Laurence Favrot

Progress isn't always loud (xkcd): buff.ly/12gBPzN

Today we're launching Brief into open beta. Your AI Product Navigator. The product layer for AI-powered teams. Built with 100+ teams shipping with agents.

New blog post: There should be ‘general managers’ for more of the world’s important problems There’s a surprisingly big category of problems that are ‘orphaned.’ By ‘orphaned’ I mean: you can’t point to a specific person or organization who thinks it’s their responsibility to deliver the outcome in its entirety. Lots of people talk about the problem, and often many work on slices of it. But if you asked: ‘is there a hyper-competent person waking up every day feeling accountable for making sure this gets solved?’—the answer is very often, ‘no.’ These problems exist across domains and at a variety of ‘altitudes.’ Indeed, some are perhaps better described as ‘things we want to be true’ rather than ‘problems.’ In any event, a few examples that have been on my mind recently: (1) Can we prevent infection from all respiratory pathogens (including the common cold)? (2) Can we make every new building in SF both serve its function and be beautiful? (3) Can we permanently fix the American west’s water problem? (4) Can we halve X risk? (5) Can we eliminate single-use plastic globally without making convenience trade-offs? (6) Can we make childcare costs so low that they’re a non-factor in deciding whether to have kids? In my opinion, there should be ‘general managers’—GMs—for problems like these. These are founder-types who feel personally responsible for delivering a specific outcome (vs field-building generally); hyper-competent leaders who will pull whatever levers necessary to achieve the defined outcome. Most companies wouldn’t let an important initiative go unmanned or without a ‘directly responsible individual’ — why are we OK not having GMs for even more wide-reaching problems? (Link to full post in reply)

@ajhodls dude

can old people really, truly innovate?

@jasoncbenn Also: indirectly help relationships by coaching you to be more you and less not-you. Feedback in real time or immediately after.

@jasoncbenn Work with you to define those relationships you care about. Then help you manage the state of those relationships. So much value in remembering to call or opportunistically doing something meaningful. Dumb version is a daily reminder to do something nice for your partner.

Let's say that it's 2030 and and you have a personal genius angel living inside of an earring. You trust it to respect your privacy, so you give it full context on your life: thoughts, audio, vision, etc. You task it with improving your relationships. What should it do?

there's something at the core of the american ideology that's only captured in happy go lucky 80s movies, which is that the noble pursuit of fun is probably one of the most productive forces in the universe and works way better than grinding away dutifully on things you hate

Be good. Future AIs are watching.

A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepneas in the Sky are two of my favorite books of all time, and I recommend them to everyone.

Hi, we're Threads. 👋 We've been kickin' it on this block for a while, and if you're new here, please note that we have no affiliation with any large social media company. We are, however, replacing Slack for the modern teams of today. Check out more below:

RIP Yammer. The product was ahead of its time and paved the way for freemium and social in the enterprise. However I think there is still more room for innovation in the space. More to announce on that soon. microsoft.com/en-us/microsof…

@Mtclai Yikes. Hoping for the best.

insane what is happening in China right now. one month ago, my small hometown in China had only one covid case in the past three years. today, I heard my whole extended family has covid. Luckily they are okay and I'm praying they stay that way.

Thanks to the recent work of BetterUp Chief Innovation Officer @grkellerman and renowned psychologist Dr. Martin Seligman, they’ve pinpointed four types of creativity for stability and innovation 👀 🧠 Integration 🧠 Distal Thinking 🧠 Figure-Ground Reversal 🧠 Splitting

New @tana_inc folks seem hungry for in-depth books on ontologies & schemas. Initial reaction was... books are overkill? There's not much to know? Just google it? But then tried googling. And it is *noisy* and poorly curated out there. A few recommendations:

@houshuang You can add a second time zone which is somewhat helpful: youtu.be/2q72abY_5D0

Wish it were possible to set a time zone per week for Google Calendar - trying to schedule events in the future when you'll be on another continent is a bit confusing.

@VitalikButerin The San Diego, California airport is right in the city. It’s a surprisingly easy walk to downtown assuming you aren’t over burdened with luggage.

In how many cities have you walked to or from the airport?

Oh shit, I think I just figured it out. LinkedIn is the opposite of Very Online. It’s Not Really Online At All. They’re in a sort of “Internet theme park” attached to meatspace.

An Initiation to Game B youtu.be/E_cyCuCKQhs

@houshuang @tombielecki How did you try to learn piano?

@tombielecki Buying a new house, moving to a new city, going back to Minerva in a new position, and being a bit burnt out by note taking tools all contributed I guess. Spent more time learning piano (not very successfully), exploring nature etc. Then omicron came, and lockdown again :)

I didn't think I'd been doing that little tweeting this fall, but apparently the difference between this month and last is staggering. I feel like I should ask someone for a promotion or something? This is almost as impressive as Australia's covid stats... Look at those %%%.

If you were building a university-like program from scratch, and you had complete control over how to design the grading/assessment system, how would it look like? Optimizing both for how to most accurately assess a student's skill/knowledge achievement, but