KFCblog - October 2024

Life

Autumn has started off well in Chicago - beautiful sunny skies and temperature in the 70s. I hope it's not snowing by Halloween. I got to spend some time with our team in Madrid in September and took a side trip for a long weekend in Mallorca. Very beautiful island!

Sports World

My hometown NY Mets avoided a last week of the season collapse and made it into the playoffs. They then leveraged some ninth inning heroics from Pete Alonso (see how unusual this homerun was) to arrive at the NLDS where they are currently battling the Phillies. Rest of baseball. The Yankees, Royals, Tigers, Guardians, Padres and Dodgers are the other teams remaining.

The NFL is in full swing - the Bears are 3-2 and Caleb Williams might be...good? In college football Texas, Ohio State and Oregon are sitting on top after a big Alabama loss to Vandy. And lastly, the US Open had a winner that wasn't Roger, Rafa, Novak or even Carlos - Italian (and Milano Cortina 2026 Ambassador) Jannik Sinner won the Men's title while Aryna Sabalenka came out on top of the women's draw.

Hello, World

With Paris 2024 in the rear view mirror, the focus on getting ready for Milano Cortina 2026 is getting pretty strong. By the way, if you want to take a few week unpaid holiday in Italy in February/March of 2026, we have recently launched the Volunteer Portal for the games. This portal was our first public facing application and it launched a few weeks ago. It takes approximately 20,000 volunteers to run a Winter Games (and about twice that for the summer games). The good news is we've already had 32,000 applications! Come join Fan26 as a volunteer!

Like most people in the technology industry, I'm pretty excited about GenAI. I've been doing a bunch of personal "hobby" development leverage Claude.ai and ChatGPT to assist the development. My belief is I'm seeing a 5x improvement in productivity - maybe higher for areas (like Outlook APIs) where I have little domain knowledge. I've also leveraged it for test data generation, debugging and code refactoring. If you are doing software development or have teams that are, and they aren't using these tools or similar EVERY DAY you're doing something wrong.

While on the topic of GenAI, if you haven't had a chance yet, put ChatGPT on your phone (iOS and Android). The new interactive voice mode is light years ahead of Siri or Google. I find myself using it a dozen times each day. Lastly, with AI tool fun - Notebook LM by Google. It's the simplest tool I've found for putting a chatbot in front of a set of documents. And it's got an amazingly cool feature - it can turn your documents into a podcast. You have to try it to believe. Click here to listen to a podcast it created after I uploaded a handful of past KFCblog articles.

Caught My Eye

An excellent article covering how AI will disrupt the advertising creation business. As I read it, I noticed that mosts of the points are pretty similar to my lifelong rent-a-brain-by-the-hour consulting business.

A useless but fun site that lets you find any text appearing in NYC (well, just Brooklyn for now) on a street sign. Here's my favorite pizza place.

A couple of decades ago, Netflix gained some deserved praise for the HR manifesto. To be current with the times, I now share Mr Beast's How to Succeed at Mr Beast Productions

Waymo has over 20 million miles of automated driving and has some great data showing the safety of its offerings compared to human drivers.

The New York City subway system has always fascinated me - from both a public policy perspective and an engineering perspective. Here's an interesting view of Why Won't New York City Build More Subways.

There are 507,000 bars of gold at the Federal Reserve bank in New York. Unfortunately, tours other than for school groups have been suspended since Covid.

In today's partisan environment, I found this old essay from Paul Graham useful: Keep Your Identity Small.

Raygun, the infamous break-dancer from the Paris 2024 Olympics, is now ranked #1 in the world??!??!

Do you want to be a US Presidential campaign manager? Play this simple, short (60 sec) game to allocate money across the swing states and see how you do.

We all know how Google search has deteriorated especially around product advice. I've been using reddit mostly, but have liked Lynk since I started playing with it.

I know Sam Altman is a bit of a polarizing figure [note: seems like an increasing percentage of people are deemed polarizing these days - maybe it isn't the individuals?]. Anyhow, here's a short, sweet blog post from Sam espousing AI optimism.

Closing Quote

“It ain't over til it's over.” – Yogi Berra