I wanted the space to stop the reader
Five fragments for the week of December 16, 2024
Hello from the 50th edition of Diagonal, and the last of 2024. I’m Diana Kimball Berlin, a partner at Matrix leading concept through Series A rounds in B2B SaaS and AI startups.
A happy surprise to end the year: my old friend Linda Liukas highlighted Diagonal in her newsletter last week.
Diana Kimball's letters on Diagonal make me feel like a sociologist discovering something rare, interesting, and poignant in the computational universe. It is probably the newsletter I click most links on.
Thank you, Linda. <3 I feel the same about yours! (Linda and I go way back to before my name change, which is why she knows me as Diana Kimball; as with every change, there’s a story behind that one.)
And now, five fragments that stuck with me last week…
LLMs don’t have their ego wrapped up in any given lens. They don’t have an ego in the first place! Often, when there’s a lens that is very tied to our identity, it is hard to put it down.
– Alex Komoroske, bits and bobs, December 16, 2024. Alex is a prolific thinker and I love this format—a river of “facets of proto-insights.” This particular proto-insight got me thinking about how LLMs can clarify by isolating the ingredients of knowledge.
Despite running a company all about having fun, I used to take everything so seriously, everything seemed super high stakes. It doesn’t always feel that way anymore. Sure, it’s easy to slip back into old patterns, but for the most part, I can hold that thought that it’s just a game. If I lose the game, that's okay. I can play other games or I can restart this game. Life will go on; that was a big learning.
– Amit Gupta in conversation with Helena Price, December 10, 2024. Amit and I have been friends for nearly 16 years now and he’s changed my life more than once. I would say he is a world expert on both seriousness and fun.
IMO one of the biggest benefits of travel is just acquiring a scaffold to hang future knowledge on. Places that had similar embeddings in my mind before I saw them (Chongqing vs Chengdu, Abu Dhabi vs Dubai, Wroclaw vs Warsaw, etc.) become extremely distinct, and future facts become much stickier.
– Patrick Collison on X, December 11, 2024. This struck me as true but I was most taken with the slippage of “embeddings” from AI back into a mental metaphor. Reminds me of a post I saw recently (can’t find it now) playing with the idea that “oneshotting” might be the AI crossover term of the year.
Earlier this year, I came across the following idea: Readers don’t have short attention spans—they have short enchantment spans. There’s an infinite amount of content out there, and readers know it. The introduction convinces a reader that their finite time alive is best spent reading this piece in front of them, and not all the other things on the internet.
– Celine Nguyen, “in praise of writing on the internet,” personal canon, December 9, 2024. I love a good reflective essay and I especially loved this one, seeing inside the mind of someone who became a favorite source (and friend!) over the course of this year. Reminds me a bit of this one from the archives, load-bearing in my own personal canon: Chris Xu’s “The Ten Post Experiment.” (And let’s not forget that Chris is the one who sent me Celine’s work in the first place.)
Spacing between paragraphs or sections is very important to my rhythm, and the spaces were so insignificant in the old e-books that they didn’t stop you. I wanted the space to stop the reader, that’s why I put it there.
– Robert Caro as quoted in “‘The Power Broker’ Is Finally Getting a Digital Edition. What Took So Long?,” The New York Times, September 12, 2024. Discovered through Jack Cheng’s newsletter, where he excerpted the same passage. It stopped me in my tracks—mission accomplished.
Until 2025,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com
p.s. Another mission accomplished…