July 9th Newsletter
Thought for the Week: It’s easy to get lost in our perpetual environment of uncertainty Where do you need to feel more emotionally safe and what can you do to make yourself feel more safe?
As immigration becomes the entire focus on US government policy, I think it's worth stepping back to think about what immigration is.
Humans have changed how we organize ourselves over human history. Sometimes we’ve organized by tribe, sometimes by religion, sometimes a land mass that is protected from attack by natural borders, sometimes by city walls, sometimes by a charismatic leader.
Right now we have the nation state, the US boundary has even changed significantly over its history, two states were added in the mid 20th century.
The point is that these organizations of people aren't static.
America, in communications at least, is an attempt to organize around an idea.
The first amendment is a novel American invention, particularly speech rights are practiced in America in a way that they aren't in the rest of the world.
Why wouldn't we want anyone here who sees that as valuable?
What I hear in the immigration policy is a desire to return to tribalism, or possibly a desire to organize around a set of values that aren't uniquely American.
Empowering police to enforce the law with a heavy hand isn't uniquely American. Neither is being a nation backed by religious doctrines.
Let's focus on what actually makes America great, having the freedom to say what you want without getting thrown in prison. Your voice is the source of your freedom in America.
Let's welcome everyone who sees the human voice as integral to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
I really liked this graphic from my class I was taking that was explaining “product market fit”. In laymen’s terms, product market fit is whether you are solving a problem that a real customer that you’ve identified has.
To explain this, product market fit involves a solution that you can build that the market needs.
If you can build a potential product, but the market doesn’t need it, that’s a waste of resources. Another class I took called these products digital zombies. Love that.
If the market has a problem, you have the resources to solve it, but you can’t figure out how to solve it (or spend time chasing the wrong ideas…), that’s a wasted opportunity. This is your company that spends an enormous amount of resources hacking away at a crappy solution. I’m reminded of the black knight from monty python - “why won’t you die”
If the market has a problem and you have a solution but you don’t know how to build it, this is living in fantasy world. I worry a lot about this one around AI. AI can do so many things that it’s very easy to think you have solved a problem before you actually understand that you don’t have the resources to solve the problem. Watch what Meta (Facebook) is doing in the AI space, they’re currently throwing billions of dollars at this problem and not solving the actual reason they can’t solve the problem. That problem is Mark Zuckerberg is an idiot jackhole.
Again, product market fit, the thing that drives real solution uptake, is only accomplished by a solution that you can build that solves a real problem for the market.
The way to discover this solution is starting with talking to customers in your market.
Figure out the actual problems they have.
Test concepts with them.
Build out those concepts and learn from iterative development.
Nothing else works.
Don’t let processes drive you, you drive the process.
I worked with college students, registering student groups and events for years before going into my current line of work. This involves a lot of “paperwork” and registration deadlines, some might argue a lot of it was unnecessary but that’s not what I’m wanting to talk about.
I often had a deadline that things needed to be in but I would generally set the student deadline at least a week or two before then.
I did this for two reasons, any time you create a deadline, humans who don’t want to do that thing are going to test your deadline. There will always be people asking for extensions and help and with “dog ate my homework” ass excuses. Just a fact of life. The other reason was that I needed time to actually do my work.
And, I guess, my third reason was that I wanted these groups to be able to function. If they couldn’t function with a real deadline, I would make one up to save them from themselves. I was a dictator but a magnanimous one (I was asked one time why I was such a hard ass and my response was “you can always lighten up but it’s very hard to be firm when people don’t expect it”).
I say all this to say when you’re working in the real world, there’s always going to be chaotic nonsense and the more people you have, the more institutions you have, the more chaotic and nonsensical things tend to be.
You can’t let this get in the way of doing the best thing.
In your work, that might mean creating a unified deadline that helps to meet all the other chaotic deadlines.
In politics, that might mean allowing people who don’t “deserve” free health insurance (whatever it means to deserve a human right) so that all the people who need it have it.
To make an omelet you have to break a few eggs, but wisdom realizes that the pursuit of perfection ends up with worse systems generally.
Instead, live in imperfection and do the most good. Just my two cents.
An aside: I did use the deadline pushers as a learning opportunity and often had them right apology letters for missing the deadline. These were so hilarious, I would hate having chatgpt to take that away from me.
I have been thinking a lot lately how many ways we have to DIY our lives, our homes and ourselves.
Between reddit, youtube, AI and (i’m a data analyst) stack overflow, we are at an unprecedented space with trying to figure things out on your own.
What you need that may be in short supply is an ability to make mistakes and to struggle.
