Jim Willis

Category: Notes

  • Read: 269 / ’Tis the Season… For Tending to the Inner Garden of the Soul

    A question worth asking: ‘What does it mean that the earth is so beautiful? And what shall I do about it? What is the gift that I should bring to the world? What is the life that I should live?’ – from Mary Oliver’s *Long Life*. Source: 269 / ’Tis the Season… For Tending to…

  • Read: The Inside Story of Microsoft’s Partnership With OpenAI

    This article offers a comprehensive exploration of the collaboration between Microsoft and OpenAI, delving into the factors driving this partnership and its implications. Key insights include: I couldn’t put this piece down, in part because it helped me crystalize my understanding of MS’s vision for Copilot. Copilot will be both an enormous shift in how…

  • Read: A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft

    I’m becoming more and more convinced that the people who are most well-positioned to leverage GenAI in its current form are those who are skilled at precise language. When you think about programming languages like Perl, Python or PHP, they’re really just language that is trying to communicate something without ambiguity to a computer. Prompting…

  • Read: “We Are All Socialists in Our Private Lives”

    > If a monkey hoarded more bananas than it could eat, while most of the other monkeys starved, scientists would study that monkey to figure out what the heck was wrong with it. When humans do it, we put them on the cover of Forbes. *Source: Nathalie Robin Justice Gravel on X* We evolved *because*…

  • Read: Overconsumption Is Killing the Planet. What Can We Do?

    During the 1960s, for example, the average American person bought fewer than 25 garments every year. Fast forward 60 years, they’re purchasing nearly 70 pieces of clothing annually, or more than one new item per week. Source: Overconsumption Is Killing the Planet. What Can We Do? – Richa Syal

  • Read: Being a Humanist Technologist

    A *humanist technologist*, then, is someone who uses multidisciplinary skills to help organizations use or understand technology in order to improve personal and social conditions. Don’t get me wrong: I can code productively, and have built entire companies by doing so. But I’m not motivated by the code or the fundamental problems themselves. My motivation…

  • Read: What’s This for You Feed? Is It Algorithmic?

    When you subscribe to a Smart List, all the posts from the accounts on that list will show up at the top of your screen, as a feed. That’s the “firehose”, nothing removed. By default, Smart Lists you subscribe to also show up in your For You feed. In For You, we only show the…

  • Read: ChatGPT Turns One: How OpenAI’s AI Chatbot Changed Tech Forever – The Verge

    We don’t know yet if AI will ultimately change the world the way the internet, social media, and the smartphone did. Those things weren’t just technological leaps — they actually reorganized our lives in fundamental and irreversible ways. If the final form of AI is “my computer writes some of my emails for me,” AI…

  • Read: What A.I. Means for Buddhism

    He gives an example: “Pretend you’re driving and you’re late to a doctor’s appointment. You start whipping through traffic so that you can get there faster. Your sense of self is defined as ‘you contained within the car.’ When you need to get somewhere fast, it’s easy to behave selfishly, but driving is an inherently…

  • Reading Notes for 2023-12-08

    From: The Imperfectionist: You Can’t Hoard Life – Oliver Burkeman Spending your days trying to get experiences “under your belt”, in an effort to maximise your collection of experiences, or to feel more confident about the future supply of similar experiences, means placing yourself in a position from which you can never enjoy them fully,…