Weekly Link Roundup #46
A big one but you'll have the holidays to read so I don't feel bad....
Just gonna put this right here at the top: New Friends After 50? Yes, Please! (gift link)> > “And this is particularly important to me since the surgeon general last year declared loneliness an epidemic in this country with particularly deleterious effects: “The mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and even greater than that associated with obesity and physical inactivity.” Furthermore, a 2020 study, noting that “having friends in old age is linked to higher levels of happiness and life satisfaction,” found that for those 65 and older, “encounters with friends” throughout the day were more pleasant and “were associated with fewer discussions about stressful experiences,” compared with encounters with romantic partners or family members.”
Design for All Learners: Create Accessible and Inclusive Learning Experiences by Sarah Mercier (Editor): BUY this book > > “Design for All Learners empowers instructional designers, trainers, and other talent development professionals to create learning experiences that are accessible to and inclusive of all people. Learn from practitioners’ vulnerable lived experiences, moving stories, and practical advice.”
PLATO: How an educational computer system from the ’60s shaped the future: Know your history > > “Far from its comparatively primitive contemporaries of teletypes and punch cards, PLATO was something else entirely. If you were fortunate enough to be near the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) around a half-century ago, you just might have gotten a chance to build the future.”
Eddie AI is one of the best video editing tools out there: Don’t know about Eddie - never tried it but there are larger signals here. I don not believe that Eddie or any tool like it will be able to replace the art and skill that my childhood best friend brings to her video editing. BUT. Tools like this will let people like my friend have time for higher value work and not the kind of entry-level editing that can chew so much time. So there’s the challenge - will we demand more of higher value content while making use of the easily edited stuff - will we create a diet of high value content and fast food content, or will we just keep eating more and more rapidly produced content? It’s on us > > “Eddie AI is the first tool I’ve tried that effectively lets anyone edit a video with natural language. Explain what you want in your own words—whether you’re cutting together highlights for social media or a rough draft of a video edit to share with colleagues.”
Realtime AI video analysis app Lloyd will offer developer kit after passing 50,000 users: What happens when we can live stream our context to the AI and the AI understands it? > > “Their freemium iOS app Lloyd, which uses proprietary video streaming and encoding tech to feed the user’s live video view to underlying AI models including OpenAI’s GPT-4o for help with a wide variety of tasks, from bicycle repair to telling bedtime stories…For example, the first Lloyd Power live now in the app is “Chef,” which provides a real-time, entirely AI coach for you that watches you as you cook (if you point your smartphone camera at your stove top or cooking area) and provides step-by-step guidance. Another Lloyd Power planned to launch shortly is Tour Guide, which allows users to hold up their phone and see real-time contextual information about their surroundings. By capturing a video of a location, it identifies points of interest, provides relevant details, and can even recommend nearby attractions or activities.” Makes me think of this experiment that Ethan Mollick did with Claude. See also: Hands on with Project Astra, Google's see-all assistant. See also: What are AI ‘world models,’ and why do they matter?
YouTube will now let creators opt in to third-party AI training: “Starting today, creators and rights holders will be able to flag for YouTube if they’re permitting specific third-party AI companies to train models on the creator’s content.”
Slack’s AI agents are learning from your office chats—here’s what’s next: What’s the gap between your least effective performer and a well-trained agent? > > “There’s so much of your organization’s knowledge context, what’s important… Slack’s channels typically reflect your organization’s structure, but also your priorities for that given moment,” said Rob Seaman, Slack’s Chief Product Officer, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. “That is just such rich context for agents to be able to answer questions and reason through whether or not they need to be able to take action.”
IP Copilot wants to use AI to turn your Slack messages into patents: Kinda dig this not for the busy engineers (we’re all busy), but because if its this easy, then it opens the door for non-engineers to go after patents as well. We need to get out of this mode of thinking that only people in technical roles have patentable ideas (see also I hate the term “creatives” because it implies “non-creatives”) > > “The Tennessee-based company, founded by AI experts with over 1,000 patents between them, aims, by analyzing internal communications and documents in real time, to streamline how enterprises discover and protect innovative ideas. “Everyone is an inventor,” said Austin Walters, CEO of IP Copilot, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. “Engineers are busier than ever and our goal is to minimize friction between ideas and patents, helping more innovators become inventors.” > > Also, this will probably be a feature in Agentforce in about 3, 2, 1.
