I’ve been spending a lot of time on the internet lately, and I think it’s rotting my brain. I need to go outside this weekend and make myself nice dinners. Recipe recommendations welcome! I am going to log off and make stuff. I think it’ll be good.
Here’s a bit of what I’ve read this week.
America’s colleges are reaping what they’ve sowed: If your university is going to trade on the activist history of the place (looking at you, Columbia!) I’m really not sure you can be surprised if your students take you up on that offer. This article doesn’t focus on the specific issue of the Middle East, but instead focuses on the question of universities and their relationship to protest with their students.
Why Chatbots are not the future by Amelia Wattenberger: Amelia is so right about the flaws of a chatbot:
Good tools make it clear how they should be used. And more importantly, how they should not be used. If we think about a good pair of gloves, it's immediately obvious how we should use them. They're hand-shaped! We put them on our hands. And the specific material tells us more: metal mesh gloves are for preventing physical harm, rubber gloves are for preventing chemical harm, and leather gloves are for looking cool on a motorcycle.
Compare that to looking at a typical chat interface. The only clue we receive is that we should type characters into the textbox. The interface looks the same as a Google search box, a login form, and a credit card field.
Of course, users can learn over time what prompts work well and which don't, but the burden to learn what works still lies with every single user. When it could instead be baked into the interface.
A profession is not a personality:
Are you a self-objectifier in your job or career? Ask yourself a few questions, and answer them honestly.
Is your job the biggest part of your identity? Is it the way you introduce yourself, or even understand yourself?
Do you find yourself sacrificing love relationships for work? Have you forgone romance, friendship, or starting a family because of your career?
Do you have trouble imagining being happy if you were to lose your job or career? Does the idea of losing it feel a little like death to you?
Make copies, it’ll make you better:
Sometimes Thiebaud literally made the same marks as his creative icons, making copies after other artists. (Thiebaud regularly instructs his drawing students to: “Copy pictures. Enjoy the hell out of it.”) One of these, exhibited in Wayne Thiebaud, Draftsman, is a copy of a Giorgio Morandi still life drawing. Thiebaud has reproduced it in its entirety, down to the signature.
But he also makes a note at the bottom of the drawing, informing viewers that it is a copy. “You want to be sure you’re not making a forgery,” Thiebaud explained at his artist talk at the Morgan. No one could accuse Thiebaud of forging the masters who served as his inspiration, since their influence is well hidden under the iced layers of sheet cake that pervade his canvases. But their traces are there, ever so subtle.
Keep your identity small: Want to have non-emotional discussions about hard topics, like politics and religion? Keep your identity small.
The most intriguing thing about this theory, if it's right, is that it explains not merely which kinds of discussions to avoid, but how to have better ideas. If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible.
An amazing thread on why large institutions are incentivized to buy bad software: A story of why academics are forced to use terrible tools, which is actually the true story of why almost all enterprise software sucks.
Netflix autoplay: The story of Netflix autoplay is pretty fascinating. It was really a surface for more experimentation more than it was a straight up grab for more views. How could the Netflix team better test the content it produced? Create their own version of an algorithmic feed like Tiktok via autoplay, of course.
Why traditional music critique doesn’t make sense for Taylor Swift: She’s not putting out work that should be evaluated as a standalone piece of music, it’s an entry into the broader Swiftverse that should be evaluated relationally. But, tbh, I didn’t like the album, and I didn’t listen to the entire thing either. I’m not the audience.
The rare Speiser tweet! You don’t want product market fit, you probably need product marketing fit.