Work Related 12/16/24

Trying a slightly new format today as I spent much of the day on a plane and caught a ton of content from the weekend.

Robots Rise

• Terrific podcast 🎧️ from Dealbook Summit hosted by Kevin Roose from the NYT and 10 experts covering a massive range of topics and issues in AI.

• Harvard releasing a public-domain dataset 📖 of 1 million books to help normalize the existing data availble for more teams.

• Given my background in marketing, I have mixed feelings on AI replacing the creative process 💡, and seeing work head just straight into the lowest common denominator through machines, but I do believe and really know we are seeing an impact on production, location, and talent.

• A much more personalized version of programmatic is likely but that’s not the same … AI doesn’t think the way we do, and that’s a good thing for now.

• If you believe the hype, you’d think AI was an everyday thing for far more than apparently claim it’s helping. This report from Goldman Sachs 📊 claims it’s just over 6% of companies with most trying to find the ROI.

• AI continues to need enormous amounts of energy to run — 10X more electricity to run a ChatGPT request over a simple google search. The impact of this energy requirement beyond the generation of power is considerable … and there’s no sign things will slow down anytime soon.

• Wrapping up the AI section today is a very cool new site called Escape.ai which is hosting amazing creative content like short films in addition to highlighting the tools and creators. A lot of what I’ve seen so far is pretty surreal and out there but shows the potential. Humans still very much required … can only imagine the time required to get this kind of controlled output.

An Apple a Day

💊 It’s not even remotely surprising that finance bros are looking to performance enhancing drugs to maintain and deliver the required time and energy the job requires. What is surprising though is the grunt level tasks like aligning corporate logos on a PowerPoint or formatting cells in Microsoft Excel.  

🧬 Back in my R/GA days I recall when CRISPR first came up in our Futurevision discussions and now 11 years later there’s a remarkable use and cure for Sickle-cell disease. Sadly it’s still unbelievably expensive (2-3MM) and will not be available at scale anytime soon without some serious financial assistance. Still incredible progress!

 🫙 It is probably impossible at this point to not be aware of Creatine and its alleged magical properties as far as nutritional suppplements go. It’s the one that almost everyone recommends and seemingly has little to no negative impact — if you follow the suggested dosage. While predominately used by gym-goers, there’s been a steady increase for endurance athletes as well. The Training Peaks blog has a solid summary summarizing pros and cons using about a dozen sources which is good to see. I dabbled last year and not sure I fully appreciated a real difference but have debated starting it up again for this coming year. The main reason I stopped was due to elevated liver enzymes from a physical though much of that is likely due to the more extreme level of training I’ve done.

😴 We all know those people who can seemingly function indefinitely without sleep and those who require far more. Scientists have been studying the differences and genetic links between these behaviors which will hopefully lead us to become more informed and empowered to take advantage of what works best.

🥱 If we can’t get the full night sleep our brains require, perhaps we can learn to leverage the power of sleep onset to induce a more creative problem solving opportunity.

Book Smart

📔 When I first read that article I was a bit skeptical as I had clicked through from a pretty biased POV via Jeff Vandermeer on Bluesky dunking on Tech Bros. If I could write novels as dense and complex as Vandermeer I might also feel the same. His latest book Absolution is the prequel to his Southern Reach Trilogy and something I’ll need to add to my queue … the initial books were all great and I enjoyed the Annihilation movie though I can’t see how anyone who hadn’t read things first would have had a remote chance in hell of understanding it even with an AI assist.

With kids in college and our youngest looking ahead to apply soon enough, we have noticed there’s been a downward trend in the amount kids are assigned to read as well as how much less kids seem to be reading in general. This reduction probably also applies to adults and it’s not a coincidence that our shorter attention spans are being honed by the algorithms in our pockets. Brain structure seems to be a clear differentiator in who reads vs not but the good news (to me anyway) seems to be that you can enhance these functions through studying and, well actually reading.

Last one of the day and it’s a fun long read but only available as a thread on Bluesky about the making of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring which was released 23 years ago.

If you made it this far you should get a reward … today that’s how to turn your typical 12 days for PTO into 45.

Please feel free to hit reply with any feedback or questions.

I have served.  I will be of service.

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