Collision Edition 1 - Weapons of mass distraction,
plus Runnin' Down A Dream, a safe search engine, marginal adjustments, Katz Kiely, and my go to edit tool
1. Tik-Tok - Weaponizing attention and pleasure.
This is a 20-minute read but might be the most important thing you read this year, especially if you have children.
2. Some Career Advice Gems
Some real gems from this 2019 talk from Bill Gurley - founder of VC firm Benchmark Capital (applicable at any stage of a career). Some good trivia in here as well.
3. Neeva - A safer search engine
You might not have heard of it, but Neeva has had a good bit of coverage this week after reaching the top spot on Product Hunt - you can download it here - either the free version or the paid.
What does this mean? NO TRACKING ever. No ADS ever. There are other great features, and for $49 a year, I think it’s worth it not to be tracked by Google. It recently added its own AI-powered search as well.
Here’s the tech bit - Neeva, runs its own search stack: crawling, serving, ranking and summarizations. They train their own LLM models and use externally available models for training data (for distillation, for example), but prefer to run their own models. It is also way more cost-effective in a system that has billions of pages.
4. How are the resolutions going?
I didn’t set any resolutions as such. I just committed to making small adjustments to my daily routine. Sunlight before screen light. 10 minutes of exercise after one cup of coffee. Listening to my thoughts and capturing notes before starting work( more to come on this next week).
This TED TALK with Stephen Dunier sets up the value of small marginal adjustments and the large-scale impact that can result. Stephen explains that what truly defines him aren't titles, but an approach to decision-making that transformed him from someone who struggled with simple tasks to a guy who is continuously achieving even his most ambitious dreams
5. And, of course, last week’s Podcast
6. What’s my editing tool?
A few folk have asked me what I use for podcast editing. Well it’s called Descript and it’s a fabulous tool that is continuously improving its features. It enables you to edit via the text that it generates from any audio or video file.
They recently added new ‘scenes' functionality that makes video editing even easier. Here is a link if you want to give it a go. Here’s a video overview as well.
Why Random Collisions
Here’s my short video explaining why I decided to pivot the pod and my intention to engineer ‘collisions’ between guests and other connections whose paths would never otherwise cross. From these random collisions, I expect new relationships to form and new ideas to emerge, resulting in collective actions to address the problems people care about.
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