400: Microsoft Office's GPT-4 Copilot, TikTok Prisoner's Dilemma, Contagious Banks, Prestige Inflation, Midjourney V5, and The Offer
" it may seem dystopian to imagine AI-written emails"
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. –Leo Tolstoy
🎂🎉🥳 Four hundred editions. That feels like a lot!
I had an obvious joke for Edition #300 (click to see it), but I don’t know how to mark this one.
Let’s just have a thought experiment about it. I’ll call it ‘The Inside View of the Lindy Effect’. (interpreting it broadly to mean: The longer something has been around, the more likely it is to stick around. In other words, life expectancy for certain things is proportional to their age).
When I was writing Edition #1, it would have been impossible for me to imagine edition #400. But as I’m writing edition #400, it’s pretty easy for me to imagine Edition #800.
However, where my brain starts to lose the signal is around edition #2000. That feels kind of like how edition #400 felt as I was writing #1. So I guess that’s the event horizon for now… 🔭
🤷♂️🛀💭 I’ve had the same experience a few times recently, which has reminded me that I live in a very special kind of bubble.
I’m having a conversation with some friends, and I want to make a point using generative AI, so I ask them if they know what it is, “y’know, like StableDiffusion or Midjourney or DALL-E?” and I get a blank stare, “y’know, you just write some text and it creates an image for you”.
Nope, they’re not familiar with it.
These are smart people with advanced technical knowledge, very online people…
This shows once again that William Gibson was and is correct:
The future is already here, just not evenly distributed.
📝 💻 Episode 139 of the Cortex Podcast has a long segment about Obisidian (it’s the segment that starts 11:49min into it):
I think this may be a good introduction if you’re considering it, but are unsure and every time you start Googling around you find incredibly complex and esoteric stuff that scares you.
The Obsidian community can get pretty nerdy, but don’t let that stop you, the basic functionality isn’t hard to learn and the app is INCREDIBLY powerful and extensible (the ceiling on what you can do is sky high).
☃️🐞🏠🐞❄️ Has anyone else been finding ladybugs in their house throughout most of the winter..? At first it was cute, but now it's just kind of annoying.
🏦 💰 Liberty Capital 💳 💴
👀🖇️🤖 Microsoft expands Copilot brand to Office Suite
I guess they won’t call it Clippy 2.0 or ClippyGPT after all…
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