I make a lot of charts and I watch a lot of basketball. I am therefore obligated to link to this explanation of why line chart baselines do not need to start at zero, which uses some basketball statistics to make a compelling case. (ᔥWaxy.org)
🏀 From a 21-point lead in the second quarter to a 10-point loss to Orlando last night, and the Wizards are yet to win their 10th game after loosing 53. They should get a team therapist since their third-quarter meltdowns are purely psychological.
Prompt: “Give me an elevator pitch for a TV show called Stakeholders, a corporate dramedy with vampires.”
“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:
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.
A friend asked me this morning whether Apple Vision Pro is a good enough substitute for business class airplane tickets.
The short answer is: no, especially not on red-eye flights. It will never be able to substitute the ability to lay down flat and actually have a good night’s rest. The “no” is more qualified for daytime trips. If you weren’t planning on sleeping anyway, you would probably be able to do a lot more on your Mac with an AVP in economy than without one in first class. That qualified “no” turns into a qualified “yes” for shorter flights in business class — say, American coast-to-coast — where you don’t even have the option of laying down flat and even if you did there isn’t much time for sleep even on a red-eye.
Keep in mind that a cross-Atlantic business class ticket is more than twice the cost of an AVP, and once you spend the money on it it’s all gone. You get to keep the AVP, and even use it on land. Ben Thompson has made this point several times on Dithering, and even had an episode called Vision Pro on a Plane. He also noted that the number of people able to afford AVP but still regularly fly economy is small, but not zero. I can confirm, as I am one of those people: I have taken more flights in the first two months of this year than all of last year, and will take many more in the months to come, so the investment was worthwhile. Your own milage may vary.
P.S. I can confirm that you can charge AVP while in use. The battery seems to have been designed for that very purpose, since the UCB-C charging port is on the same side as the cable going to the headset so that you can have two cables on the same side of the battery while it’s in your pocket. And even economy seats have power outlets these days, unless it is a very short flight where battery life wouldn’t even be an issue.
P.P.S. A great thing about AVP is that it isn’t a large electronic device, so you don’t have to put it away during takeoff and landing. In fact, an interesting use case would be for people afraid of flying. I imagine the fear is elevated during takeoff and landing, and wouldn’t it be nice if they could watch a movie at Joshua Tree instead?
P.P.P.S. If you are to bring an AVP onto a plane for purposes of entertainment, one thing to remember is pre-downloading things you are going to watch. It is amazing that we can text and surf the web while flying, but in-flight internet is bad for anything else.
Happy Monday!
For your morning viewing pleasure: How Ireland & Scotland are ruining their housing markets (spoiler: by instituting rent control).
As bad as DC’s government is on crime, at least they know that they only way to combat homelessness and high rent is to increase supply. (↬Marginal Revolution)
🍿 The Holdovers (2023) shows that not making ‘em like we used to was a matter of choice not fate. Some people still have it in them to make beautifully shot, perfectly paced, subtly acted movies with a complex message. Here’s hoping it becomes a Christmas classic.
One very good use case for ChatGPT is… actually chatting. Who knew?
I was waiting for someone at a restaurant and had 10 minutes by myself — a rarity these days. Instead of scrolling through one social network timeline or the other, I opened up the ChatGPT iPhone app, and learned that the only Leonardo painting in the Western hemisphere was right at my doorstep. Also learned that there are only 20 paintings by Leonardo and more than 300 by Rembrandt, and a few other tidbits.
Are any of them true? Well, trust but verify as they say, but why should I trust it any less than a random X account? Or worse yet, a non-random threadboy — now there’s a useful word I saw just recently — who posts unsourced graphs and opinions-as-facts.
Now sure, X and other social networks have upsides, like bonding with fellow humans over topics of joint interest. But these are for the most part shallow connections, empty calories for our socialite stomachs. A more stable and sustainable equilibrium for most people, certainly for me, could be real-life interactions for socializing and algorithms for tickling the mind without any pretense that we would be buddies. Social networks try to be both but are not great at either, the same way pickup trucks try to be both a car and a truck but are mostly gas-guzzling parking spot-hogging behemoths, and at the same time the most popular vehicles in the US. So, a perfect analogy.
From this perspective, ChatGPT’s forgetfulness is an excellent feature. It remembering prior conversations would bring it a step closer towards parasocializing, making it even worse than human social networks. I have no doubt that the feature is coming any month now, if it’s not already here. If and when it comes will the the point when X/Threads/Bluesky et al should sound the alarm — or introduce friendly algorithms of their own.
🏀 “The Wizards lost their 13th straight game Thursday night and have the worst record in the NBA, but at least Jordan Poole scored a season-high 34 points against the Lakers.”
No comment, truly.