Morfternight #73: As an AI language model...
The one where we make an announcement.
👇 tl;dr
Today I am late. We chat with bots, explore a few mental models, and reiterate the importance of seeing all teams as distributed.
I also announce my participation as a speaker in the Running Remote conference in Lisbon, Portugal, on the 25th and 26th of April, 2023.
🤩 Welcome to the 15 new Morfternighters who joined us last week.
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📷 Photo of the week
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👋 Good Morfternight!
With every day bringing some news from the AI world, we look at the most recent changes in the landscape.
After the new Bing seemingly ridiculed Google’s Bard, it appeared that the Microsoft GPT implementation wasn’t that much better.
The new Bing is still in beta with access limited so I couldn’t test it myself, but reading Ben Thompson’s encounter with Bing’s alter-ego Sydney makes me think that the guidelines there are much more relaxed than in ChatGPT.
Complete responses disappearing after being sent also hint that maybe Bing staff is checking all interactions for as long as it’s kept possible by the limited user base.
I superficially tried to see if ChatGPT could get more personal without much success. However, I’ll still share the conversation if you are interested because a) it’s mesmerizing to think such interactions are possible with a machine nowadays, and b) it’s fun to see a custom-built tool to share ChatGPT conversations has already appeared.
It’s called ShareGPT, and guess who came up with the clever name?
🗺️ Three places to visit today
I previously linked to Farnam Street’s blog posts because it is an excellent content source. Here are three of my favorite pieces from fs.blog.
Popularized by James Clear through his book Atomic Habits, the idea that “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems” is the object of Habits vs. Goals: A Look at the Benefits of a Systematic Approach to Life.
We need maps to simplify reality and solve complex problems, but we shouldn’t forget that the Map Is Not the Territory, or we expose ourselves to the risk of thinking that reality is simpler than it really is.
If you can get over the flashy title, Second-Order Thinking: What Smart People Use to Outperform is an excellent article about looking past the immediate consequences of decisions.
🐢 It’s Distributed Teams all the way down
Last week I shared a few notes about the difference between Remote and Distributed teams.
I focus on this seemingly purely semantic distinction because a remote team setup is only a particular case of a distributed team.
Think about it: from two people sharing a garage to half a million across subsidiaries, offices, factories, and warehouses worldwide, all teams and companies are distributed.
Although what we commonly refer to as “Distributed Teams” nowadays are teams functioning without a central headquarters or office, all the things that can increase their efficiency can also do the same for classic office-located companies.
A couple of months from now, I’ll discuss these ideas on stage at Running Remote 2023 in Lisbon, Portugal.
👨🏻💻 From the blog, last week
This a new section for you, dear Morfternighters, who prefer to subscribe only to this newsletter and yet have access to all my posts on paolo.blog
2023-02-15 — The all-new paolo.blog
2023-02-18 — The New Hammer for Programmers