Links of Interest - September

“This may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far. It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there.” - https://ia.samaltman.com/

“You can finally generate images of your products and branding imagery with production-level accuracy.” - https://www.everart.ai/

Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch - https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/stories/operation-night-watch/story/ultra-high-resolution-image-of-the-night-watch

Architecture -- The Cities of the Future Shouldn't Have Been Built - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3yh3eLQrm8

From Juhan Sonin - Play Seriously Episode 1: Everything is an example (super relevant for the Flow Project, Details Matter!) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBZ9DnsmcSc&t=1s?

Stimulus Sampling Reimagined: Designing Experiments with Mix-and-Match, Analyzing Results with Stimulus Plots - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4716832

Craft of polling - https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/clifford-young-14260a10_democracy-ipsos-polling-activity-7240732577488076801-SwW

"For election results, Aaru uses census data to replicate voter districts, creating AI agents essentially programmed to think like the voters they are copying. Each agent is given hundreds of personality traits, from their aspirations to their family relationships. The agents are constantly surfing the internet and gathering information meant to mimic the media diets of the humans they’re replicating, which sometimes causes them to change their voting preferences." - https://www.semafor.com/article/09/20/2024/ai-startup-aaru-uses-chatbots-instead-of-humans-for-political-polls

“We have to really learn to embrace software … If you can’t as an engineering organisation keep up with the general technology speed of society, then you will be left behind.” -https://www.ft.com/content/7e5677b8-87fa-41fa-8648-9009ac7f14fc

?“The fact that AI is generating different ideas than people, and that together an even richer set of possibilities is developed, reinforces the idea that Human and Artificial Intelligence together provides real value by complementing human creativity with AI (as opposed to replacing it)” -? https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/creativity-beauty-complementing-human-intelligence-ai-timpone-ph-d--hazye

“To outsmart geese, we built a system that uses motion detection, Image Recognition, and AI to detect geese and people. If it finds geese, it activates sprinklers. If it finds people or nothing of interest, it disables sprinklers. We call it the Smart Goose Deterrent System.” - https://irowbot.duckdns.org:1776/goose/SGDS.html

Jon Puleston Joins Ipsos as Chief Methodologist - https://www.mrweb.com/drno/news37285.htm

Klarna's shutting down Salesforce & Workday and replacing them with simpler tech stack created by Al - https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/klarnas-shutting-down-salesforce-workday-replacing-them-beli%C5%ABnas-vidkf/

Sebastian Siemiatkowski on Getting AI to Do the Work of 700 Customer Service Reps - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3niSE-8ZvE

From Mark Polyak - "The CEO wasn't technical, the board of directors had no one technical on it, they had like one dude on the management team who was the head of engineering who was technical and everyone else wasn't….It's like, alright, if that's your team then you're not a technology driven company." - https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-technical-skills-important-leadership-management-2024-9

Ipsos presentations at ESOMAR Congress 2024 - https://www.dhirubhai.net/events/esomarcongress2024-mind-myth-ma7239521768682455041/theater/

Edelman’s 2024 AI Landscape Report: The Communicator’s Guide to Finding AI Tools You Can Trust - https://www.edelman.com/expertise/ai/2024-ai-landscape-report

Meta has a major opportunity to win the AI hardware race - https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/21/24250020/ray-ban-meta-smart-glasses-ai-hardware-meta-connect

From Juhan Sonin - IKEA celebrates 100 Verity drones in their warehouses - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XDgqR61614

From Juhan Sonin - Barracuda-M Family of Cruise Missiles - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzVD4vb5ZxU

World’s first DIY espresso machine - https://www.diypresso.com/

Google says it’s made a quantum computing breakthrough that reduces errors - https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/09/11/1103828/google-says-its-made-a-quantum-computing-breakthrough-that-reduces-errors/

“To evaluate whether large language models (LLMs) can be leveraged to predict the results of social science experiments, we built an archive of 70 pre-registered, nationally representative, survey experiments conducted in the United States, involving 476 experimental treatment effects and 105,165 participants. We prompted an advanced, publicly-available LLM (GPT-4) to simulate how representative samples of Americans would respond to the stimuli from these experiments. Predictions derived from simulated responses correlate strikingly with actual treatment effects (r = 0.85), equaling or surpassing the predictive accuracy of human forecasters. Accuracy remained high for unpublished studies that could not appear in the model’s training data (r = 0.90). We further assessed predictive accuracy across demographic subgroups, various disciplines, and in nine recent megastudies featuring an additional 346 treatment effects. Together, our results suggest LLMs can augment experimental methods in science and practice, but also highlight important limitations and risks of misuse.” - https://docsend.com/view/ity6yf2dansesucf

Companies Like to Pit Internal Teams Against Each Other. Bad Idea - Research suggests that when employees compete, they become less innovative, because they don’t want to share ideas with their rivals - https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/workplace/competition-companies-employees-9099a425?mod=LinkedIn

Averaging is a convenient fiction of neuroscience - https://www.thetransmitter.org/neural-coding/averaging-is-a-convenient-fiction-of-neuroscience/