Salesforce to launch Agentforce 2.0 to change digital labor for enterprise: Maybe it won’t be someone using AI who takes your job but maybe it’ll be a company with 1/3 the employees, using agents to punch way above its weight that will take your customers > > “The platform launched with an initial set of out-of-the-box capabilities for agents called “skills.” Each skill provides an agent a template that allows them to do something such as responding to customer inquiries, such as a customer service agent, or managing marketing campaigns, in the case of a campaign agent. With Agentforce 2.0, agents will be able to mix multiple skill templates. For example, a service agent can handle service calls and marketing capabilities, which means it could generate a marketing profile for a customer after a service call. That would allow it to produce marketing analytics for marketing employees.”
Google built an AI tool that can do research for you: OK, as a recovering grad student, I’m super leery of anything that says it will do my research for me. That said, depending on what you’re working on, the ability to send something out into the Web to gather things for you is deeply appealing. Oddly, I’d feel much better about this is the summary also included what it thought were weak points or places it cold not go: “Google has just revealed a new AI tool called Deep Research that lets you call upon its Gemini bot to scour the web for you and write a detailed report based on its findings.”
Midjourney is launching a multiplayer collaborative worldbuilding tool called ‘Patchwork’: OK - admittedly there is a dystopian element in selecting the type of world you want to create from essentially a dropdown menu but the capability is significant - “To generate a new world, the user enters a text prompt into an editor bar at the top of the “create” screen and selects one or more of a set of 10 different image styles.”
The 51 most disruptive startups of 2024: My picks from here (see article for links) > >
- Cdial: “Makes a chatbox that can speak and understand nearly all African languages and dialects” > > LOVE this
- Emergence: “Emergence claims to be building a system that can perform many of the tasks typically handled by knowledge workers” > > I’m terrified and skeptical and intrigued.
- Island: “Creates a secure enterprise browser” > > because a browser is still probably the most important piece of software in our world.
Google joins $90M investment into Cassava to bolster Africa’s digital infrastructure: Let’s all hope for investment that doesn’t equal digital colonization > > “Google, for its part, recently announced Umoja, the first subsea fiber-optic cable to connect Africa and Australia — and it’s joining a $90 million funding round into Cassava Technologies, one of the partner companies involved in the Umoja project.”
Twirling body horror in gymnastics video exposes AI’s flaws: Look for the videographer in the background.
Nvidia unveils palm-sized AI supercomputer for $249: This is Gibson-esque future stuff. I love to see these kind of tools in the hands of the many. > > “Aimed at AI developers, hobbyists, and students, the kit boasts impressive performance claims, including 67 INT8 TOPS (trillion operations per second), which is a 70% increase over the previous model. The company also reports a 50% boost in memory bandwidth, now reaching 102 GB/s, and up to a 1.7x improvement in generative AI inference performance. The Jetson Orin Nano enables real-time decision-making and responsiveness when processing data locally on devices.”
Larian boss Swen Vincke calls out pretty much the entire videogame industry at The Game Awards: Love his message > > “The oracle told me that the Game of the Year 2025 is going to be made by a studio who found the formula to make it up here on stage," Vincke said. "It's stupidly simple, but somehow it keeps on getting lost. A studio makes a game because they want to make a game they want to play themselves. They created it because it hadn't been created before.”
The Best of 2024: Our favorite movies, TV, books, music and games, all in one place (NPR): Love a good all-in-one.
How Georges Méliès A Trip to the Moon Became the First Sci-Fi Film & Changed Cinema Forever (1902): “For Méliès didn’t pioneer just a genre, but also a range of techniques that expanded the visual vocabulary of his medium.”