Leverage
What Alan Kay has been emphasizing, and which is now at the heart of Bret Victor’s design philosophy, is that the computer is a “dynamic medium.” The essence of a computer is not the keyboard, the mouse, and the screen. It’s computational and responsive capabilities that don’t exist in a static medium like paper. We should use this dynamic medium t... See more
Alan Chan • My Vision: A Forgotten History
llms are trained on internet-scale datasets, but their effects are not like the internet.
calculators — or tables that can be calculated on (llm + rag) — are better analogs.
the rise of spreadsheet applications allowed professionals to migrate their tables to spreadsheets. eventually, they put even fancier wrappers around their spreadsheets in vertical applications.
AI is the new plastic
notion.so
There is beauty to naturally occurring material… and thought
This talks about value capture by focusing on the most critical point of leverage
The State of AI with Marc & Ben
open.spotify.comAI and the Internet are different phenomena.
The internet increased the leverage of computers by connecting them to other computers. Amplifies things that benefit from wider distribution. Network effects.
LLMs are stateless calculators (computers). Amplifies things that have a lot of computational complexity. Quick and Reliable decision making.
The Death of the Junior Developer
sourcegraph.com
AI adoption and capabilities are distributed bimodally across industries.
Writing-heavy professions like writing, law, software are feeling it first. It doesn't feel that way because other industries are still untouched. That may continue for long or it might not.
It's always calmest before the storm
The History of Mathematical Tables: From Sumer to Spreadsheets | Oxford Academic
academic.oup.comExcel may be the most influential software ever built. It is a canonical example of Steve Job’s bicycle of the mind, endowing its users with computational superpowers normally reserved for professional software engineers. Armed with those superpowers, users can create fully functional software programs in the form of a humble spreadsheet to solve p... See more
Benjamin Rollert • Excel Never Dies
It's becoming increasingly evident that in many circles, AI is not perceived as merely a technology, but as "something else" entirely. This misconception is exemplified by the recurring debate: "Humans vs AI." To illustrate the absurdity of this framing, let's replace "AI" with "technology":
"Humans vs Technology"___LIN... See more
Cristóbal Valenzuelax.com