A blog by Matt Webb. My notebook and space for thinking out loud since February 2000.
1. My favourite translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Wikipedia) - 1,000 year old Persian poetry - is by Robert Graves from 1967. Graves, it turns out, unknowingly based his translations on hoax sources. Which might not have gone down so badly, except that he used the his publication and the miraculous “discovery” of the sources to very publicly and with disproportionate viciousness put the…
The best way to prevent a rogue AGI from processing the Earth into maximum paperclips is to unleash a second AGI that will work to stop it. The problem of ensuring that an AGI doesn’t mulch everything into paperclips by mistake is called alignment. AGI = artificial general intelligence, an AI that exceeds human capability. Alignment = “do what I mean not what I say,” e.g. the instruction “ make as…
Hey, if you have a Poem/1 then can I ask you to do a manual firmware update? It’ll take just a few minutes and I built a special firmware update tool to make it easy. (That is an actual AI clock on my actual bookshelf in my actual house.) Why? Three reasons… No more stopped clocks. These clocks are way better at recovering from intermittent network faults like the Wi-Fi dropping or the back-end…
My perfect podcast app would be a long phone call in which I listen to the show and can also talk back to remember things. (Someone build this for me.) It would immeasurably improve my running. Long story short, I added slow runs into the training mix, and had to switch from high tempo music to podcasts because I kept going too fast. BUT genuinely interesting podcasts are a problem because I keep…
I watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off which was as great as I remember. It has an age rating of PG-13 in the US and 15 in the UK for bad language and some kissing. (There is also lying to parents but apparently that doesn’t count.) This seems absurd. I have way less problem with some light cursing/petting than films that are ostensibly for kids like cartoons and superhero movies that treat mass…
I wonder how you would design a really single-minded voice UI? Like, voice interfaces are really good now because of AI. But they’re so unbounded. If you’re having a voice interaction with a computer or with a device, you could end up having a conversation about anything. And while a voice UI is great within a domain, do you really want to be gossiping about movies or having a psychotherapy…
I went into my kid’s school a couple months back and spoke to the year group about manufacturing. Honestly it was the most rewarding speaking gig I’ve done all year. It was about the process of making my AI clock and I have a ton of pics from my factory visit to Shenzhen (mostly pics that I have only shared with Kickstarter backers). I talked about where ideas come from and the value of playing…
1. It’s hot in London so I’ve been seeing a lot of handheld portable fans, usually with a strap so you can hang it round your neck. My faves are the ones with thermoelectric coolers in the middle of the fan: a small plate that is so cold that it is covered with icy condensation. It’s the Peltier effect (the plate is really hot on the back) and the first time I’ve seen a thermoelectric cooler in…