They Bought a French Castle. Then Came the Royal Pains - https://www.wsj.com/style/design/americans-buying-french-chateau-castle-d40eedd2

Lean Design / Munro (an interesting engineering company that relies on first principles thinking) - https://leandesign.com/

What Happened to the Japanese PC Platforms? - https://mistys-internet.website/blog/blog/2024/09/21/what-happened-to-the-japanese-pc-platforms

NHS scientists find new blood group solving 50-year mystery - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgmgg493ek8o

ASCII Webcam - https://ascii-cam.replit.app/

Why Top CEOs Earn Big Paychecks - https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/08/why-top-ceos-earn-big-paychecks.html

How Apple Watch sleep apnea detection works and why it matters - https://empirical.health/blog/apple-watch-sleep-apnea/

Charting Your AI Native Journey - https://www.tessl.io/blog/charting-your-ai-native-journey

Insecure software makers are the real cyber villains – CISA? - https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/20/cisa_sloppy_vendors_cybercrime_villains/

Introducing Contextual Retrieval - https://www.anthropic.com/news/contextual-retrieval

Sword with pharaoh’s mark found in Egypt, still shimmering 3,000 years later - https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ar-AA1qQc17

Anatomy of high-converting homepages - https://x.com/oliverkenyon/status/1836315728426725829

AI agents invade observability: snake oil or the future of SRE? - https://monitoring2.substack.com/p/ai-agents-invade-observability

Sergey Brin | All-In Summit 2024 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzK9bx3CSPE

Comic Mono - https://dtinth.github.io/comic-mono-font/

Flight of the Conchords: Robots - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IPAOxrH7Ro

How much energy can AI use? Breaking down the toll of each ChatGPT query - https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/18/energy-ai-use-electricity-water-data-centers/

Physics - Signatures of Gravitational Atoms from Black Hole Mergers - https://physics.aps.org/articles/v17/133

Chain of Thought Empowers Transformers to Solve Inherently Serial Problems - https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.12875

Gigantic Wave in Pacific Ocean Was The Most Extreme 'Rogue Wave' on Record - https://www.sciencealert.com/gigantic-wave-in-pacific-ocean-was-the-most-extreme-rogue-wave-on-record

Clone A Web Page Layout With Claude and Aider - https://github.com/dmh2000/clone-layout

What If Ozempic Is Just a Good Thing? - https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ozempic-weight-loss-diet-drug-moral-panic.html

How the snack industry is responding to Ozempic - https://www.marketplace.org/2024/08/13/ozempic-snacks-industry-food-companies-protein-texture/

Online Dating Caused a Rise in US Income Inequality, Research Paper Shows - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-14/online-dating-caused-a-rise-in-us-income-inequality-research-paper-shows?embedded-checkout=true

Autofocus Eyewear (the future of glasses?) - https://vixion.jp/?wovn=en

94% of new cars in Norway last month were EVs - https://qz.com/almost-all-new-car-sales-in-norway-last-month-were-evs-1851639882

Legacy Code -? https://x.com/KevinNaughtonJr/status/1834600303464694018

The DOJ sues Visa for locking out rival payment platforms - https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/24/24253280/doj-antitrust-lawsuit-visa-debit-monopoly

1.3 million Android-based TV boxes backdoored; researchers still don’t know how - https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/09/researchers-still-dont-know-how-1-3-million-android-streaming-boxes-were-backdoored/

CHAMPION trial rationale and design: the long-term safety and clinical efficacy of a wireless pulmonary artery pressure monitoring system (A Paper Clip-Sized Device Is Changing Heart Failure Treatment) -https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21187258/

Sanding UI - https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2024/sanding-ui/

“Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door” - this fellow evaluates hundreds of traps with meticulous scrutiny - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uy5PCHeP4io

Impressive Chinese drone lightshow - https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1834071245224308850

What’s that logo supposed to be?? 37TH AMERICA'S CUP AC37 LOGO - https://www.americascup.com/news/1622_37TH-AMERICA-S-CUP-REVEAL-AC37-LOGO

1913: When Hitler, Trotsky, Tito, Freud and Stalin all lived in the same place - https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21859771

From Juhan Sonin - How many meetings did this new Sign-In UI take? - https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/lukew_ux-today-how-many-meetings-did-this-new-activity-7243049445905326080-kPqy/

Lab-grown diamonds - https://worksinprogress.co/issue/lab-grown-diamonds/

China Harnesses a Technology That Vexed the West, Unlocking a Treasure Chest - https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/china-harnesses-a-technology-that-vexed-the-west-unlocking-a-treasure-chest-5d984585

“The CEO had a degree in accounting and never went to the factory...and didn’t know how airplanes flew.? So I think if you are in charge of a company that makes airplanes fly and spacecraft go into orbit, then it can’t be a total mystery as to how they work….” – https://youtu.be/pSFvOUswFwA?t=2330

Unlocking the Future of Data Monetization - https://www.worldofdaas.com/p/future-of-data-monetization

