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: 

• Alignment Faking In Large Language Models – Anthropic. “When an AI’s output is consistent with the rules its creator set out, it’s ‘aligned’. Misalignment means doing things like explaining how to make a weapon or list the ingredients for a drug. AI companies’ safety teams have various ways of testing alignment – but it’s rather like a normal teacher testing an extraordinary pupil. How do we know if they’re lying to us when they’re smarter than us? I’m a fan of Anthropic, and its approach to alignment is different from others… it’s also more transparent. If you want to understand how misalignment and faked behavior happen, this is a great, clear explanation.” (Alistair for Hugh).
• The Ghosts In The Machine – Liz Pelly – Harper’s Magazine. “A few years back, I was writing a short e-book for O’Reilly called, Music Science, about how tech was changing the recording industry. I learned that Spotify hired François Pachet, an expert in generative music. This was seven years ago, in 2017. Why pay artists to stream their music when you can just generate it for them, I wondered. Well, it seems like something is indeed rotten in Denmark, Sweden. In this Harpers piece, Liz Pelly offers a look inside the company’s ‘Perfect Fit Content’ machine. Which brings up not only the ethical questions of artist compensation, but also a conversation about whether generative noise we like is a valid product offering.” (Alistair for Mitch).
• The Real Secret Of Youth Is Complexity – Lewis A. Lipsitz – Nautilus. “Ask Alistair about his theory of life the next time you see him, which goes something like this: life’s driving ambition is to convert energy into information. This is in contervalence to the overall physics of the universe, which tends to entropy (aka disorder). Of course there’s more to it, but Alistair will have to fill you in. In any case, studies in aging show that we are all mini-universes tending towards entropy and our own heat deaths: all the structures of the body – our brains, our bones, our organs, our skin – get less complex as we age.” (Hugh for Alistair).
• All the Little Data – Nicholas Carr – The Hedgehog Review. “Nick Carr writes about all those notifications, texts, alerts, emails, and numbers that shape our lives every day, and comes, more or less, to the conclusion that this data is replacing life. ‘What is datafication but a process for transforming the living into the dead?’ This is interesting in context of Alistair’s theory of life (see above) – ‘transforming energy into information’ … maybe it’s a round-trip? What information giveth, information taketh away. In any case, please turn off your notifications.” (Hugh for Mitch).  
• 52 Things I  Learned In 2024 – Tom Whitwell – Medium. “Full disclosure: I can’t remember how I came across this article… I don’t know who Tom Whitwell is… and I have not clicked on every link/source to verify the credibility of these statements/headlines. With that, here is a fascinating list of things that I was ’this years old’ when learning about… fun… insightful… weird… ludicrous… And it kicks off with this one: ‘To highlight tax evasion, South Korea introduced ugly neon green number plates for company cars worth more than $58,000. Luxury car sales fell 27%.’” (Mitch for Alistair).
• The Greatest Tech Book Of All Time – The Verge. “Pardon the overly click-baity title of this article. I was just telling Hugh that I am madly deeply in love with the iPad Mini. That it is, beyond reason, one of the best ‘content devices’ I have ever owned. So, what better way to enjoy this coming holiday season than curled up with a great read. This list… surprised me… some book that I have read enjoyed (that I would not qualify as the ‘best of all time’) and many more that I have not read. So… here’s to a holiday filled with clearing out those book wishlists…” (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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