Super Humans and Super AI
I had an issue with my buttondown newsletter. I wrote to support. Got an automated reply telling me they got my mail, they are looking into the issue but since they only have limited staff, working in a US time zone, it might take a bit for a proper reply. Within 1 hour, Steph is in my inbox, kindly explaining the issue and how they would resolve it. I said thank you for the quick answer Steph and for being a kind human Steph and Steph said no problem arjen, we don’t like talking to chatbots, and we don’t want to make you all deal with them either. <3 (<- I got that one from the emoji museum).
On my site this 🦉 renders as an emoji. I wonder how the newsletter engine renders it.
snails
I have a math professor friend. He is in a depression now since the Navier Stokes incident. OpenAI had an LLM solve a difficult math problem. And that’s a problem. Because mathematics was never about solving the problem, as Terrence Tao explains elegantly:
(…) But there is now a scenario in which an autonomous AI harness, backed by an enormous amount of computational resources, performs this entire iteration internally, and ends up producing the final ansatz, and thence the solution to the Navier-Stokes regularity problem, while the AI company running the harness keeps the process to arrive at that ansatz almost completely out of public view. Technically, one of the most prominent open problems in mathematics would now be solved; but there would be almost no value added to mathematics as a consequence.
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Fundamentally, problems in pure mathematics, such as the global regularity problem, serve a different purpose than immediately practical problems, such as that of finding a cure to a specific disease, or increasing the energy efficiency of some engine. In most cases in pure mathematics, the problems are posed not because we desperately want the solution to these problems in and of themselves, but because we have seen from past experience that human-directed efforts to solve these problems tend to spur further development of the field through the efforts to solve such problems, and then to digest any partial or complete solutions that emerge for further insights. Prematurely solving the problem by purely AI-powered methods - particularly without full transparency into the solution process - can contaminate this process to the point where it actually becomes a net negative for the progress of mathematics as a whole.
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(…) The point remains that there is a substantial opportunity cost in converting a historically productive and motivating problem (such as Navier-Stokes regularity) into a mere viral social media post advertising some benchmark progress, rather than actually advancing the field and developing the next generation of both problems to ask, and people to work on them.
And if even Terry get’s worried, we should get worried as well.
My friend feels like a fish who has been told that, from tomorrow, there won’t be any water anymore. Ever.
this pennywise album rocks hard
An evening stroll
I was walking my dog the other day when we ran into the ox
“Good morning cow”, I said
“I am not a cow”, the ox said
“Oh, I’m sorry”, I said
Me and my dog, we walked on
“I’m on ox.”, the ox said, “An ox!”
“Sure”, I thought, “An ox, and I’m a lumberjack”
I ran into my friend the other day. She left her job about the same time as I did. In similar circumstances as I did. And started as a freelancer about the same time as I did. We sat on a bench in the autumn sun, overlooking the Utrecht canal and found ourselves in a random state of happiness. Happiness is easy, but difficult.
“Do you know the story of Nobunaga and the three birds?”, my son asked.
“No”, I said
“Nobunaga, Hideyoshi and Tokugawa were watching a cuckoo bird waiting for it to sing, but the bird wouldn’t sing. Tokugawa Ieyasu says to the bird ‘Little bird, if you don’t sing I will wait for you to sing’, Hideyoshi says ‘Little bird, if you don’t sing, I’ll make you sing’. Then, Nobunaga says ‘Little bird, if you don’t sing I will kill you’”.
Nobunaga, Hideyoshi and Tokugawa are the three unifiers of Japan. You have to be patient, active and ruthless to move ahead in life.
Most people wait for the bird to sing, without being patient. Some people try to make the bird sing, without a mitigation plan. And only very, very few people are prepared, are willing to kill the bird.
My friend killed the bird.
Oh, and I finally published a draft of the Consultancy to SaaS essay. I’m not yet satisfied. It needs editing and polishing and I need to add figures and diagrams and I have to elaborate the use case. That’s why I didn’t publish on Medium yet. But it’s good enough to publish here. Let me know your feedback. (I had lunch and had another look and I am actually quite excited, read it!)
All systems go for GTM next week!
customatisation
Publishing early is about gettings things done and not chasing perfection. It will block you. Like when I launched my site last week, I knew it was crap. But it was something and good enough. And while walking my dog, we not only run into animals all the time, I also process stuff and cook up new ideas:
- On a Sunday evening walk, a better structure for my site popped up (consult, build, write) and from there everything became more logical and fell into place in the updated and restructured version;
- On a Thursday afternoon walk I thought about a collaboration structure for freelancers to stay engaged with all the wonderful people I am talking to these days. One step beyond “let’s stay in touch”, without any formal or binding stuff. Do stuff together, know there are people willing to listen and just be happy in general.
dog in basket