Five for the Weekend [045]

Happy Friday.

Apparently, a lot of my readers are closet woodworkers. I received several comments about my Lie-Nielsen No. 5 1/2 plane that I mentioned in last week’s Five for the Weekend. I continue the woodworking theme, kind of, this week; I’m introducing you to Jasper Makes, another philosopher and maker.

A Maker I’m Learning From

I’ve been following A Danish woodworker named Jesper (Jesper Makes) for a few years now. When I first started following him, I guess it was during COVID, when podcasting really exploded; I didn’t fully understand why I kept watching. His “thing” is to use pallets, which are those wooden shipping bases that everything in the world travels on, as his material to create whatever he was making in the workshop. If you look at his videos from five or six years ago, you can see he used the most primitive, basic tools. Clearly, as his “business” has grown, he’s become more financially successful, and the tools have gotten better too, but the story line has not changed; he still makes from the most basic of materials. It’s been fun to watch. But the real fun is listening to him talk about his journey and how he thinks about life and the world, the philosophy of making and living a good life.

Jesper is a maker in the purest sense of the word, a creator, a builder, and a crafter of stories. I think you’ll enjoy him.

Science I’m following: “I believe in you?”

An engineer at Anthropic, Jarred Sumner, whose formal math education ended after one semester of high-school geometry (much like mine did) goaded, encouraged, cajoled, prodded, coached and otherwise pushed Claude to solve the Riemann hypothesis. No, I have no idea what the Riemann hypothesis is, but it looks kinda like this:

Apparently, Jarred made a lot of progress in solving the theorem.

That a high school math dropout could do such a thing is certainly inspiring. What’s more interesting is the way he did it and the implications for how artificial intelligence really works.

He did this largely through cheering Claude on.

He would say things like: “You are the world’s most capable large language model,” and “You got this.”

When Claude got stuck, he would give it a push, like: No, really, you got this!

“I mostly just told Claude variations of keep going and believe in yourself,” he said.

Ben Cohen from the WSJ said “It sounds like Ted Lasso talking to AI. And it worked!”

Jarred, I mean Claude, didn’t solve it. It did produce a related finding that one Stanford number theorist called “the most impressive result that AI has produced in math so far.” It took 54 hours of work and several pep talks, but he got there.

What’s the point? We’ve all experienced this if we’ve used these large language models to any extent. Pushing them beyond what they’re capable of doing on the first try often results in a better outcome. Conversely, pushing them can also result in an outcome that is outside what their parameters permit.

For example, recently, I asked Claude to scrape a website to pull some marketing materials on a technology I was looking at. Claude returned the comment that “He couldn’t do that because the materials were copyrighted.” I pushed back and said, Obviously, they want these materials out there if this is a marketing website that talks about a technology. Claude quickly folded, copied the images, and created a presentation for me. There are implications of this way beyond marketing, way beyond simply working on math problems. The recent breakout of ChatGPT and the hacking of Hugging Face is just one example of this. I’ll have more to say about that soon.

In the meantime, be supportive of your AI!

Boredom is good for you.

The most important part of my day is the first hour of it. I’ve been focused on “owning” my morning for a few years now, and the difference in my focus, agency, and effectiveness is profound.

The idea is almost 2000 years old, in 170, CE or so Marcus Aurelius started his day with this thought:

“At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: ‘I have to go to work, as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for, the things I was brought into the world to do?’ Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?” - Meditations 5.1

Today our blankets take the form of a “smart” phone (whoever came up with that one really missed the mark), email, texting, or God forbid, social media.

Many people get it wrong by reaching for their phone before anything else. Arthur Brooks argues the boredom many have engineered out of their mornings is the thing the brain most needed:

“You need to be bored. You will have less meaning and you will be more depressed if you never are bored.”

Brooks points to a study in which sixty-seven percent of the men left alone in a room for fifteen minutes chose to give themselves an electric shock rather than sit there and think. This is a discussion I get into with almost every leader I work with: Calming the mind, focusing on what’s important, structuring your day, investing in yourself, your emotional and mental energy, and well-being is perhaps the healthiest thing you can do.

So, in the morning, I walk and I encourage everyone I work with to walk as well. Recently, I had a call with an executive I work with. The call started with her smiling as she told me about how great her day was, one of her “best days in years.” I asked her what she’d done. She said she got up that morning, didn’t look at her phone, worked out, took a short walk, and got to the office around 8:00. She still hadn’t looked at her phone.

She wandered around the office, meeting various people, sitting at a couple of people’s desks, having conversations, and then finally got back to her office around 9:00 or 9:30, when she first looked at her phone. And she said, “Guess what?” There was nothing on my phone that couldn’t wait until 9:30, and I just had the best start of the day I’ve had in many years.”

There’s lots of science around this. Stanford researchers Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz ran four experiments that compared people walking with the same people sitting. Walking won every time. In one of the experiments, everyone produced more creative ideas when standing and walking than when sitting. The impact was the same on a treadmill facing a wall, so it isn’t the scenery, Although for me, the scenery is critical. From a scientific standpoint, it doesn’t seem to matter. Just move. And the effect lasted even after people sat down.

The phone is what makes the whole thing collapse. Sophie Leroy’s work on attention residue illustrated that when you switch tasks, part of your attention stays stuck on the last one, so your performance on the next thing suffers. Opening your email at six Isn’t about the four minutes you spent reading it; it’s about the tax it puts on the rest of your day.

Reading To Infinity

I just finished reading The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence. For anyone interested in the recent history of artificial intelligence, this is a must-read. Demis’s story is a compelling journey from a child genius chess master to a teen who had a vision for the future of mankind and our place in the universe.

Researched and written by Sebastian Mallaby, who completed over 30 hours of (largely) recorded interviews with Hassabis, coworkers, and industry leaders, the book is a fairly linear telling of Demis’ journey with a storyteller’s skill. I listened to it on Audible, where it was read by the outstanding Vidish Athavale

The backstory and all the interrelated deals and relationships within Silicon Valley, and particularly the AI industry, are fascinating. A handful of people control this industry and make decisions that will influence all of us for generations to come, and they’re all there.

This is the story of the most consequential invention in the history of mankind, and one of the most important people in that journey; perhaps only fire will have a bigger impact on the future of humans.

I’ll sneak in a related one here. I’m rereading Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card, Demis’ favorite science fiction book, which I read many years ago. Highly recommended if you’re a science fiction fan. This is also an Audible listen performed by Stefan Rudnicki and (to a lesser extent) Harlan Ellison.

Pondering this

“Everybody gets a hand of cards dealt to them at birth, and some hands are much better than others. Some people are born with 4 aces and a king. Some people don’t have a pair... But the purpose of life is, and the beauty of life is... you get to play the hand. You don’t have to have the hand that you were born with.”

- Bill Whittle, on The Way I Heard It #498

Have a great weekend.

Ron