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Hello from the middle of May. 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…
I got some perfect hands in V4 and most definitely V5, but I also get bad hands in V6 too. I’m happy with what I’d say is a 95% success rate. I used to have to prompt
--no hands
, but now I never do. But I always, always count the number of fingers! I am often impressed that 6-finger hands appear to be amazingly anatomically correct, so good that I sometimes leave them in. But then, most of my images have ‘surrealism’ in the prompt, and I used to love my V3 images with 2 or 3 noses!
– Reddit user on the /midjourney subreddit, January 25, 2024. Quality assurance for surrealist creativity.
Whereas the strike of the typewriter’s keys forces the writer ever forward, character by character, line by line, WordStar’s intricate layers of push-button inputs allowed far more freedom and flexibility. So extensive were the combinations and permutations that MicroPro even provided a cardboard stencil of crib notes that could be fitted conveniently around a keyboard.
– Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, 2016. Thinking about the affordances of early word processors. (Forever fascinated by the office suite in all its permutations.) This is also how I found myself down the rabbit hole on Electric Pencil.
Early computer-vision pioneers took visual problems and translated them into math to solve. The young, Slovenian math nerd was mesmerized by the prospects of such technology, so much so that by the time the [computer vision] talk ended, Fidler knew she had found her calling. “It was love at first sight,” she said. “The fact that you could have something in mathematical form, but then see the results, something that human eyes could understand, and can get excited about, that just felt really nice to me.”
– Joe O’Connor, “Meet Nvidia’s Canadian Secret Weapon,” Financial Post, April 26, 2024—an in-depth profile of Sanja Fidler. Thanks to Naureen for sharing this. When Sanja shared the profile on LinkedIn, she mentioned that it all started with a cold email: “I typically don’t take interviews, but Joe O'Connor’s intro email was something else. It read like he knew me before we even sat down to chat.” Goals.
Most people value the small tuning work that they do to present a story around data. They don’t actually want the data to be shared with anyone at the company without their ability to interpret it for their audience.
– Merci Victoria Grace on X, May 9, 2024. I’m grateful that Merci openly shared these reflections on not finding product-market fit with her startup, Panobi. This observation in particular puts words to something I’ve long felt but never quite managed to put so clearly.
Acknowledging that a computer is actually a place for sticking Post-It notes (mine is surrounded by them), make the frame much bigger—give the conceit ‘desktop’ some real meaning. The problem with computers is that they exist too exclusively in the electronic domain: what you need is a transitional area round the edge.
– Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary, 1996. A sidenote: when visiting The Interval this week, I noticed that piece of Brian Eno artwork that hung over the bar has now been replaced by a mirror. A sad moment for me, since sitting at that bar and noticing a diamond-shaped artwork was what spurred me to seek out this book (one of my favorites) in the first place a few years ago.
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com