I’m in London this week, and so there won’t be a column. Back next week (assuming this global plane outage stops at some point)!
Podcast: My interview with Medium’s CEO Tony Stubblebine
Medium is one of those media platforms that everyone knows and everyone wonders where it went. Well, it really went nowhere, to be frank — and it’s doing better than ever. Medium has been reinventing itself for years as it seeks a path through the fast-churning crises of media economics. Now, according to CEO Tony Stubblebine, the company has found a formula that he thinks will sustain the company for a decade or more. By offering free distribution to writers with expertise, no one has to spend their days trudging to build up their own audience just to be read.
Tony and I talk about the subscription economy and the challenges of building media platforms, the rise of user-generated content sites like Forbes, LinkedIn and Substack, and the future of Medium and the media industry more broadly.
This is a bit of a follow-up episode to our previous one on AI and media with Eric Newcomer and Reed Albergotti, so do listen to that one as well.
🔊 Listen to “Pivoting to the Expert Economy”
The Orthogonal Bet: The Quest to Find the Poetic Web
In this episode of our Riskgaming podcast mini-series The Orthogonal Bet, our scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman speaks with Kristoffer Tjalve. Kristoffer is hard to categorize, and in the best possible way. However, if one had to provide a description, it could be said that he is a curator and impresario of a burgeoning online community that celebrates the “quiet, odd, and poetic web.”
What does this phrase mean? It can mean a lot, but it basically refers to anything that is the opposite of the large, corporate, and bland version of the Internet most people use today. The web that Kristoffer seeks out and tries to promote is playful, small, weird, and deeply human. Even though these features might have been eclipsed by social media and the current version of online experiences, this web — which feels like a throwback to the earlier days of the Internet — is still out there, and Kristoffer works to help cultivate it through a newsletter, an award, an event and more.
🔊 Listen to “The Quest to Find the Poetic Web”
Lux Recommends
- Perfectly timed with yesterday’s massive global tech outage due to a bad update from CrowdStrike via Microsoft Windows, Sam has an article in The Atlantic on "What the Microsoft Outage Reveals.” “Engineers can induce only so many errors. When something happens that they didn’t anticipate, the network breaks down. So how can we expand the range of failures that systems are exposed to? As someone who studies complex systems, I have a few approaches. One is called ‘fuzzing.’ Fuzzing is sort of like that engineer at the bar, but on steroids. It involves feeding huge amounts of randomly generated input into a software program to see how the program responds. If it doesn’t fail, then we can be more confident that it will survive the real and unpredictable world. The first Apple Macintosh was bolstered by a similar approach.”
- Shaq Vayda loved Elana Simon and Jake Silberg’s completely comprehensive deep-dive (overflowing with illustrations!) of how, exactly, AlphaFold3 works and why. Extensively detailed, it brings to mind Stephen Wolfram’s epic post on how the transformer architecture works for AI. “We’ll start by pointing out that goals of the model are a bit different than previous AlphaFold models: instead of just predicting the structure of individual protein sequences (AF2) or protein complexes (AF-multimeter), it predicts the structure of a protein, optionally complexed with other proteins, nucleic acids, or small molecules, all from sequence alone. So while previous AF models only had to represent sequences of standard amino acids, AF3 has to represent more complex input types, and thus there is a more complex featurization/tokenization scheme.”
- Sam recommends an interesting story via David Lang at Asimov Press on “The Flower Designer Who Built a Laboratory In His Home” aka Sebastian Cocioba. “I want to see amateur biology thrive, and while a lot of regulations exist for a reason, I’m unconvinced that molecular biology requires all the crazy expensive equipment that has become associated with it. I mean, how did people do molecular biology fifty or one hundred years ago? If somebody really wants to learn biology, but they're in an environment without resources, I hope they will ask: What biology can I do?”
- I’m a fan of Byrne Hobart’s work at The Diff, and he has a monstrous takedown (that I mightily disagree with) on the late David Graeber’s notion of “bullshit jobs.” “And: some of these jobs may be fake, or fake-ish. Some may be the result of corporate empire-building, or might exist to help create and sell products that customers would be better-off not buying. That's always a valid suspicion! But it's also valid to ask: when you encounter other people's behavior, and find it surprising, is it more likely that you noticed something, with only a few moments of thought, they've missed for their entire career? Or that they've figured out something you don't understand after years of work?”
- Finally, Sam recommends the always-fascinating Brian Potter’s look at what it might take to rebuild Bell Labs in Construction Physics. “AT&T’s size also gave it a low bar for what constituted a valuable technical improvement. Even a tiny improvement that saved a few cents on a component or service would be large when multiplied by the enormous scale of the Bell System. This low bar made it far more likely a given research effort would be successful.”
That’s it, folks. Have questions, comments, or ideas? This newsletter is sent from my email, so you can just click reply.
