Curious Minds - September 5, 2022
Hello and happy Labor Day!
I hope you find some time to do something you enjoy, I’ll be doing my first attempt at some outdoor sport climbing. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy some of my recent finds.
Something making waves
You may have heard of Dall-E2, an AI that creates images from textual descriptions, but now Stable Diffusion has been announced. While it does roughly the same thing, it has released all of its code so it can be run on your personal computer or private web server. If you want to give it a try, go to the Dream Studio. To understand the impact, someone recently won an art contest with an AI-generated image and there is already a website that is turning novels into picture-storybooks.
A prompt for the dream studio:
“A Van Gogh style image with Warren Buffett fishing with Benjamin Franklin.”
Something I read
How To Tell A Story by The Moth is one of my favorite books I’ve read this year. I’ve long been envious of those who seem to easily tell engaging stories at dinner parties or pitches. The Moth is an organization that has been hosting live 5 or 10-minute story-telling events for the last 20 years, from local chapters to the United Nations, and have done an incredible job dissecting the process. If you decide to give it a read, I highly suggest the audiobook which has many of the original recordings of the stories.
Something bizarre
You’ve probably heard the frequent refrain of, “there’s an app for that,” in regards to just about everything (from glitter bombs to goat puns). The most recent bizarre app I’ve found is Carrier Pigeons as-a-service. I am skeptical that this is real, but I’m excited to try it.
Something I am thinking about
A quote from Naval Ravikant (founder of AngelList):
“Scott Adams’ observation is a good one, predicated on statistics. Let’s say there’s 10,000 areas that are valuable to the human race today in terms of knowledge to have, and the number one in those 10,000 slots is taken.
Someone else is likely to be the number one in each of those 10,000, unless you happen to be one of the 10,000 most obsessed people in the world that at a given thing.
But when you start combining, well, number 3,728 with top-notch sales skills and really good writing skills and someone who understands accounting and finance really well, when the need for that intersection arrives, you’ve expanded enough from 10,000 through combinatorics to millions or tens of millions. So, it just becomes much less competitive.
Also, there’s diminishing returns. So, it’s much easier to be top 5 percentile at three or four things than it is to be literally the number one at something.”
In essence, to find your unique potential and become the best, it is not necessary to be the best in a single skill, but if you are the best with a combination of skills, you have created a niche.
This is very similar to Charlie Munger’s advocation of a multidisciplinary approach.
Something factual
For a time, M&Ms were sold exclusively to the military during WWII.
I hope this adds a little bit to the start of your week. As always, I enjoy feedback and suggestions and I’m excited to see where this goes.
Until next week,
Kerry