Just work your way through the park
Five fragments for November 12, 2024
Hello from 11/12. I’m Diana Kimball Berlin, a partner at Matrix in San Francisco leading pre-seed through Series A rounds in B2B SaaS and AI startups.
My kindergartener turns 6 this week, and you know what that means: the LEGO set of dreams. (His? Mine? Both.)
And now, five fragments that stuck with me last week…
running a local llm and checking its output feels exactly like monitoring my runescape bots as a kid.
that same thrill of “let’s see what it did while I was gone 👁️”
– Vincent van der Meulen on X, November 11, 2024. I’d read a whole essay on the Runescape-to-AI pipeline. (If you’re looking for a way to play with LLMs locally, check out Matrix portco LM Studio.)
With a Second Brain at your fingertips, you will be able to unlock the full potential of your hidden strengths and creative instincts. You will have a system that supports you when you are forgetful and unleashes you when you are strong. You will be able to do and learn and create so much more, with so much less effort and stress, than was ever possible before.
– Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential, June 14, 2022. I went back to my 2022 highlights from this book as a first step toward revisiting the pandemic-era zettelkasten craze. Fascinating to me that this was published just a few months before ChatGPT came out—it feels like much of the tools for thought crowd moved on to playing with LLMs, which could also be said to deliver on the benefits above.
Like every other LLM, Claude is gullible
A gullible “agent” is of limited use - if you’re going to send it off to autonomously take action on your behalf you need to be able to trust it not to get confused or tricked
– Simon Willison on X, November 4, 2024. “Gullible” is such a useful word, and one I haven’t seen applied to LLMs before. Good discussion in the replies, too.
What’s fundamentally uncontrollable? Trying to sleep. Falling in love. Whether a potential friend or love interest likes us too. Our health. Being moved by a work of art.
– Celine Nguyen, “everything i read in october 2024,” November 1, 2024. Catching up with Celine tomorrow before she moves to London (sob), so of course getting current with her latest set of capsule book reviews first, and this reflection on Hartmut Rosa’s The Uncontrollability of the World struck me. It also makes me think that part of what draws us to LLMs may be that they’re not quite controllable.
Do not stand in line. Do not board any attractions. Just work your way through the park, focusing on everything from banisters to building second floors (what’s up there?) to foliage.
– William Baerg in “41 Disneyland tips, tricks and food secrets from park fanatics,” The Los Angeles Times, April 20, 2023. We’re taking the kids to Disneyland for the first time in a few weeks and I’m collecting tips. (Would love yours!) I found this one charming; it reminded me of my friend Rob Walker’s book (and its companion Substack!), The Art of Noticing.
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com