Brian Frank
@brian_frank
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Product lead & strategist into design, technology, society, sports and ideas.
London, ON
Joined October 2007
"Fake work" is generally a euphemism for "Human interactions are hard and messy and I don't like it."
Sam Altman says Slack has many positives, but it creates endless fake work We need an AI-native productivity suite to replace docs, slides, email, and Slack Not add-on features, but trusted agents that handle work and only escalate when needed This finally feels within reach
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9 Canadians have started an NBA Finals game. A third of those players were added to the list tonight Shai Gilgeous-Alexander Lu Dort Andrew Nembhard Jamal Murray (2023) Andrew Wiggins (2022) Tristan Thompson (2015-18) Joel Anthony (2011) Todd MacCulloch (2002) Rick Fox (2001-02)
A record 3 Canadians will start in the NBA Finals. Only other time multiple Canadians started in the Finals was 2002 (Fox/MacCulloch). It’s the 2nd straight year that 4 Canadians are going to the Finals 2024: Powell, Lawson, Prosper, Brissett 2025: SGA, Dort, Nembhard, Mathurin
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I’ve been cutting down on podcasts and audiobooks because letting the mind wander, replay, think ahead, etc is how a lot of memories and ideas are shaped and I felt those maybe slipping (less since the change).
Most people shouldn’t be listening to more podcasts. Not because they’re bad but because they’re better at replacing your thinking than enhancing it. You’re not downloading insight. You’re drowning in it. We confuse consumption for creativity. But creativity needs space.
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So we need to assume that autonomous cars will help drive up traffic and congestion by putting non-drivers in single passenger vehicles
SF on Saturday morning: a large % of Waymos are ferrying solo kids (8-14 yo), presumably to sports or other activities. A friend told me that 85% of parents at their kids’ SF school use Waymo for kids pickup / drop off: earlier it was ~10% using Uber and Lyft. Shows how Waymo
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The chaos is the point. It’s all about changing the game from one where players respect rules to one where everything is perpetually negotiable, or just takeable if you have enough leverage or force and will.
You’re fired. Wait, oops, you’re rehired. All funds are frozen! Oof, that was unpopular, okay, we’ll rescind it for now. Tariffs! Oh wait, no, not for a month. Tariffs again! Ouch, that stock market response! Okay maybe not for cars, not for the next month, okay? okay.
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👀…
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NIST is absolutely not playing around with its efforts to take on a bigger role in AI and just dropped a giant (106 pages, including footnotes, glossary, etc) report all about how people can get AI to do bad things (IE adversarial ML).
Adversaries can deliberately manipulate AI systems to make them malfunction — and there’s no foolproof defense. Check out NIST’s new guide to the types of attacks developers and users can expect, along with approaches to mitigate them: https://t.co/AhbluzSeEx
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Been a while since I’ve seen so much disparity between (very good) quality of an argument vs the ignorance of the comments. People are saying “so the Mavs will be DEI now” like it’s a big gotcha but the NBA has been finding & developing talent from overlooked places for years.
Since this seems to be the most common response. let me address it. DEI does not mean you dont hire on merit. Of course you hire based on merit Diversity - means you expand the possible pool of candidates as widely as you can. Once you have identified the candidates, you
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Been feeling that generative AI and VR will both really hit their stride when they do more together… eg digest every record that exists about some time and place and recreate a life-like, interactive experience of actually being there.
Midjourney CEO in office hours just said he thinks they “can get to the holodeck” by 2024 😳 “We’re gonna build a lot of stuff this year. I think we’ll build more stuff than I’ve ever built before…By the end of 2024 hopefully we have real-time open worlds” Holy shit
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Creating one generative AI image uses as much energy as **CHARGING YOUR PHONE** AAAAAARGH Article link: https://t.co/CzZrCLgllI
#ClimateChange Explainer TikTok · Professor Casey Fiesler
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Seems like too much fixation on sci-fi “AI domination” scenarios going around. Still plenty to worry about as long as people are in charge!
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dX : How does it reflect that? Me : Inherent conflict. Typical commercial opportunity is based on exclusion (i.e. property that you sell) whereas open and benefiting humanity are based upon inclusion. It's not easy to combine the two. Brave board that stands up for the mission.
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dX : What do you think about Open AI? Me : I assume you mean non profit board focused on the organisation's mission of "benefit humanity as a whole" versus commercial (and possible self interests)? It reflects the whole "open" but not "open" nature of OpenAI.
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This might not just be a labour protection but good business/process discipline — or risk “efficiently making something that should’t be made at all.”
Big things the WGA won in terms of protections from studios using AI: -AI can't write or rewrite scripts, and AI generated scripts can't be source material—thus preventing studios from using AI to undermine wages. -The *writer* can choose to use AI. That's how it should be.
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Vicious Self-Degradation > you Google > Quora spots query and id’s as frequent > Quora uses ChatGPT to generate answer > ChatGPT hallucinates > Google picks up Quora answer as highest probability correct answer > ChatGPT hallucination is now canonical Google answer
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I’ve spent much of this year learning about car bloat, the process through which smaller vehicles are being replaced by increasingly massive SUVs and trucks. What I’ve learned: Huge cars are terrible for society, often in ways that are hidden. A summary 🧵
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