Obviously not really four because it also wasn’t posted on a Friday.
- British Design, Dyson Farming
- Finding the Needles in Haystacks with Tech & AI Newsletters
- What’s the Future with Apple’s VisionPro?
- Design Process is a Lie
+1 Nick Lane and the Electrical Origins of Life
Cover Image from https://huggingface.co/miqudev/miqu-1-70b
——
British Design, Dyson Farming
I got very lost on a farm recently. Ok, reading and watching videos about farming. I wasn’t actually on a farm. In particular I got lost in Dyson Farming, the large scale, circular model, sustainable, technology driven, experimental approach to industrial farming by James Dyson.
For a project I’m working on, I’ve been looking at the different systems of farming, and of course Dyson farming popped up. About ten years ago Dyson began purchasing land in the UK, which now makes up 36,000 acres of high yielding farmland in Lincolnshire, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire (took me three attempts to spell that correctly.) and Somerset. Where he set up his version of R&D for farming. And it all looks and reads quite impressive.
I really enjoyed seeing the circular approach to generating electricity to power the growing of 750 tonnes of strawberries a year.
This PDF showcases some of the facts and vision for his Farm in their commitment to Sustainability. It reminds me in places of a client I worked with over a decade ago: Stacey Frost’s ReVision.
This is a slick, very well produced video, but nonetheless is quite fun to watch.
I also confess I enjoyed reading all of the job descriptions on the farm’s web site. I am really tempted to apply for the Work Experience Summer Series position. I’m wondering if they’d extend it to a month for me?
https://dysonfarming.com/vacancy/summer-series-2024
There is something particular about the Britishness of Dyson explaining his vision and philosophy to various fields of invention. It’s as if it is all quite understated yet really quite brilliant. He’s bold, and open about his failures (Fast Company: Dyson Using Failure) but has a real joy about the work he’s pursuing and why it matters to him. Branson had the same kind of personality, even if he was a little cheekier. The soft-spoken personality of the British trade or craftsman is interesting to me as they are no less ambitious than their American counterparts. DeWaal, Heatherwick, Pentagram when it began and so on.
It makes me think about the cultural differences of bold, ambitious, designers and entrepreneurs. Those who are making an outsized impact on the world and in whose image are they imitating? And what is the benefit for those societies to have these cultural icons?
——
Finding the Needles in Haystacks with Tech & AI Newsletters
I have collected quite a hefty amount of tech and AI newsletters in the last year, this week I took the time to review everything that came in just this week, to see if there was actually anything of importance in them all.
Funnily enough, I get so many newsletters in one day that this is just what I pulled from my Inbox on Monday the 5th.
I’m wondering if I should set up a separate blog to collect these throughout the week in short notes like the following?
From TLDR 2024-02-05:
I really enjoyed this post in mathoverflow about daunting papers and books and how to finally read them.
This makes me think of the neuromodulators that help you focus as well as the biological resistance to not focus your attention, lest that tiger jumps out and eats you.
Because it is biologically unsafe to get lost in something and to lose awareness of our environment. It opens us up to the possibility of surprise if we’re lost in something deeply. And that it is important to push past this chemical resistance. (And not artificially boost our dopamine through instagram etc)
This reminds me of a ten—wait, twelve year old paper on how sensitive our pre-frontal cortex is to stress and we can freeze, and the brain can lose its highest cognitive functions.
The Information / Monday
The EU Unanimously Approves Draft AI Act.
(I accidentally wrote ‘Daft AI Act’ but corrected it.)
This is interesting to see how governments attempt to reign in high-risk applications of AI. Like social scoring, advanced conversational AI and Transparency.
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/eu-unanimously-approves-draft-ai-act
Ok—I was also interested to see that Bezos has filed to sell up to $8.5Bn in Amazon stock in the 12 months. What is he going to buy? A new boat?
TLDR Web Dev 2024-02-05
I enjoyed this simple and short informal summary of a paper, The Pain Points of Building a Copilot. The AI agents that can help you with your tasks.
https://austinhenley.com/blog/copilotpainpoints.html?utm_source=tldrwebdev
The paper referenced is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.14231
41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective, from Jason Nielsen.
