jason scherschligt

Hey, this happened! I collaborated with @johncutlefish and the fine folks at @Amplitude_HQ on The North Star Playbook. Read it, share it, tell us what you think. amplitude.com/north-star

@danielsgoldman The even more real story: we live in a nation where 70 million+ citizens actually chose this corruption. That's the problem America needs to confront. I don't know how we'll do it. But we must.

Real story: Judge was about to throw out the case bc Trump controls both parties. Before it’s dismissed, Trump tells both parties to reach a “settlement.” Settlement shields Trump from any future audit and creates a secret slush fund that can dole out money to anyone with no transparency. Mind-boggling corruption. @SpeakerJohnson - you may not know it, but your job is to conduct oversight of the admin. You can’t run away from this one.

I think this episode perfectly encapsulates the new right: Trump says he doesn't care about Americans. JD Vance is asked what he thinks about that, and the quote is read to him word for word, but all he can do, because he has no spine, no moral compass, no self-respect for himself as an American, is deny that Trump said it at all. Then Trump doubles down, knowing full well that his base will swallow his contempt for them, and that no one around Trump, least of all dogs on leashes like Vance, would dare ask him to mask his hatred for the average person, while conservative media from The Blaze to The Daily Wire will praise Trump for being so refreshingly candid about how much he hates this country and its people, which they will also call patriotism.

@EricTrump @SenWarren C'mon. We all remember in 2016, after Trump was elected, pundits and commenters said "well now he'll put his assets in a blind trust," and then he just...didn't. There was that press conference with the stacks of empty folders. People don't forget that, Eric.

.@SenWarren All of our assets are invested in a blind trust by the largest financial institutions in broad market indexes. To suggest that individual stocks are being bought or sold, at the discretion of any member of the Trump family, would be a lie and blatantly false. Using a silly example, if you buy the “Schwab 1000,” you will get some exposure to Nvidia - as well as a 1,000 other U.S. companies large- and mid-cap stocks. It’s completely disingenuous to represent anything to the contrary. Please be better than this…

@boagworld An analogy I've used is bringing a pie to a social gathering. Imagine that instead of baking it myself, I get a pie from a bakery. It might be delicious and I might have carefully selected it, but I shouldn't say I baked it. If I do, I deceive people about my skill & effort.

@boagworld I suppose it's rooted in the idea that authorship is meaningful. When I declare (through a byline) "I wrote this passage," I am sending signals about my thoughts, personality, attitudes, skills. If I didn't choose the words but label them as if I did, I am deceiving people.

I got some feedback recently that made me stop and think. Someone told me they could tell my LinkedIn posts were AI-generated before they finished the first sentence, and the giveaway wasn't the content, it was the opening. Always "last week" or "this week." AI writing patterns work until they don't. They become predictable enough that readers clock the formula before they've absorbed anything you've actually said. Once they've mentally labeled it as AI output, something shifts. The content stops landing with the same weight, even when the underlying observation is genuinely useful. I don't think this is entirely rational. An insight doesn't become less valuable because software helped draft it. But people process content differently when they sense it came from a formula rather than a person sitting with a genuine frustration or observation. Treating the AI draft as a first attempt helps. The question worth asking: would you actually say that opening out loud to a colleague? If the answer is no, rewrite it until you would. #LinkedInContent #ContentStrategy #AIWriting

"Learning how to write well is an experience you don't want to rob yourself of." Preach. I plan to pass this exact message on to my offspring for generations.

@babadookspinoza Oh, I love this. Writing good sentences, one after another, is such a wonderful and important skill. AI tech has a lot of potential in a lot of areas. But it hinders its own promise when so many people primarily use it to shirk learning to write good sentences, one after another.

Learning how to write well is an experience you don’t want to rob yourself of, because there’s no substitute for knowing how to communicate well in your own voice, how to be heard, how to persuade and move people and articulate your feelings and argue for your causes. You can!!

I guarantee you’re a better writer than ChatGPT. Never butcher your own writing or relinquish your own voice to put your name on the dead-eyed, mechanical hallucinations of a bunch of 1s and 0s. People who know good writing and AI have no trouble recognizing AI-generated garbage.

@atrupar I'm no physicist, but here's what I don't get: combustible materials like petroleum, coal, or even a pile of firewood are also basically releasing energy that was once sourced from the sun. So by arguing for fossil fuels, Burgum acknowledges that solar energy can be stored. No?

BURGUM: When the sun goes down, solar produces zero electricity HUFFMAN: I want to enter into the record this amazing new technology that apparently the secretary is unaware of -- it's a battery

People seem to have forgotten that the point of creating products in small iterations is to get the continuous feedback necessary to produce a great product. It has nothing to do with coding mechanics. The idea is that very few customers know what they want until they get something into their hands. So, get something into their hands, get some feedback, and adjust. Small increments (because nobody, including customers, has the cognitive bandwidth to handle an avalanche of changes all at once), frequent releases (daily is ideal), continuous improvement. Meanwhile, the stans all tell me that the "right way" to use AI is to create a vast amount of code all at once. So much, in fact, that it's not feasible to examine it. Honestly, though, pushing out all that code in one chunk works against us from a product development perspective. I'm not saying we shouldn't use AI, but maybe we're not going about using it in the best way, at least not if we intend to produce products people actually want to buy. That all-at-once mindset has led us back to traditional shove-it-down-the-customers-throats waterfall thinking. Build something huge, some "great idea!" that we're convinced will "disrupt the market!" with its "revolutionary!" approach 🙄. Then try to convince customers that they actually need it. Often, the market remains unconvinced. That's a sales-driven approach. Compare that to a marketing approach, where you figure out what the customers need first, then build that. That's where small increments come into play. It's not a coding strategy; it's a market-research strategy that's more effective (at least faster and cheaper) than doing it with mock-ups. It's a way to figure things out while we're building, rather than before. The traditional critique is that it's somehow "cheaper" to mock up the idea first, but that thinking doesn't factor in the opportunity cost of the time delay and overestimates the cost of actually building it. In this brave new AI world, that cost is lower than ever. The AI advantage is a tight inspect-and-adapt loop that gets us feedback sooner. Leverage that.

