Hello from the other side of a long weekend in California. I’m Diana Kimball Berlin, a partner at Matrix leading concept through Series A rounds in B2B SaaS and AI startups. If any friends of yours are building things you think I’ll be interested in, I’m at diana@matrix.vc.
A snapshot: I’m here at the office on a gray summer morning in San Francisco listening to II by Kiasmos, a new album Spotify thought I’d like. (Spotify was right.)
Here are five fragments that stuck with me last week…
The amount of humor Websim tends to unlock in LLMs is so fascinating to watch. Maybe it’s something about allowing them to create websites with extra flairs in addition to their text outputs?
– Kyrannio on Twitter/X, July 6, 2024. Quite interested in the community growing up around WebSim—thanks to Weiwei for the glimpses.
Most mechanisms are not fun. Good games come from a demanding selection process which works the other way around: first, find the fun. There’s no reason at all to believe that for any arbitrary abstract topic, one can always “find the fun” which implicitly teaches it.
– Andy Matuschak, “Exorcising us of the Primer,” July 1, 2024, about the long shadow of “The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer” from The Diamond Age. “I want to exorcise myself of the Primer. I want to clearly delineate what makes its vision so compelling—what I want to carry in my heart as a creative fuel. But I also want to sharply clarify the lessons we shouldn’t take from the Primer, and what it simply ignores. Then I want to reconstitute all that into something new, a vision I can use to drive my work forward.” I love the premise of this piece and want to see more like it: deep inquiry into specific sci-fi plot devices that have come to define the direction of entire fields.
It’s not typically in your interests as a data vendor to admit that building the best data tool isn’t enough, you also need to enforce social conventions around the use of the tool.
– Cedric Chin on Twitter/X, July 5, 2024. Generalizes to “the best tool isn’t enough, you also need social incentive design around the use of the tool.” Related: if you’re looking for a rich vein to mine in discovery calls with prospects, ask about the social dynamics of the recurring meeting you imagine your tool will be screenshared in and you’ll be off to the races.
Because I got to tag along on some of the reporting trips, I have personally experienced the strange architectural interiors of the global cold chain, including metal vats the size of missile silos, inside of which swirled vortices of discolored orange-juice concentrate, and limestone mines that have since been converted into underground vaults filled with frozen pizza.
– Geoff Manaugh, “Quantum Navigation, Books to Read, Ambient Music: Some recommendations for a mid-summer break,” June 25, 2024. I remember Geoff’s writing from the early days of BLDGBLOG and was excited to reconnect with his thinking by way of his newsletter. This evocative passage is about his wife Nicola Twilley’s new book, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, Ourselves, and comes paired with a charming bit of partner hype: “Nicky has dominated the refrigeration beat for more than a decade and her book has the receipts.”
As I watch the yearly growth in ingenuity among my students, I find myself anticipating a new kind of storyteller, one who is half hacker, half bard. The spirit of the hacker is one of the great creative wellsprings of our time, causing the inanimate circuits to sing with ever more individualized and quirky voices; the spirit of the bard is eternal and irreplaceable, telling us what we are doing here and what we mean to one another.
– Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, 1997. Found by tracing back through the acknowledgments of Building SimCity; Murray was a beloved professor of the author’s. The spark for this tweet.
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com