Lex Fridman's recent interview with Brendan Eich reminded me of Flash, which seemed relevant to my recent writing about inventing new software materials and laws of physics when designing interfaces. I've heard Flash, especially the interactive animation editor, praised so often for its interface innovations/interface metaphors. I should look into it more.
I think I would pay up to $20/mo for a service that would take a Twitter handle or email address of a stranger, and based on some cursory Google searches and Internet sleuthing, gave me a few-paragraphs summary of who that person is, and why they might (or might not) be interesting. I have some friends who are very good at this, but it strikes me as the kind of thing that may not be too difficult to automate and scale with language models.
Our brains (visual systems, language centers, etc.) are capable of perceiving, internalizing, and thinking in terms of a vastly larger set of primitives than we currently use them for, and we probably give them credit for.
Having a Twitter presence is like living in the SF Bay Area — great for bootstrapping a network and reputation, but once you have that set, probably not necessary, and fine to move away given all the downsides.
Question to think about, from the Interact retreat:
What are the most likely organizational (institutional), cultural, and IP regimes under which a given kind of invention or innovation is most likely to be created and succeed?
It seems like people in Silicon Valley have assumed that the answer is "a venture-backed company" more than it is the answer in reality. But PC also posits that companies are underrated as a large-scale long-term changemaking instrument because of its unique autonomy, not beholden to few investors but to changeable customers.
I blocked Twitter from my computer and now I have to talk to real humans when I'm bored instead of throwing screenshots into the void for vibes and it's annoying.
Starting to think a research residency role at an applied AI research lab would be an interesting way to structure + continue my work on notational intelligence and knowledge representation. Here are two that stand out:
Nothing like feeling like your stated career ambitions are too ambitious, and then running into someone whose project description is like "yeah, that's one of many points in the infinite parameter space of ideas we're exploring."
The Internet is great.