The advantage of immediacy

Five fragments for the week of March 10, 2025

“Escape to Morning, preliminary,” another painting by Carroll Cloar. (Still on the Cloar beat from last week.)

Hello from the other side of saving daylight. Rescue complete!

Thank you to Robin Sloan for a lovely mention in his newsletter:

I’ve been enjoying Diana Kimball Berlin’s weekly newsletter, which presents five snippets from her reading, each with a concise commentary. It has a tech lean — Diana is a product superstar turned VC — but/& the view that emerges is philosophical & playful. Highly recommended.

…and welcome to all the new subscribers who found me that way. Not sure about “superstar,” but “philosophical & playful” you can hold me to.

Here are five fragments that stuck with me last week…

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The house of mirrors fools us all. Do we want a thing, or have we just been convinced we want it? Do I even like mid century furniture? Was I always low key obsessed with loafers? Is it a coincidence that they are everywhere now? I swear I was wearing them before they were everywhere. But honestly I have no idea.

What I do know is that none of these systems are designed to help you be more authentically you. They are optimizing for two things: extract your attention or extract your money. You don’t get to choose what they optimize for. But with AI, to an extent, you do get to choose. You can create a stunningly intelligent tool that exists to serve whatever objective you want. Instead of being the subject of algorithms, you can be their architect.

– Hilary Gridley, “reclaim yourself from recommendation algorithms,” the night crazies newsletter, March 4, 2025. Hilary’s feature in Lenny’s Newsletter last November on “How to become a supermanager with AI” was a banger, and the hits just keep coming in her personal newsletter. I always get inspired by her ultra-specific use cases for LLMs—I’m 100% going to make a personal taste Custom GPT as she outlines here. (She’s also a fellow Survivor superfan…don’t miss her note of recommendation linked at the bottom of the post.)

As a painter and printmaker with a background in architecture and the history of technology, I utilize the advanced technology of the laser printing machine in combination with heat transfer, a contemporary method that is archivally secure. Heat transfer printmaking permits an enormous amount of creativity in terms of coloration and assemblage, along with the advantage of immediacy.

– Phyllis Seltzer, “Artist’s Statement,” from her website snapshotted on the Wayback Machine as of June 2009. (Sadly, since she passed in 2023, her site is now out of commission.) Now plotting out how to make it to Rutger’s to spend some time with her archives. This is actually a good example of using LLMs as personal taste machines: I liked Carroll Cloar’s work enough last week that I thought to ask ChatGPT for a list of contemporaries with somewhat similar style, and it pointed me to Seltzer’s work…which I like as much or more.

We traveled around the world to buy components from many suppliers, going all over America (very deeply into Silicon Valley and New England), all over Europe including its far corners such as Finland, and Japan. Everywhere we went, the vendors had a pitch with presentation slides. I collected the printed copies of their overheads which they always passed out, and eventually I had a banker’s box full of presentations. They were made in all kinds of ways—handwritten, on a typewriter, drawn on an old pen plotter, or made on many kinds of large computers, But I was struck by how they were very much the same all over the world.

– Robert Gaskins, Sweating Bullets: Notes About Inventing PowerPoint, April 2012. A callback to the very first edition of Diagonal, as well as my first job out of college as a PM on the PowerPoint team at Microsoft. This collection of presentations enabled feature prioritization at its finest: “Later, when we began work on PowerPoint, we went back to my ‘corpus’ and went through it to tally features: how many presentations used bullet points? How many had a border around each slide? How many had a logo on each slide? How many used tables? How many charts? How many diagrams? How many “boxes and lines” diagrams? We used this data to prioritize features to be included in the early versions of PowerPoint.”

The marking of NASA spacecraft vehicles is essential, critical, and difficult.…These vehicles represent tangible evidence of many of NASA’s most interesting programs. As such, they are the focus of considerable public and media attention and should be marked in simple but effective ways.

Another important consideration is that the vehicle be marked so that it can be identified from different angles, whether in a launch mode or in outer space.

– Richard Danne and Bruce Blackburn, The NASA Graphic Standards Manual, January 1976. (Reprinted in 2015.) NASA’s “worm logo” and the SF Muni system’s “worm logo” (mentioned last week) both launched in 1975, so as far as I can tell both were likely a product of the time rather than one directly inspiring the other. Something I like in this excerpt is that Dunne and Blackburn make the implicit explicit: these are our hero objects, so let’s make sure we get them right.

it’s called mt tam because you can see all your potential users from the top

– @paularambles on X, March 8, 2025. I laughed out loud!

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Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com