Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (Solve for Interesting, Tilt the Windmill, Interesting Bits, HBS, chair of Strata, Startupfest, FWD50, and Scaletechconf; author of Lean Analytics and some other books), Hugh McGuire (Rebus Foundation, PressBooks, LibriVox) and I decided that every week the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person “must see.”

Check out these six links that we’re recommending to one another:

• Reality Has A Surprising Amount Of Detail – John Salvatier. “What an amazing essay. It can be summed up as ‘The existence of a surprising number of meaningful details… is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality.’ For someone who largely thinks in the abstract, lately I’ve been finding real value in forcing myself to dive into the details, whether that’s implementing a QR code hack or understanding what it would mean for AI users to have ‘recourse’.”It’s also an almost poetically beautiful explanation of why we get stuck in our thinking: Once a mental model is good enough, it’s hard to go back upstream and improve it.” (Alistair for Hugh).
• I Made A Graph Of Wikipedia… This Is What I Found – adumb codes – YouTube. “If Wikipedia is the sum of all knowledge, biased through the lens of things people want to – and are able to – write about. @adumb_codes wrote software to analyze the popularity and interconnectedness of every article on the site, with some fascinating results, and published this summary.” (Alistair for Mitch).
• Welcome To The Age Of Technofeudalism – Wired. “Yanis Varoufakis wore a leather motorcycle jacket as a socialist-ish Greek finance minister battling (unsuccessfully) the European Central Bank during the Greek financial crisis. He founded a political party focused on the voice of the people, and has written many books, the most recent of which is about all the ways in which we now work for our tech overlords.” (Hugh for Alistair).
• What Is ChatGPT Doing … And Why Does It Work? – Stephen Wolfram. “Stephen Wolfram – an excessively smart person – goes into great depth explaining how and why ChatGPT works.” (Hugh for Mitch).
• Get Tech Out of the Classroom Before It’s Too Late – The New York Times. “How many alarm bells (or, in this case, articles, podcasts, news segments, statements from politicians and more) do we need before some action is taken. If teacher’s find themselves battling between what they’re teaching and the screens that the kids are supposed to using for school work in class, isn’t the solution obvious? And, while we’re at it, if we don’t update what it means to even be a student in a world where ChatGPT can answer every secondary high school question better than most students, we are going to have a very difficult near-future. What are we solving for? Ultimately, we want these young people to build a better society. So, let’s start thinking now… quickly… about what school is for. If the tech is in the way of creating the best humans possible… we should use that as our starting point.” (Mitch for Alistair).
• This Woman Deconstructs 100-Year-Old Books To Restore Them – Jason Kottke. “For now, there is much to be done that artificial intelligence won’t be able to do better than humans. There are many interesting trades and ways in which us humans can keep being valuable, knowledgable and interesting. Books are always my starting point for real knowledge. Now, check out how old books are restored… seems more like an art form than a trade to me… but this seems like vital, passionate and important work that compensates the creator… which is a beautiful thing… just like this video.” (Mitch for Hugh).

Feel free to share these links and add your picks on X, Facebook, in the comments below or wherever you play.

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