Hello from the other side of a weekend spent listening to The Tortured Poets Department. I’m Diana Kimball Berlin, a partner at Matrix leading concept through Series A rounds in B2B SaaS and AI startups. Here are five fragments that stuck with me last week…
How to more consistently express emotions? I’ve read the docs on this where is says to state the emotion at the end like this: “He stapled his sack to the ceiling!”, he said angrily. But it seems to almost never work in practice. I can generate the same sentence a dozen times fiddling with the settings and it's like a low random chance the AI will use the stated emotion.
– Reddit user on the Eleven Labs subreddit, April 18, 2024. It struck me that “How to more consistently express emotions?” could easily be a question on a personal growth forum, as well, but here it’s about how to get an AI-generated voice to sound a certain way.
The idea of writing was still entangled with the idea of speaking.…Every user of this technology was a novice. Those composing formal legal documents, such as charters and deeds, often felt the need to express their sensation of speaking to an invisible audience: “Oh! all ye who shall have heard this and have seen!” (They found it awkward to keep tenses straight, like voicemail novices leaving their first messages circa 1980.) Many charters ended with the word “Goodbye.” Before writing could feel natural in itself—could become second nature—these echoes of voices had to fade away.
– James Gleick, The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, March 6, 2012. (Speaking of voices.) I’ll never forget reading this book in my dusty sublet under the heavy heat of a New York City summer the year I interned at Kickstarter.
Shortly after beginning your adventure in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, you will gain some powers through your ghostly hand. With this, you can manipulate objects around you and create some truly fabulous vehicles. At first, you might find it difficult to make a vehicle that's both cool and practical.
– Jacqueline Zalace, “The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom – Beginners Guide To Building Vehicles.” Thinking about “build mode” across contexts. And what’s true in TOTK is true in startups as well—it’s tough to make things that are both cool and practical.
You don’t build the life you want by saving time. You build the life you want, and then time saves itself.
– Laura Vanderkam, I Know How She Does It, June 9, 2015. Build mode for life.
In the family tree of professions, submarine cable work occupies a lonely branch somewhere between heavy construction and neurosurgery. It’s precision engineering on a shifting sea using heavy metal hooks and high-tension lines that, if they snap, can cut a person in half.
– Josh Dzieza, “The Cloud Under the Sea,” The Verge, April 16, 2024. This piece was fascinating, and I like the idea of a “family tree of professions.” Where would being a founder sit?
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com
p.s. Congrats to my friend Cate on the launch of her first book, The Engineering Leader! An instant download for me.