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AI New York City News

Sunday Papers

This is an experiment. While I was reading this weekend’s New York Times I kept a chatbot window open and commented on each article I found interesting. Then the chatbot added some of its own comments. And we continued on. This is a long post but a very interesting experiment!

The weekend paper is still the best place I know for the mixture of large and small that keeps me reading. This week’s edition ran from legislative history and public threats to delivery robots and a bathroom that plays classical music. A few of the items stayed with me.

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Memories Radio San Francisco/California

Remembering San Francisco’s KMPX

For most of 1967, the basement of a warehouse at 50 Green Street, near the foot of Telegraph Hill, was a place where nothing was supposed to happen. Chinese in the morning. Portuguese. Italian. Whatever middle-of-the-road filler could be stacked into the hours nobody had bought.

Then, in February, at midnight, for forty-five dollars a week, a twenty-six-year-old from Detroit named Larry Miller sat down at the board and played what he wanted. He called it folk rock. He let whole album cuts run, folk into jazz into classical into whatever he’d found that day, and he talked when he felt like talking. No jingles. No clock. No time and temperature.

I know because I used to ride over from Berkeley to watch him do it.

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Interstate 280 Podcasts

The Foothill Line: Interstate 280

A curving six-lane freeway follows a ridge beside a long reservoir, surrounded by rolling California hills covered in oak and chaparral, glowing in warm golden-hour sunlight.

Here’s the fifth podcast episode in the story of Interstate 280 on the San Francisco Peninsula.

Here are the earlier episodes:

  1. The Road to Ruin
  2. The Boulevard
  3. Built from the Top Down
  4. The Bridge Built for Physics
Categories
AI Creativity History Space SpaceX

The Patience of a Noisy Line

Paul Baran was laughing when he told me about AT&T.

This was before I joined the board of Telebit, his company, a seat I would hold because he later asked me to, which sounds like a credential and was really a gift. At the time we were simply meeting. Before he said a word about the idea the company was built on, he wanted me to know what had happened the first time he tried to explain packet switching to the people who owned the telephone network.

It had happened years earlier, in the early days. They heard him out. They decided it would never amount to anything. He told me the story the way you tell a story about an old friend’s worst haircut, with his whole face, delighted. What amused him was not that they were wrong. It was how complete their confidence was, the particular serenity of people who have never once had to imagine the thing that is about to replace them. Amusement, I would come to understand, was his entire theory of the people who said no.

Then he explained the modem.

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AI Business Software

Ice Rinks

Nobody in the Valley thinks about ice rinks.

That line sat with me longer than the rest of a conversation between Patrick Collison and Amjad Masad. Collison runs Stripe. Masad runs Replit. Someone asked, more or less, where Collison would look if he were starting over. He did not name an AI lab. He named the software nobody fashionable wants to touch.

I have heard versions of this advice for years. Vertical SaaS. Boring industries. Schlep blindness. What felt new was the timing. The distance from an idea to the first dollar has roughly halved. On Stripe’s numbers, the time to reach a million, ten million, even a hundred million in recurring revenue is about half what it was in the last SaaS boom. Twenty percent of new startups now charge a customer inside thirty days, up from eight percent in 2020. New business creation on the platform nearly doubled in a year, a bigger jump than the pandemic spike.

When building the thing was the scarce skill, the programmer won. When a working product can be stood up quickly, the scarce skill is knowing why the old thing is still tolerated. The domain expert gets the edge. A teacher who understood schools built MagicSchool on Replit and rode it toward a company later described as worth half a billion dollars. The insight was the teacher’s. The tools closed the gap.

Collison’s map has three drawers.

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Categories
Creativity History

The Pioneer

Asa Whitney came home from China with a number in his head, and the number was thirty.

He was a New York dry-goods merchant, born in North Groton, Connecticut, in 1797, and he had made his money in the China trade. He knew what distance cost. The voyage out, in 1842 and 1844, ran the long way, around the Cape or by way of Europe, a hundred to a hundred and fifty days under sail. Somewhere in all that water the arithmetic turned over. Run a railroad to the Pacific, put steam on the far side, and the trip shrinks to about a month. He had seen an early British locomotive in 1830, and now the old impression had a purpose.

He was not an engineer, and the plan shows it. It was simple, almost serene. A line of about 2,160 miles from Lake Michigan to the mouth of the Columbia, somewhere between the 42nd and 45th parallels. Add the roads already built or planned east of the lakes and New York to the Pacific came to roughly 3,000 miles and eight days. He put the cost at $65 million, fifty to build and fifteen to run the road until it could pay its own way, and he admitted the figure was made without a real survey.

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Categories
IBM Living

Meeting Cher

Some memories sit untouched for fifty years and then show up without warning. This one arrived yesterday, while I was thinking about our time in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC.

