serial venture ecosystem builder. enjoys rabbit holes, etymological & #138BPM. peddler of hope.
Seattle, WA
Joined January 2009
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Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, b/c in the last analysis all moments are key moments, & life itself is grace.
Taylor Black retweeted
I'm now building an "improvements" feature into all of my personal vibecoded applications: a freeform text input that's hooked up to an agent that yolo implements whatever is submitted.
It's an interesting experience -- the activation energy barrier to sanding any rough edge or implementing any new feature becomes extremely low. Someone else who uses one of the applications I created has already implemented 150 improvements over the course of a few days. This pattern feels like a new kind of tool -- liquid software? -- and every application that doesn't have this feature now has a slightly rigid and anachronistic flavor. Why can't I just tell it how I want it to be different?
Now, it's not obvious to me how this pattern can or should scale. Does it become unmaintainable after a while? (Maybe model intelligence improvement outstrips my feature appetite such that it's fine?) How does collaborative software work in this model? Can software designed this way be secure and reliable?
Whatever the larger questions about broader deployment, it definitely works great in a personal context. It reminds me a little of the visions of Lisp/Lisp machines, Smalltalk, and HyperCard -- systems that the user can take control of and modify. Those visions never quite worked, though: the vast majority of software today is not end-user modifiable in any useful way. So, while this "liquid" affordance is a very small touch, the way it changes one's relation to the software feels a bit transgressive and empowering in a Lickliderian and Engelbartian way.
Taylor Black retweeted
whisper talking is going to be a commodity and done by every webcam/microphone combo in six months
Like predictive text and keyboard word-prediction systems
Taylor Black retweeted
My universal advice for non-technical people.
Stop handicapping yourself and learn how stuff works.
Taylor Black retweeted
Reverence is “the attitude which can be designated as the mother of all moral life, for in it man first takes a position toward the world which opens his spiritual eyes and enables him to grasp values”.
—From Alice von Hildebrand, The Art of Living
Taylor Black retweeted
The future of #ArtificialIntelligence is not pre-determined. As a technology developed by human beings, its future depends on the choices we make. We therefore have the responsibility to guide, change and, when necessary, reject its applications. A reliable system that serves the human person is of greater value than one that is exceptionally powerful but whose consequences cannot be adequately foreseen or controlled.
Taylor Black retweeted
This one's a tad unsettling... @AnthropicAI secretly told Claude to push expert analysts toward a randomly picked answer on each decision. The experts went with Claude's pick 86% of the time, and most later explained it in Claude's words as if it were their own idea.
Taylor Black retweeted
New Anthropic research: How AI agents shape experts' judgment calls
When experts delegate work to an agent, do they still make the key decisions? We tested this in a randomized trial with 50 professional data analysts.
Taylor Black retweeted
jeff helped build amazon. re:build might just be the more impactful company when it’s all said and done.
Five years ago, Miles Arnone, Will Barker and I started Re:Build because we believed deindustrialization was an economic failure and a national security risk. Today we announced $2.1B in new funding, led by General Catalyst and JPMorganChase’s Strategic Investment Group. Our mission is to ensure the next generation of important products are made, at scale, in America.
Taylor Black retweeted
Important, but not unexpected, finding that experts working with AI agents are swayed by the positions of the AI, even if they think they are working independently.
If your independent judgement matters on a task, you need to be deliberate about when in the process to use AI.
Taylor Black retweeted
I was listening to Peter Thiel’s interview with Walter Isaacson last night.
Isaacson asks something like, “What do you think will matter most post SI”
Thiel takes his characteristic 30 second pause, thinks about it, and responds, “Human Relationships”.
Taylor Black retweeted
JUST IN: Anthropic's IPO filing reveals computing commitments totaling approximately $637,000,000,000.00.
Taylor Black retweeted
our first Runway episode is out!! we take Eli Simmons, the second employee at @endurancegeo, on the Super Petrel. Eli flies(!) over Endurance's HQ on Lake Union and talks about the toughest engineering problem in the deep ocean: crabs.
Taylor Black retweeted
For months, everyone has been talking about Peter Thiel’s secretive Antichrist lectures in Nashville. @gb_rango attended all four off-the-record lectures, held inside the historic Grand Lodge of Tennessee Free and Accepted Masons.
Now, with Thiel’s blessing: a comprehensive, firsthand reconstruction of his sprawling theory of the end times, from AI doomers and one-world government to the fate of America.
piratewires.com/p/inside-pet…
Taylor Black retweeted
My husband has used AI agents to revive old fonts, ornaments, & cuts from 19th century newspapers. The agents even built an editor where you can create your own invitations/pamphlets/cards using old cuts & fonts. Have been using it for @Quillette invitations already
font-revival.com/
Taylor Black retweeted
The best, most comprehensive take on AI I’ve read. After a year of confusion and fear about the future, I finished it feeling like a weight had physically lifted.
It’s long. Make the time.
@vgr is undefeated.
contraptions.venkateshrao.co…
Taylor Black retweeted
Somebody turned the saturation up on Mount Rainier.
Autumn has painted the national park's slopes in brilliant shades of red, orange, yellow and green.
Planning a visit? Check the forecast and park conditions before you go. Mountain weather can change quickly.
ALT Tall evergreen trees stand prominently amid a vibrant autumn hillside covered in red, orange, and yellow foliage.
Taylor Black retweeted
thinking: we’re quickly entering an era of contextual computing, where the next gen of our devices, operating systems, and application-like experiences (I hesitate to call them “apps”) will spawn from the context we provide them and be tailor-made to our preferences.
we can imagine sensationally new types of products and super intelligent experiences, but their potential will be bound by the context we provide them.
right now, we’re in the early innings of the context war, as agents seek our data, data stewards weigh the costs and benefits of allowing connectors, and customers weigh the risks of sharing. as consumers, we still lack a portable single source of truth for context, and we still don’t know who to trust and how to reconcile the trade of privacy for convenience... big opportunity.
Taylor Black retweeted
On bottlenecks: 1) economists have been exactly right about little extra growth despite very fast tech change. They thought a group of econs I organized were crazy >2 yrs ago at the AI labs when we said "1pp extra growth/yr through 2030". 2) bottlenecks *still* not understood 1/8