Charlie Williams
@pontifc8.bsky.social
Professor at Bocconi University in Milan. Amiable dabbler posting about business research, business education, strategy execution, human impact of business, and maybe a few other things.
SEO slop was sinking search well before AI results.
tweety fish@sifu.tweety.fish · 3mo agothis isn't a point I make that much because I think it could be seen as excusing or justifying google and, you know, fuck em, not my job. but the idea that search was working well right before all the gemini bullshit got added is bafflingly ahistorical. they were losing the SEO war badly.
A commenter notes that "Trump managed to be both Hitler and Chamberlain in the same negotiation. An unprecedented feat." 😭
How does nonverbal expression affect success in crowdfunding pitches? Does this vary between men and women? Do these differences provide hints to why women do better in crowdfunding than in traditional entrepreneurial fundraising?
Finally, dungeon crawler Carl and Princess Donut get the @lauramille.bsky.social treatment in Slate. I resisted recommendations for this ridiculous "LitRPG" series for quite a while, and I'm still wrestling with why I love it so much. slate.com/culture/2026...
The Unlikely Hit That’s Popularizing a Whole New Type of Novel
Like many, I never thought I’d become a fan of this bizarre series, but here we are.
slate.com
"And perhaps the greatest myth of all is that Greenland was ever truly conquered. It remains, even now, a place that humbles empires, silences explorers, and outlasts expectations. It is not a relic or a ruin. It is a force," Erik Mikkal Thorsen, Greenland Uncovered
The rate of global mean sea level rise has increased from ~2.1 mm/year in 1993 to ~4.5 mm/year in 2023. www.nature.com/articles/s43...
The rate of global sea level rise doubled during the past three decades - Communications Earth & Environment
Global mean sea level rise amounted to 4.5 mm per year as a result of warming oceans and melting land ice, more than twice the rate of 2.1 mm/year observed at the start of satellite data in 1993, base...
nature.com
tldr: it all comes down to Baumol’s disease plus rising opportunity costs of family work. www.ft.com/content/3fa9... Why Americans are feeling poorer even though they’re not
Why Americans are feeling poorer even though they’re not
Essential services cost more because people are better off
ft.com
I just finished Moby Dick. The last 25-30 chapters are a rip-roaring yarn. What elevates it to “classic” experience is the relief of getting through the first 100 chapters of whale trivia and ship gossip.
I just finished Moby Dick. The last 25-30 chapters are a rip-roaring yarn. What elevates it to classic is the sheer relief of getting through the first 100 chapters of whale trivia and ship gossip.
They should put in auctions where you bid to recline while the person behind bids to prevent reclining. To the winner go the spoils.
“We found over 35 cases in which the judges have specifically said what the government is providing…false information. It might be intentionally false information, including false sworn declarations time and again," says Ryan Goodman, law professor at New York University.
Oh, Europe. Self-parody is so 2018.
Manuel Müller@manuelmueller.foederalist.eu · 10mo agoIn short, you can call it a "hamburger" if it contains meat rather than ham, because everyone knows what a hamburger is; but you can't call it a "veggie burger" if it is veggie-based, because that would be confusing. 🙃
How causality ate the world. I don’t see how causality is the key issue in psychology research, most of which is based on RCTs. Replicability crisis, yes a big issue. Generalizability out of the lab, yes. But causality? That hardly seems to be the crux.
Julia M. Rohrer@dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 10mo agoHappy to announce that I'll give a talk on how we can make rigorous causal inference more mainstream 📈 You can sign up for the Zoom link here: tinyurl.com/CIIG-JuliaRo...
[writing the constitution] Benjamin Franklin: Write down "no dumb fucks as president" Alexander Hamilton: Stop saying that Benjamin Franklin: I'm tellin' you. You're gonna regret not writing that down
“Technology will just get better” idk but I liked the Internet better 25 years ago
The renewable energy transition goes very slowly, then all at once
How did the hype get so far ahead of reality?
Thomas Fuchs@thomasfuchs.at · last yr.The relationship of AI to sentience is like the one of homeopathy to real medicine.
It’s time for scientists to publicize the research that is being cancelled. Enough silence in hopes of evading the axe! Disease communities (and others) are organized & can be activated!
Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · last yr.How is this not impeachable? No other president ever would been allowed such a transparent and harmful vendetta. /imagine being such an asshole you make me side with Harvard
Large Language Models and their associated businesses are a $50 billion industry masquerading as a trillion-dollar panacea for a tech industry that’s lost the plot. The tech and business media must change their ways, or risk repeating these cycles forever. www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/
It is now actively illogical to act as if generative AI is a real movement. Analyst Josh Beck said last week that Amazon will only make *$5bn* from AI in 2025 - after spending $105bn in capex. And they're pulling back on data centers too. This isn't a revolution! www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/
![Oh, shit! A report from Wells Fargo analysts (called "Data Centers: AWS Goes on Pause") says that Amazon has "paused a portion of its leasing discussions on the colocation side...[and while] it's not clear the magnitude of the pause...the positioning is similar to what [analysts have] heard recently from Microsoft, [that] they are digesting aggressive recent lease-up deals...pulling back from a pipeline of LOIs or SOQs."
Some asshole is going to say "LOIs and SOQs aren't a big deal," but they are. I wrote about it here.
"Digesting" in this case refers to when hyperscalers sit with their current capacity for a minute, and Wells Fargo adds that these periods typically last 6-12 months, though can be much shorter. It's not obvious how much capacity Amazon is walking away from, but they are walking away from capacity. It's happening.
But what if it wasn't just Amazon? Another report from friend of the newsletter (read: people I email occasionally asking for a PDF) analyst TD Cowen put out a report last week that, while titled in a way that suggested there wasn't a pull back, actually said there was.
Let's take a look at one damning quote:
...relative to the hyperscale demand backdrop at PTC, hyperscale demand has moderated a bit (driven by the Microsoft pullback and to a lesser extent Amazon, discussed below), particularly in Europe, 2) there has been a broader moderation in the urgency and speed with which the hyperscalers are looking to take down capacity, and 3) the number of large deals (i.e. +400MW deals) in the market appears to have moderated.
In plain English, this means "demand has come down, there's less urgency in building this stuff, and the market is slowing down. Cowen also added that it "...observed a moderation in the exuberance around the outlook for hyperscale demand which characterized the market this time last year."
Brother, isn't this meant to be the next big thing? We need more exuberance! Not less!](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:qc6xzgctorfsm35w6i3vdebx/bafkreig6slvxsazwqancvj7fkcj4qcg46n3t256dlhyohzhvp7mrtirtoa)
Mark Halperin hasn't seen a "clever and invigorating joke" since the 2004 presidential election cycle.
NYTimes: affirmative action for mediocre editors angry at MeToo@originalist.bsky.social · last yr.Rufo: "these chats as a good investment of my time to radicalize tech elites who I thought were the most likely and high-impact new coalition partners for the right." "Andreessen in 2022 asked @RichardHanania to set up a group with smart conservatives, where Hanania saw Andreessen radicalize"
We are definitely at peak market moment for “Andreesen seems brilliant for spending 20 hours a day on signal chats.” Gonna be a fast slide from here - joining Elon in the heap at the bottom.
Dave Karpf@davekarpf.bsky.social · last yr.I guess I just think anyone who says stuff like "The groupchats are the memetic upstream of mainstream opinion" should be stuffed in a locker and never let out. These groupchats are only powerful because of the sheer concentration of wealth. Your crowd isn't brilliant or clever. You're just rich.
This is a good rundown of some research about how AI thinks. Big bags of heuristics do not “generalize” to new problems very well. AGI may be much farther away than industry leaders claim. www.wsj.com/tech/ai/how-...
We Now Know How AI ‘Thinks’—and It’s Barely Thinking at All
The vast ‘brains’ of artificial intelligence models can memorize endless lists of rules. That’s useful, but not how humans solve problems.
wsj.com
Cool graph. If you had asked me, I would not have correctly predicted that the slope was steepest for Latin America
Powerful. But not “intelligent.” A transformative technology. But not going to replace all human & organizational intelligence in a matter of years. We’re like the 18th C audiences mesmerized by batteries attached to twitching frog legs thinking the font of life had been discovered.
Emily M. Bender@emilymbender.bsky.social · last yr.LLMs are nothing more than models of the distribution of the word forms in their training data, with weights modified by post-training to produce somewhat different distributions. Unless your use case requires a model of a distribution of word forms in text, indeed, they suck and aren't useful.