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Six Links Worthy of Your Attention #660

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:

When The Internet Becomes Chat – People Vs. Algorithms. “I’ve been writing a bunch of things about ChatGPT, democratized AI, and where humans are headed. I wish I’d written this article, which is one of the best takes on where search goes. Troy Young says the current, page-centric model of the Internet is Search > Result > Link > Page > Transaction. And with chat, this becomes Ask > Answer > Citation > Page > Transaction. This moves the focus of power from Page to Answer. It’s an interesting hypothesis, and his arguments make a lot of sense.” (Alistair for Hugh).
Does My Son Know You? – The Ringer. “Not gonna lie, this is an emotional read. A posthumous article from Jonathan Tjarks, who left behind a 3-year-old son. What can a father do for a son who will outlive him, and have no father? How does he keep his memory alive, and make the son know how loved he was? My own dad died when I was eleven, and my sister only two, and I’m still figuring out what I never learned. As Tjarks says, ‘that’s the age when your parents go from authority figures to actual people.’ And as he says in conclusion, ‘I want him to wonder why his dad’s friends always come over and shoot hoops with him. Why they always invite him to their houses. Why there are so many of them at his games. I hope that he gets sick of them.’ I’m not crying, you’re crying.” (Alistair for Mitch).
How to Build a Collaborative City: In Conversation With Sheila Foster – The MIT Press Reader. “Cities are such amazing entities. Think about all that food, water, electricity, garbage and sewage that moves in and out of a city over the course of a day week month. Regular cities are astounding; great cities more so. What makes a great city? How do we build great cities that truly deliver for (all) their inhabitants?” (Hugh for Alistair).
Got a Granny? Build Her a House in Your Backyard – The Washington Post. “I think the housing-cost crisis could be one of the biggest challenges Canada is facing, especially when tied to our huge targets for immigration. If people can’t afford to live in Canada already, and we’re expecting to add hundreds of thousands of new citizens needing places to stay, well it’s going to be a fundamental problem in the functioning of our economy and society. One reason for the housing problem in Canada is zoning laws making it hard to build new houses. I don’t know how to solve the housing crisis, but I like the idea of thinking creatively about zoning, and allowing more houses to be built in backyards. Ideal? Maybe not, but certainly worth looking at.” (Hugh for Mitch).
How ChatGPT Works: The Model Behind The Bot – Towards Data Science. “Like Alistair, I am spending a lot of time with tools like ChatGPT and many other AI technologies. I’m left wondering if there has ever been another technology in my career that has become so quickly integrated in my day-to-day work, so quickly and in so many different ways? I can’t think of a comparable. With that, I am also making several media appearances to discuss the impact of AI on work, culture and the society at large. My general frustration with these conversations is how little the interviewers really know about how ChatGPT works. I’ve bookmarked this article to send along, and it’s one that we should all read. The general sentiment I get from people who don’t spend a few minutes understanding this technology, is that ChatGPT is like a better Google… or search tool. That could not be further from the truth, but that starting point makes it even more challenging to discuss and debate the power and merits of these tools.” (Mitch for Alistair).
When AI thinks and writes like Kurt Vonnegut – Ethan Mollick – Twitter. “I usually avoid these types of AI exercises. They seems elementary and lack the true spirit of how to best use these tools. If ChatGPT makes something rhyme in the style of Dr. Seuss, it usually doesn’t really feel like the great kid’s books writer. In this case, it gets a little more interesting. The creator of the prompt asks the AI bot to write two paragraphs describing eating a slice of cake. He then prompts the AI to learn Kurt Vonnegut’s famous rules for writing, and to improve the writing by using those rules… and that’s where it gets interesting. What makes this smarter is how they compare the Bing AI tool to ChatGPT. Spoiler alert: Bing wins.” (Mitch for Hugh).