Arc browser launches Live Folders to auto-update tabs for you: I mean AI is cool but it has to get to you somehow right? Even something like MidJourney that started on in Discord, now has its own web site. Now Arc is “introducing a new feature called Live Folders, which will automatically create and update tabs in a folder based on events like someone adding a file to a shared folder. Live Folders comes as the company also builds out more AI-powered features to create more dynamic and automated user experiences.” Then you have this: Google Cloud brings Gemini to security, introduces new secure enterprise browser: “Chrome Enterprise Premium, which brings security capabilities including zero trust, access policy controls and security reporting into its popular web browser.” and even Opera allows users to download and use LLMs locally. I haven’t even touched on all that MSFT is doing with Edge and CoPilot. The whole point here is that I love to see this much innovation happening in the browser space and I want to encourage you not to sleep on these advances and experiment on how they can affect both your internal and external customers’ experiences.
$10 Billion Productivity Startup Notion Wants To Build Your AI Everything App: Did you ever use IRC (that’s Internet Relay Chat for you young ‘uns). How about if you know what the origin of “wiki” is? If you don’t know, look up Ward Cunningham and the wiki wiki bus. As an anthropologist, I’m fascinated by points of entry for tech into a culture. Software developers are a huge entry point in most of our worlds. All that is preamble to saying that I first heard about Notion from my dev friends. Now it’s got a valuation of $10B. Pay attention to these cultural points of entry and pay attention to Notion.
AI Will Shape The New Era Of Employee Performance Metrics: Let me correct that headline - Even Without AI, WE Have The Ability to Re-Shape Performance Metrics into Something That Measures Value Over Activity. > > “74% of respondents in Deloitte’s 2024 Global Human Capital Trends survey said that it’s very or critically important to look for improved ways to measure worker performance and their value (beyond just traditional productivity).”
AutoTRIZ: An Artificial Ideation Tool that Leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to Automate and Enhance the TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) Methodology: OK…so this is wicked cool and I have two thoughts - 1) any new process for speeding up or increasing the volume of ideas coming from an ideation process will inevitably be constrained my the organizational capacity to evaluate and execute on those ideas and 2) while this is done with technical contradictions, I want to feed it a more human set of contradictions. “TRIZ is a knowledge-based ideation methodology that provides a structured framework for engineering problem-solving by identifying and overcoming technical contradictions using inventive principles derived from a large-scale patent database.”
International Booker Prize shortlist for 2024 spans three continents: (I’ve crossed this sentence out about 3 times, let me try again) As far as I can tell, if you want to broaden your thinking, if you want to increase your chances of being truly innovative, then you need to read more broadly. Think of it as the literary version of the T-Shaped Skill Set. Yes, you should read deeply on your main interest, passion or role but if you’re not reading broadly, then you’re limiting your own personal scope of possibilities. Pick something off this list and don’t categorize it as “reading for pleasure” - it’s just reading, to be more human.
This ‘literacy pen’ instantly teaches you to read and write: This could be interesting on multiple levels. “The device, dubbed Literacy Pen, is compatible with any standard pen or pencil. Users slip the device onto the pen and then speak their desired words into the built-in microphone. Voice dictation technology then transcribes these words, letter by letter, onto a digital screen built-in to the device. The user can then copy the words they see onto paper all using the one pen.”
How Viber's new AI summarizes your busy group chats: Here’s the deal - we can either keep going down this road and end up with my AI Meeting Summarizer talking to your AI Meeting Summarizer or we can realize that these activities that can so easily be summed up by AI aren’t actually value-add and figure out the worthwhile we stuff we should be doing > “Viber unveiled a new AI Chat Summary feature that uses OpenAI's technology to summarize unread messages in group chats, handling up to 100 unread messages concisely.”
Arize launches prompt variable monitoring to detect when models go awry: Good idea but I’m always going to ask - who is watching the watchers?
