Is there one link, story or idea that stopped you this week… and made you think, “someone else needs to see this”?
My friends: Alistair Croll (Just Evil Enough, 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 made a simple pact years ago. Once a week, each of us would share one link with the others… something we genuinely believed the other two had to see. No trend-hunting… no performance. Just six ideas exchanged with intent. What started as a small ritual between curious friends became Six Links That Make You Think.
These are the six links we passed to one another this week… take your time with them…
- Trump vs Carney The 4 Minute Speech That Shattered North American Peace – YouTube. “I do my best to avoid online scrolling, but somehow got interested in this video: did Mark Carney give a world-shaking speech I hadn’t heard about? I’m a pretty sophisticated sniffer of bullshit on the web, but it still took me a couple of minutes to clock that this video was a deepfake. Probably I was lulled by the boring delivery. Anyway, it’s a fake, and there are surely thousands like it. There are (only) 80 comments, I guess mostly from bot farms, not one of which says: deepfake. Tech companies bungled their disinformation mandates during Covid, drawing the ire of now-president Trump, leaving space for domestic and sophisticated state bad actors to do lots of damage. I met someone at a conference recently, a relatively senior person at the Canadian Department of National Defence, who told me they watch Warren Buffet‘s podcast on YouTube, and that Buffet just moved all his investments out of the US and into Canada because of stability. It didn’t pass the sniff test, so I checked it out: of course the Buffet podcast is a deepfake as well. I guess this is old news to anyone paying attention, but whoooboy are we entering a complicated world.” (Hugh for Mitch).
- Jimi Hendrix Was A Systems Engineer – Rohan S. Puranik – IEEE Spectrum. “Amazingly geeky sound physics analysis of the genius of Jimi Hendrix, complete with waveform and frequency-response plots demonstrating how various circuits transformed his guitar signal.” (Hugh for Alistair).
- What We’re Working On – Jesse Vincent – Prime Radiant. “My friend Jesse Vincent is a programming legend. He codes so hard that he even launched a Kickstarter for a keyboard for coders. He maintained Perl. And his Claude skill Superpowers is the hottest thing on Github right now. There are few people I know who have so perfectly melded human and algorithm. And he just took the covers off Prime Radiant (yes, an Asimov reference), his new project to create a personal assistant. Follow this space.” (Alistair for Hugh).
- The Shape Of The Curve – Jen Van Der Meer – Contribution Design. “Jen van der Meer is a force for good. You two might have met her at Startupfest; she’s been working hard to figure out the existential, unspoken question of progressives everywhere: ‘If we’re the good guys and we’re so smart, why isn’t the world going our way?’ She describes her newsletter as ‘the counterweight to futilitarianism.’ The old model (what Carney might call ‘nostalgia’) is that a crisis forces political restructuring. But in recent crises, this hasn’t happened. Her conclusion about why, in this devastating piece, is simple: ‘Each crash produces not restructuring but more liquidity, more narrative, more abstraction from relationship. The bubble does not pop into a Golden Age. It reinflates. It has one move, and the move works every time.'” (Alistair for Mitch).
- How Brain Networks Work Together Is Key To Human Intelligence – Tracy DeStazio – Futurity. “There is so much rhetoric around what ‘intelligence’ is and what it means. I get it. Artificial intelligence is changing how we perceive so many things around what it means to think, create and do. With that, it’s probably important for us to spend some time really looking at what human intelligence is or at least what we know about it. This was a good read. Scientists found that human intelligence comes from how different brain networks work together, not from one single brain part. The brain coordinates many specialized areas through efficient connections and control hubs to solve problems. This teamwork explains why intelligence is flexible and helps guide better artificial intelligence designs… So the question now becomes: can machines replicate this or have they simplified it down to some type of predictive engine? It seems like we don’t really know quite yet.” (Mitch for Alistair).
- The Enshittificator – Vimeo. “Last week, I had Cory Doctorow on my podcast to discuss his latest book, Enshittification – Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse And What To Do About It. I guess the timing was good, because this video came out and not only did a bunch of people send it to me, but it went viral all on it’s own. It’s funny… because it’s also sad. I’m not one to explain a joke (that ruins it), so just take a watch. But it’s worth it to think about how this happens all of the time to our digital lives… and we hardly do anything about… but we should. I’m really curious to see if/when AI becomes enshittified, because my guess is that it will be a whole new level of lock-in. We already see how greedy these frontier models are for tokens… well, imagine a world where a company does let go of staff and uses agents… and suddenly the AI BigCo’s double or triple token prices… then what?” (Mitch for Hugh).
If one of these sticks with you, pass it on… and let us know what earned your attention this week…
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