@harryjsisson @davetroy Worth noting: we live in a nation where tens of millions of people think this man Trump is the very avatar of wisdom, leadership, and American values. Trump's madness is kind of pathetic; his voters' madness is terrifying.

Trump had one of his worst mental health episodes yet last night, posting over 55 times in 3 hours. Here is the list: 10:15 PM - Accuses Obama of attempting a coup in 2016 10:15 PM - Says Obama worked with CIA to overthrow Trump 10:15 PM - Reposts tweet saying Obama is a “traitor” and that he should be arrested 10:22 PM - Attacks dominion voting systems for 2020 election saying they switched votes 10:22 PM - Says Fulton County, GA had their 2020 fraud exposed (there was none) 10:23 PM - Accuses Obama of personally making $120 million from Obamacare (wtf?) 10:23 PM - Cites quack lawyer Sidney Powell on the 2020 election 10:24 PM - Posts fake JFK Jr account that says Obama wiretapped Trump Tower 10:27 PM - Demands Senator Mark Kelly resign 10:29 PM - Claims neither Biden nor Harris were in charge of the Biden admin 10:29 PM - Attacks Fulton County, GA again 10:29 PM - Posts Fox News clip of Rep Ro Khanna 10:30 PM - Demands Jack Smith be arrested 10:30 PM - Accuses Obama, Clinton, and Comey of treason 10:39 PM - Reposts a tweet from a MAGA account saying they have secret intel proving Clinton and Obama committed crimes 10:39 PM - Reposts a MAGA tweet saying Hillary Clinton should be sent to Haiti 10:40 PM - Says the DOJ is “working hard” to arrest his enemies for treason 10:40 PM - Reposts a tweet attacking his own DOJ and Todd Blanche for no arrests of political enemies 10:40 PM - Posts a TikTok video of people stealing from a convenience store 10:41 PM - Posts a TikTok of someone taking a Door Dash order 10:41 PM - accuses Obama, John Brennan, and Clinton of sedition and treason again 10:42 PM - Posts a video of a man on CCTV footage knocking over food a waiter was carrying 10:47 PM - Calls Obama the “most DEMONIC FORCE” in American politics 10:47 PM - Posts a tweet from Mike Flynn saying 2020 election wasn’t fair 10:49 PM - Attacks Dominion again claiming they stole the 2020 election (it wasn’t) 10:51 PM - Reposts a fake Charlie Kirk account that claimed Obama blocked Hillary Clinton from being prosecuted 10:53 PM - Claims Obama was part of Hillary Clinton’s emails in some way 11:28 PM - Claims a senior Democrat just testified under oath that Senator Adam Schiff leaked classified information 1:13 AM - Attacks the New York Times for reporting on the reflecting pool This man is clearly not well.

@boagworld How about AI disclosure as some kind of metadata? Like a date, the writer's name, taxonomy info (categories, etc.), additional sources. Those are all helpful pieces of content that we associate with primary pieces of text to give readers context. Could we do that with AI?

@searchlight5 Yeah, I'm not sure that's feasible, if I'm honest, because very quickly we're going to be in a place where that's going to read like this post was typed on a keyboard. In other words, I think AI will soon be so ubiquitous that those kinds of disclaimers will be pointles.

People just wanna cheat a process that takes decades to develop. The difficulty of getting words out of the brain and into the page is the most fundamental struggle of writing. Developing that skill is what MAKES you a writer. If you circumvent that, you’re not a writer.

He makes a great point. I have not seen a compelling argument for prompting text into existence using AI and then pasting it under your own byline without disclosing you've done so.

@nateberkopec Yes! The humane, obvious solution is to enforce some simple disclosure of if and how the writer used AI. This is especially important when the piece has a byline of a particular person (like an email, tweet, blog post, comment).

IMO it's very disrespectful to post direct output from an AI into an email, Github comment, or other document intended for human consumption without any annotation saying that it's agent output.

as usual, these courses are actually extremely cheap to run and often end up subsidising other courses for the university, but consultants and management don't respect them and think they need to make the universities look futuristic by opening Raytheon AI Crypto centers instead

@21percentgroup Heartbreaking.

History, philosophy, English, linguistics & creative writing “are no longer financially viable” says University of Hertfordshire Arts & Humanities are being squeezed into handful of elite universities, while huge parts of the UK are left without access timeshighereducation.com/news/hertfords…

“As Cory Doctorow, author of Enshittification, is fond of observing: you won’t be replaced because an AI can do your job, you’ll be replaced because an AI salesman convinces your boss that it can” Conned by a chatbot ft.com/content/eb6f53…

In an effort to enhance the prestige of vocational training, the Danish government is building 3 new Håndværkskollegiet (craft colleges). This one, in Herning, opened last year. It hosts up to 85 people at once, & specialises in masonry, carpentry, plumbing & metal. Stunning!

Instead of worrying that humanities degrees don’t prepare students for jobs in today’s world [product managers finance consultants startups], we should worry that we’ve created a world with such little value for literature, art, philosophy—anything that expresses the human soul