Avi Wigderson, Complexity Theory Pioneer, Wins Turing Award: It always gives me hope that in a world of exits and DAUs/MAUs, and next quarter’s results, there are people like Ari - working at deep levels on foundational issues. Just wish we regarded them with the same kind of reverence that we share with someone who invented a web site > “The prolific researcher found deep connections between randomness and computation and spent a career influencing cryptographers, complexity researchers and more.”
AI's flawed human yardstick: Can’t love this enough and it makes me wonder about all the other “flawed yardsticks” we use (side-eye at the Likert Scale) > > “There is no widely accepted definition of intelligence or 'smart,' so there is no general test that people use," says Blake Richards, a professor of computer science and neuroscience at McGill University.”
To understand the risks posed by AI, follow the money: So many good articles in this issue with terrific warnings that will surely go unheeded by many. “These are risks stemming from misalignment between a company’s economic incentives to profit from its proprietary AI model in a particular way and society’s interests in how the AI model should be monetised and deployed.” > > Now understand that you can swap out “AI Model” for any proprietary technology and you see my point.
Consumers will finally see FCC-mandated ‘nutrition labels’ for most broadband plans: Love this idea. What do you think it would look like if your LMS or your expense reporting system or your AI model had a “nutritional label”?
YouTube now lets creators share exclusive Shorts with their paying subscribers: Have you ever seen an experiment with an internal creator economy? Would love to know if you have. Really.
Rooms is a delightful escape: I find the idea of seeing rooms that people have designed absent any physical or economic constraints to be MUCH more interesting than their avatar. “The premise is as simple as it sounds: you start with an empty room and fill it up with stuff. A room, in this case, is a three-dimensional space with two walls and a floor, open to the viewer like a diorama… if you want to go deep, you can go deep. Rooms don’t have to be rooms at all — some do away with the walls entirely, and some are games, like one where you guide a ball through a maze by using direction arrows to tilt the “board.”
Snapchat turns off controversial ‘Solar System’ feature by default after bad press: Tell me you didn’t have enough diversity on the design team without telling me - what a horrible, unthinking design mistake > “The ranking system for paid subscribers today shows you how close you are to your Snapchat friends by displaying your position in their solar system. For example, a friend in the “Mercury” position would be someone you communicate with a lot, while “Uranus” would be someone not as close.”
AI a 'game changer' but company execs not ready: survey: I’ll file this under “No Kidding”
The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?: This is a book review of The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt and I agree with the reviewer’s argument “First, this book is going to sell a lot of copies, because Jonathan Haidt is telling a scary story about children’s development that many parents are primed to believe. Second, the book’s repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science. Worse, the bold proposal that social media is to blame might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people.” The reviewer goes to say “Hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations. Most data are correlative. When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers. These are not just our data or my opinion. Several meta-analyses and systematic reviews converge on the same message2–5. An analysis done in 72 countries shows no consistent or measurable associations between well-being and the roll-out of social media globally6. Moreover, findings from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, the largest long-term study of adolescent brain development in the United States, has found no evidence of drastic changes associated with digital-technology use7. Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, is a gifted storyteller, but his tale is currently one searching for evidence.”
Microsoft, Salesforce woo skeptical CFOs on new generative AI tool spending: “CFOs, often risk adverse, have been a little slower to charge full-speed into generative AI, in some cases due to conservative spending plans or less clarity around the return on investment. However, a new suite of finance-focused generative AI tools from companies like Microsoft geared towards CFOs, as well as a growing number of use cases, could cause the technology to quickly spread.”
The Atari 400 Mini is a cute little slice of video game history: “It may not have the big-name games of other mini consoles, but it still offers fascinating insights into Atari’s 8-bit era.”
Oregon’s governor signs right-to-repair law that bans ‘parts pairing’: Keep it going.
How Skyflow is protecting sensitive company information from large language model snooping: In a gold rush, look for the people selling picks and shovels. That’s where the long money is.