve Jobs: In 1983 Steve Jobs gave a talk on how computing will change once computers got small enough to be embedded around the home and office. Also, there’s a crazy story of how Steve Jobs was unfair to Steve Wozniak early on in their partnership on the game Breakout. Early on, the Steves sold Blue Boxes. This is the iconic article on Blue Boxes. And of course there’s the Crazy Ones video from Steve’s funeral and Steve’s Narration over a draft of the ad.
- Apple Videos: While everyone has seen the Macintosh 1984 commercial, I had never realized that Jobs gave an intro to it during a 1983 Keynote. To go along with the Macintosh Ad, take a look at this parody of Every Tech Commercial Ever Made. As much as John Sculley gets tarred as backward thinking, he produced a pretty good view of the future in the 1987 video of the Knowledge Navigator.
- Reading
- Here’s a list of my favorite tech articles.
- Andy Hertzfeld has a history of Apple at folklore.org.
- I enjoyed the oral history of Silicon Valley in Valley of Genius
- In Founders at Work, Jessica Livingston did an awesome set of interviews with founders of companies like Apple, Visicalc, Bloggers, Craigslist, and many more.
- Nudist on the Late Shift is Po Bronson’s account of the Tech Boom.
- Web3 Reading: Web3 s Going Great Just Great.
Science & Math
- Festival of the Spoken Nerd is the most adult geeky fun thing that I’ve ever seen. Have a look at their trailer. They have 3 live shows you can buy from their website for about $4 apiece. The math guy, Matt Parker, has his own site Stand Up Maths. He has an amazing video of spreadsheets that’s worth sharing with kids and a fun one on when math goes wrong and probability (the probability part is particularly amazing). He has another talk that includes some wonderful craft projects you can do at home with a Mobius strip.
- How Numbers Work in the Real World. In school, we were taught that math is linear; however, in the real world, distributions are more likely to be exponential.
- Why Today Can’t Be an Opposite Day. How the statement “Today is Opposite Day” is mathematically inconsistent.
- Game Theory for Parents. Game theory provides some interesting lessons on how to equitably share a piece of pie.
- Nontransitive dice are sets of dice that don’t adhere to the transitive principle that if A > B and B > C then A > C. If that seems weird, think about the game Rock Paper Scissors where there’s no best throw.
- A Mathematician’s Lament (free abridged version here) is a great book on math education — focusing on how kids should be learning math.
- For those of you that want a more “adult” basic math book, check out Steve Strotgatz’s Joy of X is quite good — you can also read a number of his articles in the New York Times.
- Math with Bad Drawings by my friend Ben Orlin is also very good. He goes deep into the math (and the philosophy of math) but makes it fun and interesting.
- Benny’s Rules is a famous math education paper, part of a set of “Disaster Papers,” on how individualized instruction measured in an automated way can go horribly wrong.