Reckitt CMO: AI is already making marketers better and faster - https://fortune.com/europe/2024/09/05/reckitt-cmo-ai-is-already-making-marketers-better-and-faster-tech-retail/

10+ Things to Know about The Great Wave - https://www.artic.edu/articles/1139/10-things-to-know-about-the-great-wave

Oxford commercializes its 20% more powerful solar panels in the US - https://electrek.co/2024/09/05/oxford-commercializes-its-20-more-powerful-solar-panels-in-the-us/

Top Trends - 2024 Sweets & Snacks Show - https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/top-trends-2024-sweets-snacks-show-david-banks-7ytfe/?trackingId=YMSnP9msRSSkhroKbdYjkg%3D%3D

Loopy: New Audio-to-Video Lipsyncing Model Looks Insane - https://x.com/EHuanglu/status/1831686214333952026

After Apple, Jony Ive Is Building an Empire of His Own - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/21/technology/jony-ive-apple-lovefrom.html?unlocked_article_code=1.MU4.yQ0h.eWhw5uGB5owK&smid=url-share

Inside the Texas Crime Lab That’s Cracked Hundreds of Cold Cases - https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/othram-forensic-genetic-genealogy-catherine-edwards-murder/

College Grades Have Become a?Charade. It’s Time to Abolish Them. - https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/college-grades-have-become-acharade-its-time-to-abolish-them-ee4eb3fe

Monocles: How did they become a symbol of wealth? - https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/12/monocles-how-did-they-become-a-symbol-of-wealth.html

Steve Ballmer was wrong - https://gukov.dev/puzzles/math/2024/09/05/steve-ballmer-was-wrong.html

Mad World performed by Curt Smith of Tears For Fears - https://youtu.be/NEpfvTdR5-U?si=ZSDRYySoKQf6QnBX

Using GPT-4o for web scraping Eduardo Blancas - https://blancas.io/blog/ai-web-scraper/

Here’s the time-lapse I promised you from yesterday’s solar activity. Complete with Earth to scale and a bonus of the sun’s rotation - https://x.com/AJamesMcCarthy/status/1830644312948003289

Trove of dinosaur fossils found high in B.C. mountains - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-researchers-fossil-trove-1.7325926

Is My Blue Your Blue? - https://ismy.blue/

Chromatone - https://chromatone.center/

How encrypted messaging apps conquered the world - https://www.economist.com/international/2024/09/05/how-encrypted-messaging-apps-conquered-the-world

Sleep on it: How the brain processes many experiences — even when ‘offline’ - https://news.yale.edu/2024/08/14/sleep-it-how-brain-processes-many-experiences-even-when-offline

Create winning influencer ads with AI - https://icon.me/

Algorithms we develop software by - https://grantslatton.com/software-pathfinding

His time at the White House serves as a case study in getting what you want - https://www.economist.com/culture/2024/08/27/nudity-drinking-smoking-winston-churchills-unusual-diplomacy

Simple blood test could predict a person’s heart disease risk 30 years out - https://www.nbcnews.com/health/heart-health/simple-blood-test-predict-persons-heart-disease-risk-30-years-study-fi-rcna169009

UK News Consumption - https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/research-and-data/tv-radio-and-on-demand-research/tv-research/news/news-consumption-2024/news-consumption-in-the-uk-2024-report.pdf?v=379621

Jim Farley is changing strategy to combat what he calls an ‘existential threat’ from?China’s electric carmakers - https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/ford-china-ev-competition-farley-ceo-50ded461

AlphaProteo generates novel proteins for biology and health research - https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphaproteo-generates-novel-proteins-for-biology-and-health-research/

New Russian train ticketing kiosks, what’s old is new again! - https://youtu.be/5VK71t9Duxw?si=AzwPq7EsBfc2MwBY

“What has happened to Sonos is at its heart a cautionary tale of company leadership ignoring the perils of technical debt, the term used by software engineers to describe the compounding threat of outdated code and infrastructure on security, usability and stability.” - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-09-23/how-sonos-botched-an-app-and-infuriated-its-customers?embedded-checkout=true

Bonus Section, Quotes of Interest

“The?battle?between every startup and incumbent comes down to whether the startup gets?distribution before the incumbent gets innovation” – a16z

“The older you get the more rules you have to break to get anything done.” – Harrison Ford

“The trend is your friend until the bend at the end.” – Ed Seykota

“May you have the hindsight to know where you've been, the foresight to know where you are going and the insight to get you there.” – Irish toast

“Remember the 3 H’s of AI: Honest, Helpful, Harmless” – Jason Calacanis

“The CEO had a degree in accounting and never went to the factory...and didn’t know how airplanes flew.? So I think if you are in charge of a company that makes airplanes fly and spacecraft go into orbit, then it can’t be a total mystery as to how they work….” – Elon Musk commenting on Boeing.

“To use a fashion metaphor: this is like asking your grandma to tailor your skinny jeans – they might have the best intentions, but they probably won't have the most current fashion sense.” - Andreea Cotabitiu

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