Analogy of the Week Award goes to Eric Levitz of Vox:

In our conversation, Przybylski said he doubted that using social media shortens people’s attention spans. To me, this is a bit like doubting that chewing broken glass causes oral discomfort. And I imagine most of my fellow heavy X users would agree.

Though not as big of an X user as I used to be, I, too, agree.

Jonathan Haidt’s interview with Tyler Cowen was excruciating and my opinion of Tyler deteriorated significantly, but it was the push I needed to order Haidt’s new book. I thought I’d skip it because we were already in perfect agreement but I’ll make sure to turn on my confirmation bias shields.

Google is in trouble and I am not surprised at all that they are looking at a paid subscription model for a new kind of search:

Google began testing an experimental AI-powered search service in May last year, presenting more detailed answers to queries while also continuing to present users with links to further information and advertising. However, it has been slow to add any of the features from what it calls its “Search Generative Experience” experiment to its main search engine.

These kinds of search results, which include an “AI-powered snapshot”, are more costly for Google to serve up than its traditional responses because generative AI consumes a lot more computing resources. It has offered access to SGE to only a select few users, including some subscribers to its Google One bundle that offers benefits such as extra cloud storage for a monthly fee.

Just today ChatGPT 4 answered a basic question — how to do multivariate regression in Excel — with a response miles better than the SEO spam I got from an online search. Having abandoned Google more than a decade ago, I won’t shed any tears.

Both Ben Thompson and Jason Snell had reservations about Apple’s only immersive video to come out since Vision Pro came out. It is a 5-minute highlight reel of the Major League Soccer Cup and after seeing it myself I kind of disagree with both of them. The video is fine!

There are some limitations of the technology: you can’t have the camera panning around the pitch so you have to be in a fixed position, and a soccer pitch is so vast that there is no way to watch a game from the same spot while being close to the action, while at the same time being close to the action is the whole point of immersion. So, to square that circle Apple, or whomever they chose to produce the video, opted to cut to the most interesting bits of action from the most interesting spots.

I don’t know how much soccer Snell, Thompson and other Apple commentators have seen in their lives but I would wager that it’s not a lot. I am far from being a super-fan, but I’ve seen enough games to know where to look and the cuts in the video were fine — for those who know the game. Moving from spot to spot was logical and it was clear which games you were watching.

But what did Apple intend with this? To have an immersive video for the fans? Or was it a tech demo? Or maybe a vehicle to get more Apple whales — and let’s face it if you own an AVP you are an Apple whale no matter what you tell yourself — to get into MLS? They’re three different things with different tradeoffs and it seems like they went for the fans here first, but how many of them are there who also have a Vision Pro?

Now with basketball you actually can be close to the action and have a good overview of the game, and this is where everyone, fan or not, would probably prefer a single court-side position over quick cuts. So I hope Adam Silver is working on that. I don’t know or watch baseball, but I assume it’s somewhere in between basketball and soccer. At the only baseball game I ever watched I could clearly see every part of the field, I just didn’t know what was going on or where I should look.

The optimal version for every sport would of course be to have a choice between several spots around the court, pitch or field and I do hope we’ll get that for some of the upcoming NBA playoff games. I already have a League Pass and would happily pay extra for the experience.

Fantasy Flight is second only to Apple in how much money they got from me over the years, all thanks to the Arkham Horror card game. No regrets.

You can view an essay as you would an organism. There is the skeleton — a through-line going from paragraph to paragraph that forms a coherent message. Then there is the meat — mostly facts, one would hope, and at least one original opinion. And of course the connective tissue — turns of phrase and flourishes of style that bring it all together.

LLMs are good — occasionally brilliant — at this last component and serviceable if a bit pedestrian at the first, but the meat is all on you. (ᔥThis day’s portion)

Hah: U.S. Sues Apple, Accusing It of Maintaining an iPhone Monopoly.

I can only hope this is a case of an unfortunate headline, not the actual substance of the lawsuit. What would be next, suing BMW for maintaining a BMW monopoly?