Before moving to Montgomery County (and living there twice!), I spent some time at the IBM Washington Systems Center in Gaithersburg. The WSC had a very large computer room filled with the various IBM mainframe models that were current in that era.

I was then working for IBM in San Francisco, and one of my projects was responding to an RFP from the State of California for the Teale Datacenter. As part of that effort, we had to run a large benchmark supplied by the State to demonstrate the power and performance of the specific IBM configuration we were proposing. I spent a month at the WSC preparing for it and stayed at the Holiday Inn across the street.

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Categories
Creativity Curiosity Living Walking

The Silence of the Concrete Saint

I was alone in the car when I noticed, which is the wrong way to notice anything.

Something was off about the hillside above the Crystal Springs rest stop. I couldn’t have told you what. It took a mile, maybe more, for the shape of the absence to harden into a fact. The statue was gone.

Twenty-six feet of concrete sprayed over a steel frame. A robed Junípero Serra, kneeling, one arm thrust west toward the missions, set above Interstate 280 in the bicentennial year and left there to watch the Peninsula go by. A thing so large and so constant that the eye had stopped registering it, the way you stop hearing a refrigerator. And then, sometime in the last few months, nothing. A patch of bare earth. No one beside me to ask whether they’d seen it go.

This is what the road does. At highway speed the world beside the freeway is a blur you agree not to examine. The statue stood behind a locked gate, and the people who passed it by the hundred thousand did what the road trains everyone to do. They looked ahead.

It took a walk to catch up with it.

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Categories
Interstate 280 Podcasts

The Bridge Built for Physics: Interstate 280

A curving six-lane freeway follows a ridge beside a long reservoir, surrounded by rolling California hills covered in oak and chaparral, glowing in warm golden-hour sunlight.

Here’s the fourth podcast episode in the story of Interstate 280 on the San Francisco Peninsula – the bridge over the Stanford Linear Accelerator.

Here are the earlier episodes:

  1. The Road to Ruin
  2. The Boulevard
  3. Built from the Top Down

Categories
AI

The Tempo of the Brake Pedal

Martin Casado said something this week that snapped a few loose thoughts into place. The frontier labs missed Jev, he argued, because they are building beings that speak. Software needed a model that chooses.

That reads like a product distinction. It is really a habit of mind.

For a few years we have taken a machine born in chat — text in, text out — and tried to cram it into ordinary programs. Parse the JSON. Retry when it rambles. Plead with it to stay inside the schema. Hope it does not invent a field. Casado’s word for this was right: janky.

Jev takes the other fork. Don’t generate the paragraph. Give the model a state and a menu. Let it pick, score, or answer yes or no, with a probability attached, in one pass, cheap enough and fast enough to live inside a loop. Train it for that job instead of training it to sound like someone worth talking to. The name winks at Jevons: make the unit of intelligence cheap enough and software will call it constantly. That is not a chatbot. That is a function.

I keep finding the same fork elsewhere.

Full self-driving is not AGI on wheels. AGI is the being. Driving is the chooser. The car does not need a meditation on the yellow light. It needs brake, hold, go, at a tempo no essay can match. Tesla and Waymo are not succeeding or failing as philosophers. They are succeeding or failing as systems that pick from a small set of actions in a messy world, millions of times a day.

Humanoid robots make the same confusion look even more like the story we want it to be. Two legs, two hands, tidy the kitchen. The demo is speech and generality. The work underneath is neither: a high-frequency controller choosing stance and contact, and a slower chooser deciding which mug, which drawer, abort or continue. Language is a compiler of intent. It is a poor motor cortex.

We blur the layers because the being is the story we want to tell. The chooser is the product that has to work.

There is a flattering counterargument: wait for the general model, and it will absorb the narrow jobs. Sometimes it will. But a lot of software’s value does not live there. It lives in the call that has to be right, cheap, and on time — route the ticket, score the lead, decide the grasp, stay in the lane. A being is optimized to continue. A chooser is optimized to decide. Different losses. Different machines.

None of this makes the labs foolish. If you are trying to build God, God speaks in natural language. That is a coherent ambition. It is just not the same ambition as making ordinary software reliable. We spent a few years pretending those were the same project. Jev is a reminder that they never were.

Labs build speakers. Software, cars, and robots need choosers. Speech is a wonderful interface and a miserable control loop.

I have been as taken as anyone by the being — the voice, the fluency, the sense that something is in there. Curiosity pulls that way. So does the stage. But the quieter question, the one Casado is actually pointing at, is whether most of the work was ever conversation at all. Maybe it was always a menu, a state, and a choice — and we were paying a novelist to raise his hand.

Somewhere right now a self-driving car is holding at a yellow light, saying nothing at all, deciding everything.