394: Jerry Seinfeld, YouTube + AI & Podcasting, Rivian, F-150 EV, Self-Deterrence, Sauna Science, Sign Language AI, NSA, and MarioGPT

"The pool of ideas is not static, it replenishes itself"

The earlier the warning, the less we know. —Zeynep Tufekci

🛑✋🙈💡🪫 Here’s an easy way to self-deter from starting a big new project, at least if you’re wired anything like me.

It’s a trap, and I want to tell you about it so that you avoid it.

It goes something like this:

• You’re considering starting something pretty big and open-ended

• You start projecting yourself forward, imagining yourself doing the thing, but you run out of steam at 7 or 12 potential ideas… 🤔😔

• You convince yourself that it’s not worth starting because you don’t have enough material, too few good ideas, and you’ll surely run out of things to say or do

The trap is underestimating how many new ideas will be generated by doing something, creating, or even just the passage of time.

The pool of ideas is not static, it replenishes itself, and you can make that process faster by figuring out your favored creative inputs (reading a lot? walks in the woods? talking to interesting people? learning about new things? quiet time alone?)

When I started this newsletter as a hobby back in the Paleoarchean era, I had a few ideas I wanted to write about, but I was sure I’d rapidly run out and it’d just fizzle out because at the time I couldn’t see past those ideas.

Sometimes you can’t see what’s on the other side of the hill, but you have to trust that there’s something there.

Somehow, the cup kept refilling itself 🍵, and the more I created, wrote, and recorded, the more stuff I had to say.

These days, my note file for ideas is growing faster than it shrinks, so there are lots of things I’ll never be able to get to.

Funny that when you think the problem may be famine, it’s actually overabundance!

But it still requires that early leap of faith, because nothing can guarantee that the ideas will keep coming. You just gotta go for it!

🥶 🤖 Will there be a chilling effect from A.I. chatbots with perfect memory?

In a legal context, a chilling effect is “the inhibition or discouragement of the legitimate exercise of natural and legal rights by the threat of legal sanction.”

Taken more broadly, it can mean that the mere threat of something bad is enough for people to restrain themselves and act in a certain, or not say certain things.

It’s insidious because unlike actions taken to silence someone or stop them from doing something, this self-censorship is mostly invisible.

Well, what if chatbots with personality — like Sydney — become more and more common and useful, and they have access to the internet and their own logs of all past conversations (so that people can have ongoing and evolving “relationships” with them).

If you are unfriendly to the bot in some way, maybe just to test its limits or to have fun or accidentally, are you then stuck with that “reputation” with the machine forever?

Maybe it’s not too bad if you use an alias, but if it’s under your real name (the way that many articles about Ben Thompson and Kevin Roose’s interactions with Sydney are now forever in the AI’s training data), how can you get away from it?

Is there a right to be forgotten? To be... forgiven by machines (?!)

Will that dynamic make people behave differently with these perfect-recall AIs?

What about when these chatbots can easily identify people even when they are using an alias?

I can imagine doing it through statistical analysis of the way they write and finding that fingerprint online (with a long enough text, you can usually extract a ‘fingerprint’ of who wrote it. The longer you have, the more certainty—I’m sure that intelligence agencies already do this to identify some ‘anonymous’ people)?

☁️☁️☁️🤕 I’m beginning to suspect that overcast days may be a trigger for my migraines, which are thankfully pretty rare, but I would prefer them to be even rarer…

I’ve noticed this especially during the winter, when the snow reflects a lot of light to begin with.

I need to look into whether this has been studied and what can be done about it.

When sitting at my desk, I’m right in front of a big window, which is great most days. Maybe I need to preemptively draw the curtains on overcast days and see if that helps..? Wear sunglasses indoors (😎)? 🤔

👦🏻👦🏻 🎂🎂🗓️ There will not be an Edition on Monday, March 6th.

Both my boys have birthdays a week apart, and we are having family come over this weekend to celebrate. My parents are staying over a few days, and I do not anticipate having much time to write.

I’m also planning a fun project with my father 👨🏻‍🔧, who is knowledgeable about this kind of thing:

We’re going to try to figure out the best way to route a fiber optic cable through my basement’s ceiling all the way to my garage, where I’d like to put a router, and then maybe find a way to get a 10-gigabit ethernet cable up to the attic and then back down to my office.

Trying to upgrade my internet connection without doing too much damage to our freshly painted walls!

See you Wednesday, have a great weekend! Learn something new, create something!

---

🏦 💰 Liberty Capital 💳 💴

✂️ Keeping Big Tech layoffs in perspective 📊