The latest ATP members' special is their best one yet. It is called John’s Windows, it is about John Siracusa’s window management system, and it is one of those rare podcast episodes that are best viewed on YouTube. Easily worth the price of membership.

Prompt: “Give me an elevator pitch for a TV show called Stakeholders, a corporate dramedy with vampires.”

ChatGPT-4:

“Stakeholders” is a cutting-edge corporate dramedy that intertwines the cutthroat world of business with the dark, secretive existence of vampires, offering a unique twist on the workplace drama. In the bustling metropolis of New York City, a prestigious investment firm, Bloodline Capital, serves as the battleground for power, ambition, and survival. The catch? The firm is run by vampires who’ve been pulling the strings of the financial world for centuries. By day, they’re savvy business moguls navigating mergers, acquisitions, and corporate espionage. By night, they engage in a more primal struggle for dominance within the vampire hierarchy and their quest for the elixir that promises them daywalking abilities.

Our protagonist, a young, ambitious MBA graduate, unknowingly becomes embroiled in this supernatural corporate world after landing a dream job at Bloodline Capital. They must navigate the treacherous waters of vampire politics, corporate rivalry, and their own burgeoning vampiric powers after a fateful encounter. As alliances form and secrets are uncovered, they discover that in the world of vampires and venture capital, stakes are more than just a financial term—they’re a matter of survival.

“Stakeholders” blends dark humor with thrilling drama, exploring themes of power, identity, and the quest for immortality against the backdrop of the high-stakes corporate world. It’s ‘The Office’ meets ‘True Blood,’ where every negotiation has fangs and every boardroom battle is a fight for eternity. This show promises to captivate viewers with its witty dialogue, compelling characters, and a plot that twists and turns like a stock market chart on a volatile trading day.

I’d watch it.

Just last week, OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 saved me 4 hours of work. It is like having a not-too-bright but hardworking undergrad student who’s trying to impress you. So, trust but verify — which is good enough for me! In any case, it was more than worth the monthly subscription price.

However, for creating graphics, MidJourney is still miles better. I use it weekly for some podcast artwork and what it generates is miles better than the plastic-y, obviously AI-generated nonsense ChatGPT produces. See here for some examples of the latter, and this is not a comment on the newsletter itself which is quite good and would be even better were it not for the distracting visuals. Or maybe I just like my own prompts better and someone would think the same of the stuff I like?

Microsoft’s Copilot has so far been absolutely useless — a slightly less intrusive Clippy. Note that I only tried to use it in Word and Outlook, and its value in Excel and other more code-like environments may be higher. Copilot’s constraint to use only what’s in the document in which you are using it is particularly limiting, especially if you need it to fill some blank space. Having it be able to browse the internet would be nice, or at least create a collection of documents, NotebookLM-style, which it could access.

Speaking of NotebookLM, formerly known as Tailwind, I haven’t used it nearly as much as I expected I would. Having a 10-document limit for each collection is too constraining, so it never became my default place to ask questions. Now, if DEVONtechnologies built something like that into DEVONthink and was able to train an LLM on my document collection, I would probably use it first, then ChatGPT, and leave everything else for playing and experimentation.

And something I haven’t used yet but might is Claude 3, which some on X have said achieved AGI level which, really, no (see the last link for Tyler Cowen’s reasons why, with which I agree), but it does look quite good. Note, however, that even supposedly simpler LLMs like Kagi’s FastGPT gave me the “correct” answer to a question that’s in the is-this-an-AGI battery of tests while also being, well, faster.

So, my actual real-life use of generative AIs to date:

0. (doesn’t exist yet but would be great if it did) LLM trained on my DEVONthink database — let’s call it DEVONai
1. ChatGPT-4
2. MidJourney
3. FastGPT
4. …
5. NotebookLM

This is for matters of productivity only. As I wrote last week, LLMs have already received entertainment chatbot perfection and any further “improvement” on that end would be to our detriment.