Links

Think of me as a web crawler with taste.

ChatGPT as a Calculator for Words

The ChatGPT model is huge, but it’s not huge enough to retain every exact fact it’s encountered in its training set.

It can produce a convincing answer to anything, but that doesn’t mean it’s reflecting actual facts in its answers. You always have to stay skeptical and fact check what it tells you.

I like to think of language models like ChatGPT as a calculator for words.

This is reflected in their name: a “language model” implies that they are tools for working with language. That’s what they’ve been trained to do, and it’s language manipulation where they truly excel.

The post includes a list of language manipulations you can try.

New Instapaper Features

I might start working through my Instapaper queue in the car now that it supports CarPlay.

Editing titles on posts on mobile is something I’ve wanted for ages too, so that’s a win.

Unlocking Your Peak Performance

Sean Byrnes:

In fact, as a leader, there are often only a handful of key decisions that make the difference between success and failure. The challenge is not whether you can be at your best all the time, the challenge is whether you are at your best when you make those key decisions. Since we never know when those decisions will happen, we have to find a way to be ready for them at all times.

I rebuilt my schedule with some new rules:

  • Exercise is part of my job
  • Sleep is part of my job
  • Spending time with my family is part of my job

Why and How Culture Amp Retired Elm

Kevin Yank:

From time to time someone will ask, “Does Culture Amp still use Elm?” I’ll answer privately that no, we are no longer investing in Elm, and explain why. Invariably, they tell me my answer was super valuable, and that I should share it publicly. Until now, I haven’t.

A Mind Made of Silk

Joshua Sokol:

In February, Japyassú and Kevin Laland, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Saint Andrews, proposed a bold answer to the question. They argued in a review paper, published in the journal Animal Cognition, that a spider’s web is at least an adjustable part of its sensory apparatus, and at most an extension of the spider’s cognitive system.

Unclogging Your Decision Making Factory

Roger Martin:

The entire white-collar workforce of the modern company works in decision factories where they pump out decisions such as what and how much to produce, how to market and sell what is produced, what new things to consider producing and selling, where to sell what it produces, how to protect the IP behind what it produces, and so on.

If you had that as your conceptualization, you would naturally do things such as organize around decisions; measure output in terms of decisions; measure and work on enhancing the productivity of producing decisions; and so on. But companies don’t do any of the above because their conceptualization is of a coordination and control structure, not a decision factory.

How to Equip Your Team to Problem Solve Without You

Luis Velasquez and Kristin Gleitsman:

Leaders who model optimism set a positive tone in the workplace, empowering team members to recover from setbacks. If you want your team to navigate challenges independently, the worst thing you can do in the face of a setback is look for who to blame. Developing the organizational muscle to pull together to overcome setbacks is crucial. And while blame is not helpful, team retrospectives can help the team collectively get better at anticipating and avoiding similar setbacks in the future, creating a sense of shared accountability.

But What About the BAU Work?

Dan North:

tl;dr

  • Model and visualise your value chain.
  • Structure the people around the value chain.
  • Make all the demand visible, so there is no hidden work. This is key.
  • Identify work that will reduce drag and give you more discretionary capacity.
  • Decide what you want to invest in, and structure the people around that.
  • Repeat every quarter, which is long enough to get work done, and short enough to iterate.