I believe making mistakes and struggling is not only part of the process of doing things, I think it’s a product of your expectations. If you expect struggle, then the struggle isn’t bad, it’s just part of the process of solving problems. If you don’t expect struggle and failure, struggle and failure can be catastrophic, disastrous or heartbreaking.
You might be asking how you get better at struggle and failure.
Fail
Fail some more
Keep failing until you figure it out
That’s it, that’s the process.
You won’t ever do anything big and ambitious until you grow comfortable with failing at doing things.
This is why lifting weights or running is so great, failure is built into the process. If you want to improve, you have to struggle.
But it could be home maintenance or being a parent or building something. There are infinite ways to fail and to grow.
The only way is by starting. And failing. Try something you know you can’t do, figure it out.
This newsletter will always be pro-humanity.
A noisy critic might say that I talk about technology a lot and thus technology is fundamentally anti-human (at the risk of creating a straw man, I soldier on). I don’t think that’s correct. Technology should make us more human, not less. We should hand tasks that we don’t want to do to machines and let ourselves focus on being useful in other ways.
I don’t find washing the dishes to be a very human activity, I’m more than happy to let a machine take over the task of washing the dishes. Same with the clothes.
AI is presenting so many conundrums around this.
My theory is that you should watch what people are happy to let AI automate (not corporations or capitalists, but people), and that will tell you what people find dehumanizing.
Professors might lament that students aren’t doing their homework. You’re telling me that teachers and professors might have fundamentally different values about what constitutes something they should be doing? I’ve never heard of such things.
People are using LLMs to write emails, do resumes and cover letters, draft presentations for work. People don’t want to do these things, that's what they‘re telling you!
We can try to ban the technology, something that never works on the internet (especially in America), or we can find ways to make these processes work better.
I’ll tell you what won’t help, going on your social media to bitch! Surprise, that’s what everyone’s doing.
But instead of seeing these things as threats, what we could do is consider ways to redesign these dehumanizing processes to make them more human-centric. People wouldn’t hand this stuff over to AI if they saw value in it. Defend the value or make the process more valuable.
I’ve written on here about how stupid the entire job application process is. AI is here to blow the whole thing to bits. Let it die. Build something new.
My dad and I attended the PGA championship at quail hollow in Charlotte a few months back. It was a great time, got to see a lot of good players and it was my first PGA major tournament. Hopefully I can make it to Augusta soon.
The tickets were very expensive but the food was all included, other than alcohol. To get a burger, you just walked in and grabbed a burger.
You spent a lot less time at the freaking concession stand than at most sporting events and, given we were walking a lot in the heat, we got to stay very hydrated and full of food. Good times were had.
I don't know why more events don't do this. I feel like the concession stand at events is such a huge source of friction and time wasting. Who goes to events and doesn't hate standing in the concession line?
I know the price may not work but I think people would actually be very open to lower priced food options if this was set up this way.
Create less friction for your customers and I think people will be happier even if it costs more.
A great test for this would be minor league baseball. Offer water, soda, hot dogs and popcorn only and make the tickets all inclusive but more expensive. Would be interesting to see where they felt the price point would need to be.
Everyone's doing things the same, how can you be different and actually improve your business?
You might have heard that Grok, Elon Musk’s AI, is calling itself MechaHitler, saying anti-semitic things and celebrating the Holocaust.
It’s crazy that Twitter used to be a fun site to learn about things happening in the world and talk trash with people you barely knew. Time marches on.
You’ll probably read some takes about how Elon Musk is bad or how AI is bad and this fundamentally proves it. I’m not here to talk about that.
I think what it proves is that AI reveals something about it’s programmers and it’s users.
I also think Grok is telling us something about cognition and how the brain can be broken by bad inputs.
AI (LLMs) like Grok are just machine learning models with particular settings that may be hard for even the creators to understand why they’re outputting what they are. They’re self reinforcing, they “learn” and reflect the inputs that they’re given.
So, Grok is doing this partly because Twitter has become a cesspool of insane people giving it bad inputs, and partly because of what it is told to do.
Grok’s coders apparently told Grok to “not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated” and if asked for a partisan answer it should “conduct deep research to form independent conclusions”.
Let’s break these down.
not shy away from making politically incorrect claims” - I heard someone say that “politically correct” is just a fancy way of saying “nice”. So basically, this is telling Grok that it’s fine to be an asshole.
“independent conclusions - this is just “do your own research”, and “do your own research” isn’t a real thing that exists, even the best scientists in the world work together. Thinking you should “do your own research” is dumb.
They basically programmed Grok to be a dumb asshole. You can’t be surprised that it’s acting like one if that’s what it was told to do.
And if you’re making this way of being core to your identity, being politically incorrect and “doing your own research”, you might be acting like a dumb asshole too.