#79: Crypto out, AI in

I’m back from a break with things about crypto and, more excitedly, AI.

💎 Word gems

How Not to Play the Game (Bloomberg / Matt Levine)

Following the FTX collapse, this article feels like a damning postscript to crypto in 2022. Once again, crypto has come up short for having real use cases.

If the crypto project is going to work, that’s probably its best chance: to be more regulated, more grown-up, more like the regular financial system. All that stuff in the regular financial system, all the accretions of rules and customs and requirements, all the intermediaries and checking—it turns out all that was there for a reason. It can be fun to get away from it for a bit, to build a fantasy financial system without all those boring rules, but that’s just a game. In the long run, you want your system to work in real life.

The End of Organizing (Superorganizers / Dan Shipper)

In contrast to crypto, the ChatGPT launch took large language model AI from experiments to an actual product with practical uses. It’s still early  but this article describes what would be my dream AI product - one that can automatically catalogue and summarize everything I read.

[Large language Models] LLMs can enrich and write your notes for you. They can synthesize and write a report based on everything you’ve ever written about a topic, so you can load it into your brain without having to ever go back through your archive.

The End of Programming (Communications of the ACM / Matt Welsh)

In a similar vein to the article above, this one argues that AI will make writing programs obsolete. The statement is fictional at worst and premature at best, but nonetheless highlights ways AI will change how we work.

(Note: Any article that declares the end of something should be met with skepticism).

Programming will be obsolete. I believe the conventional idea of "writing a program" is headed for extinction, and indeed, for all but very specialized applications, most software, as we know it, will be replaced by AI systems that are trained rather than programmed. In situations where one needs a "simple" program (after all, not everything should require a model of hundreds of billions of parameters running on a cluster of GPUs), those programs will, themselves, be generated by an AI rather than coded by hand.

And lastly, the Bloomberg 2022 Jealousy List for a bunch more great articles from last year.

💩 Cool shit

Awesome ChatGPT Prompts - ChatGPT has truly exploded in the months since it launched, and here’s a collection of some ways to use it.

There’s an AI for That - One thing that has made AI stand out from other “web3” technology is the immediately obvious use cases. This collection of use cases feels like peering into possible near-term futures.

Playlist AI - Another example of how AI will become part of our lives. Create a playlist with prompts.

Webspaces - A tool to create and self-host 3D worlds built on HTML.

The most popular people names for dogs - Is your dog’s name more commonly human or dog?

Jazz.Computer - I’m not sure exactly how to describe this other than what it says it is: an “interactive song”. It’s wonderful

Tableau Public’s Viz Wrap - A collection of great data visualization dashboards.

I’m here - A site with a singular role.

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