The usability expert who was a significant influence on myself and most of my colleagues over thirty years ago…
https://www.uxtigers.com/post/41-years-in-ux?utm_source=tldrwebdev
Beyond Self-Attention: How a Small Language Model Predicts the Next Token
This is long, and technical but so interesting. Small Language models are interesting to me. How long will it be before all our own data can be our personal SLM? Medical and created content?
https://shyam.blog/posts/beyond-self-attention/?utm_source=tldrwebdev
The Information / The Electric.
So any newsletter that begins with ‘In a 1950 paper, British mathematician Alan Turing posed the provocative question “Can machines think?” will catch my attention.
This week’s newsletter explores the Electric Vehicle Winter. It’s really very good. (I’ve reached out to the Information to see if I can share a public link to the newsletter. Fingers crossed—but I doubt its possible.)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-electric-is-that-chill-in-the-air-ev-winter
Exponential View / via LinkedIn
$100bn (cloud) baby
Amazon’s AWS (Amazon Web Services), the on-demand cloud services for companies (and governments), and me, contributes to 76% of all Amazon’s operating profits over the last decade. And it’s likely to grow even more as more companies and startups invest in AI, needing cloud services like AWS, Microsoft’s Azure and Google, to do the computation.
The cost of setting up your own massive GPU cluster is significant, but will Cloud Services continue to grow or will companies want to bring that sensitive LLM crunching in-house?
https://www.exponentialview.co/p/ev-459
The Information / Exclusive
We’re still on Monday morning for the Newsletter’s I’ve received.
Musk’s X is Flooded With Ad Spam—Stolen Credit Cards May Be Key
I thought this weird exclusive where stolen credit cards are generating a surge of ad spam on X was interesting. In particular (I write that a lot, don’t I?) where it indicates a future where misinformation could get a lot worse.
Three papers caught my eye in the Hugging Face Daily Papers email from AK.
K-Level Reasoning with Large Language Models
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.01521.pdf
Complex reasoning tasks.
TravelPlanner: A Benchmark for Real-World Planning with Language Agents.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.01622.pdf
Planning is a hallmark of human intelligence.
Specialized Language Models with Cheap Inference from Limited Domain Data.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.01622.pdf
This paper looks at the challenges to training LLMs and identifies four important metrics to consider in what decisions to make with the size of your budget. (Researchers from Apple.)
So this is what I read from my inbox before 09.30AM. And I’m going to stop here, otherwise I fear this will be a never-ending post. Perhaps I should be interested in less. Refine my parameters a little?
——
What’s the Future with Apple’s VisionPro?
Apple’s VisionPro was released to the public on Friday. Of all the reviews I watched, Casey had the best thing to say in his non-review, video of using it: “This is the future interface of all computing.” Which is a good point to make.
Watch the short, entertaining Neistat video here:
Marques Brownlee probably has the best reviews of the VisionPro if you’re looking for the nuts and bolts of the new technology.
——
Design Process is a Lie
I came across a talk by Shopify senior staff designer, Jose Torre, where he proposes that the design process is a lie because it doesn’t fit real life. There are some considerable flaws in his arguments, possibly from not fully understanding the epistemology of the design process or using the definition of linear as meaning a straight line, as opposed to sequential steps of progress. This is definitely something I’ll write about more in a little bit.
However, Torre is a very talented artist and has an interesting story of how he became a designer, from growing up in Portugal. His colourful and wonderful illustrations help tell his story and thesis. So I enjoyed the talk even as I disagreed with it. You can also read an essay on the point he’s making over on Medium:
https://ux.shopify.com/the-design-process-is-a-lie-465a7064a733
——
+1 Nick Lane: Electrical Origins of Life
There always has to be a plus one. This does not disappoint. I don’t know a lot about evolutionary biochemistry but I felt I did after this lecture. A fascinating, brilliant talk on the electrical origins of life. I think it’s partly because of Prof. Lane’s very clear and approachable way of discussing science. Which makes it very easy to visualize what he’s explaining.
This opened up a whole new subject for me to study and I’m really enjoying it.
——
Ok—so this is what happens when I don’t write reliably every week. Next week, it will probably be shorter. I think.