SaaStr: “Forward Deployed Engineers Are the New CS. Every major AI company has figured this out. Palantir essentially invented the model. Now everyone’s copying it. What Forward Deployed Engineers actually do: work directly with customers to understand their specific processes, build end-to-end workflows and take them to production, handle model training and iteration until it works, solve real-world implementation problems daily. They’re engineers + consultants + AI trainers rolled into one.”
Clay Shirky: “As an academic administrator, I’m paid to worry about students’ use of A.I. to do their critical thinking. Universities have whole frameworks and apparatuses for academic integrity. A.I. has been a meteor strike on those frameworks, for obvious reasons. But as educators, we have to do more than ensure that students learn things; we have to help them become new people, too. From that perspective, emotional offloading worries me more than the cognitive kind, because farming out your social intuitions could hurt young people more than opting out of writing their own history papers. Just as overreliance on calculators can weaken our arithmetic abilities and overreliance on GPS can weaken our sense of direction, overreliance on A.I. may weaken our ability to deal with the give and take of ordinary human interaction.”
NYTimes on how to make friends as an adult: “Tune in to intuition. “When you encounter someone you’ve never met before but feel like you’ve known all your life, you need to act on it,” says Sewell. She looks for an “instant feeling of trust, which is rare.” The New York-based photographer and artist Joshua Woods, 39, a friendly face to many on the fashion and culture circuits, is on the lookout for people whose overall tastes align with his own: “It’s how someone lives their life and the things they’re engaged with,” he says, like a shared interest in a certain writer. Aminatou Sow, 40, the interviewer and co-author of the 2020 book “Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close,” who lives in Brooklyn, agrees. When joining a new group — a running club, for example — “pay attention to who those [like-minded] people are and what you want to know about them.” Even in professional contexts, where there are power dynamics to contend with, it helps to “develop a sensitivity for who sees you as a human,” says Sehgal, noting that those people often make for good friend material.”
WSJ: “In “How Great Ideas Happen,” [George Newman] draws on scientific studies, historical examples and behavioral research to argue that what we call inspiration is better understood as a set of habits and mental practices available to anyone willing to cultivate them. Creativity, in his telling, is more method than miracle. The first myth Mr. Newman challenges is the romantic notion that isolation breeds originality. Retreating to a personal Walden, he suggests, may smother creativity rather than fuel it. Isolating ourselves from colleagues, acquaintances and the wider world severs what sociologists call our weak ties, the people outside of our circle of close family and friends who tend to be the conduits of fresh ideas. As important, Mr. Newman argues, is what happens once those ideas surface: submitting them to the scrutiny of others, whose feedback often sharpens what solitary effort cannot. Mr. Newman also dispels the belief that great ideas are entirely new. In practice, he argues, many innovations grow out of existing ones, often by borrowing or transplanting concepts from one field to another.”
