Stuff I Find
The little things
Hi all,
1.One of my favourite AI writers, Ethan Mollick, has written an excellent article in this week’s Economist on the mistakes companies are making with AI adoption (I’ve copied the article here so everyone can read it). Essentially he says treating AI like any other technology by giving it to your IT department (as he says, people who would sleep better if they could take away your keyboards) is like ‘receiving a mysterious alien artefact and immediately using it as a paperweight’. What organisations (and I would say, individuals) should be asking is ‘what does it mean to rebuild an organisation around the fact that a single programmer can now write a hundred times more code? What new products become possible? What new markets open up?’. I would also add, what does it mean if everyone can now code for themselves. What should you do with that empowerment? All good questions and more latent potential than you can shake a stick at.
2.I’ve started to re-watch one of my favourite TV series, Billions, this week. Looking over my newsletter archives I’m surprised to see I’ve not mentioned it before. Billions revolves around the adversarial lives of Bobby Axelrod, a billionaire hedge fund trader, and his legal nemesis, Chuck Rhoades. Initially it was a little ho hum with Chuck going after ‘Axe’ for insider trading, but over the series’ seven seasons it developed and expanded to include a wide range of characters on both sides, introducing another billionaire, Mike Prince later in the show. That hedge fund world is far too complex in the actual transactions and operations for us muggles to understand, but the show does a great job of building the drama and giving all of the characters full lives and scope rather than just focusing on the two principles. One of the pivotal characters, for instance, is Wendy Rhoades, Chuck’s wife, and Axe’s performance coach, who straddles the two worlds and not always cleanly. Anyway, it’s a great show, and a window into the lives of such people should you ever be curious!
3.This week I completed the installation of a new Wifi system in our house. I realise this isn’t the most inspiring of sentences, but I discovered that my internet provider was doing it’s job with a firehose-like connection to the house with blistering internet speed and capacity, but my little wifi router wasn’t able to deal with the 25-30 devices that was asking for a signal, including streaming and gaming and all sorts of other high bandwidth calls for its attention. I won’t bother you with ALL the details, but of course, I had a chat with ChatGPT about my setup and it recommended a system from TP-Link called EAP610. It’s a setup which is aimed at small businesses and finally delivers on the idea of multiple wifi devices which a user can roam throughout the house without having to manually change to the strongest signal. Plus it’s able to easily deal with my number of devices. Of course, no one in the family noticed any difference but we no longer see that wheel or beach ball indicating a wifi download issue, and we can take advantage of the internet firehose speeds connected to the house rather than being the victim of the system’s narrowest pipe. It’s these little things that make all the difference.
Look after yourself,
Ben