Hello from the end of August. I’m Diana Kimball Berlin, a partner at Matrix leading concept through Series A rounds in B2B SaaS and AI startups.
I just got back to San Francisco and I’m glad to be here. This week and next are full of early autumn energy, with my two kids starting school.
Here are five fragments that stuck with me from my reading and research over the last week…
Programming need not be tedious. The rest of this paper is devoted to computer systems which make programming fun. As we have seen, creativity is an emotional process, and joy is one of the strongest emotions.
– David Canfield Smith, “Pygmalion: A Creative Programming Environment,” May 1975. I followed a link from Benj Edwards’s article on the history of the computer folder and before I knew it I was reading a dissertation by the inventor of computer icons. The promise of overcoming tedium makes me think about the latest AI-powered IDEs (such as Cursor); “cursor + gpt4 32k removes the tedium from programming.” And the claim that “joy is one of the strongest emotions” makes me think about Inside Out, which I recently rewatched with my two young kids.
the problem with caring about the details, is that you start to notice *all* the details, and how many you want to change, but you can’t (bc you have limited time and attention), so you live among them, forever
– Kevin Yien on Twitter/X, August 10, 2024. In my Quip era, I would sometimes call it “Kevin Gibbs’s Home for Recovering Perfectionists” as a term of endearment.
I’d like to propose that we think of generative AI as a technique for producing aleatory artworks. Much of the angst around AI, to me, comes from observing the stochastic, indeterminate, unpredictable nature of it—and framing these things as flaws. But in aleatory art, these qualities are useful and productive: They invite the artist to produce works through different processes, which lead to different aesthetic outcomes.
– Celine Nguyen, “good artists copy, ai artists ____,” personal canon, August 26, 2024. I’ve followed Celine’s work closely ever since Chris sent me “research as a leisure activity,” so imagine my excitement to see this deep dive on some of my greatest interests blink into my inbox over the weekend—with the added thrill of seeing my own thoughts on total authorship in generative AI cited. The term “aleatory” was new to me; Celine shares that it “refers to anything dependent on random or stochastic processes (like rolling a die, or using the result of a random number generator)” and “was often used in the 20th century to describe art that used chance to create, produce, or perform a work.”
i want parallel longevity, not the sequential vampire kind
give me 1000 x 24h, *today*
“who’s building this” --> i think that's what AGI is about tbh
– Fabian Stelzer on Twitter/X, August 19, 2024. Same!
With the experience of freedom, life does not become perfect, but we do have a sense that everything is workable, that nothing is missing.
– Bruce Tift, Already Free, June 1, 2015. Hurtling across time zones means hurtling into jet lag, so I’ve had some early mornings and late nights to page through books downloaded to Kindle long ago. This one has been a steady companion.
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com