🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 154

July 18th, 2024

Jul 19, 2024

Episode 154 — July 18th, 2024 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/154

Contributors to this issue: Ade Oshineye, Stefano Mazzocchi, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Dimitri Glazkov, Neel Mehta, MK, Boris Smus

Additional insights from: Ben Mathes, Justin Quimby, Alex Komoroske, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Julka Almquist, Scott Schaffter, Lisie Lillianfeld, Samuel Arbesman, Dart Lindsley, Jon Lebensold, Melanie Kahl, Kamran Hakiman, Chris Butler

We’re a ragtag band of systems thinkers who have been dedicating our early mornings to finding new lenses to help you make sense of the complex world we live in. This newsletter is a collection of patterns we’ve noticed in recent weeks.

“Plans can break down. You cannot plan the future. Only presumptuous fools plan. The wise man steers.”
— Terry Pratchett

🌪️🌅 Grounding, granding, grinding moments

We can get stuck in our own heads, overwhelmed by day-to-day concerns: work, family, traffic, finances, and everything else. However, life periodically jolts us out of this tunnel vision, presenting us with events of such magnitude that they temporarily shatter our routine preoccupations.

These grounding moments vary widely. They might be grand and joyful, like the birth of a grandchild. They might threaten to grind us down, like losing a job or a loved one. Initially, these events consume all our mental capacity, forcing us to adapt to a new state of being. As we get to that new state, we get back to “normal”, where everyday concerns flood back in, filling all mental space around us like water. But before they do, there might be a fleeting moment of peace — a chance to reset and reorient. We don’t always get to have this moment. It might be too brief or absent altogether, rolled up into the whirlwind of events surrounding the main event. This is why when we do sense them, it is worth sitting in them. These moments provide brief windows of clarity where our mental fog dissipates, allowing us to perceive our lives from a more expansive vantage point.

When what preceded this moment of rest was joyful, like the birth of a grandchild, the moment of peace can feel anticlimactic, like coming down from an exhilarating high. The initial euphoria and excitement eventually give way to a quieter, more contemplative state. Conversely, when the event is sorrowful, such as losing a loved one, the pause can feel like climbing out of a dark hole. The initial grief and overwhelming sadness are intense, but as you emerge from the depths of despair, you find a quieter, more open space. With its many origins, this moment of rest is not necessarily better or worse. It is just still.

Such a moment allows us to pause, breathe, and reorient ourselves. Embracing this stillness, even briefly, can help us return to our daily lives with a renewed perspective and a deeper sense of grounding. Soon, the needs and concerns of everyday life will return. However, if we can sit with that moment of stillness, we may be able to bring a broader and more creative perspective back to the daily hustle.

🛣️🚩 Signposts

Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.

🚏👻 Apple tech bloggers were “zombified” when their blog was revived with AI

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), a popular gadgets blog from the late aughts, shut down in 2015. An ‘online advertising agency’ recently bought the domain name, though without the rights to the original content — so they revived the site by using AI to rewrite archived copies of the original posts. They kept the original authors’ bylines but replaced their pictures with AI-generated images. (Once this story went viral, the new owners quietly replaced the authors’ names with generic ones like “Mary Brown” and “Matthew Wilson.”)

🚏🔋 California credited its renewable energy buildout for helping it survive a heat wave

California’s power grid escaped the state’s recent three-week-long heat wave “relatively unscathed”; officials have been praising the state’s years of investment in renewable energy, including huge batteries that could store that energy and help smooth out power demand. The batteries “were charged and ready at the right times for optimization on the grid,” according to one official. All in all, the Golden State is now home to “the most grid batteries in the world outside of China.”

🚏📐 Microsoft created an LLM that specializes in spreadsheets

In a new preprint paper, a team from Microsoft unveiled ‘SpreadsheetLLM’: a model that can deal with 2D grids of data with varying data types and formats, a realm that language models have historically struggled with. The team used a new compression method for tabular data that accounts for sparse matrices, the relationships between neighboring cells, and identical cells that can be merged. This compression algorithm can reduce token usage for a spreadsheet-related task by 96%, and the authors say it “improves performance in spreadsheet table detection” (a fundamental first step toward taking actions on the spreadsheet) by 25.6% compared to standard GPT-4.

🚏🌎 Climate change is making days a tiny bit longer

The increased melting of the polar ice caps has been shifting water from the poles to the world’s oceans, which, on average, means that water is migrating closer to the equator. This has made the Earth fatter around the middle, thus slowing the rotation of the planet. The rate of slowing has accelerated from between 0.3 and 1 millisecond per century to about 1.3 ms/century; it’s not a lot, but GPS, telecom, and timekeeping systems have to account for small shifts like these. (The redistribution of water has also shifted Earth’s axis of rotation.)

📖⏳ Worth your time

Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.

We Need Visual Programming. Not Like That. (Sebastian Bensusan) — Argues that there’s a reason why drag-and-drop, flowchart-style programming has never taken off: programmers do want visual information about their applications, but they want higher-level overviews rather than nitty-gritty visualizations of individual lines of code. It’d be particularly useful if we could auto-generate graphics like network topologies, source code maps, memory layout diagrams, and state machine flowcharts.
My First BillG Review (Joel on Software) — Joel Spolsky tells the story of an intimidating product pitch meeting he had with Bill Gates and reflects on the importance of having technical people run software companies. While the typical MBA “believes that management is a generic function,” Spolsky thinks it’s foolish “to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand.”
How Actors Remember Their Lines (The MIT Press Reader) — Observes that repeating items over and over, called maintenance rehearsal, is not as effective as elaborative rehearsal, in which actors focus their attention on the meaning of the material, imagining each character in detail, relating their lines to their backgrounds and moods, and learning to respond naturally.
How Physicists Finally Solved the Feynman Sprinkler Problem (Dr. Ben Miles) — Illustrates how experimental physicists solved a simple problem that had stumped scientists for a century: if a sprinkler’s heads suck in water instead of blasting it out, what direction does it spin in? The solution required looking at an unexpected part of the system, and while it might not be generalizable, the mechanism involved is fascinating.

🔍🍩 Lens of the week

Introducing new ways to see the world and new tools to add to your mental arsenal.

This week’s lens: topological transformations.

How is a donut like a mug? No, the answer isn’t coffee. Topologically, a donut and a coffee mug are equivalent: they both have a single hole. You can mathematically transform one to another through operations that one can think of as being like stretching, twisting, or bending… but not doing anything that changes the continuity within a surface. Topological transformations, more technically called topological homomorphisms, can change nearly everything about a geometric object but leave fundamental properties in place.

This idea of topological transformations can be applied more broadly. Two very different metaphors can share the same insights: gears and ocean waves show how rhythmic, repetitive motion can create more complicated effects on a larger scale. This superficial equivalence is incredibly flattening. Who cares if gears and waves both generate larger patterns? They are otherwise dissimilar. Who cares that a mug is topologically equivalent to a donut? They’re so different in so many other ways.

Nevertheless, this flattening provides focus and potential insight. Understanding how one thing transforms into another can reveal more profound insights into the nature of the subject of our examination, and this can help us see how to transform it from one state — perhaps a state we consider problematic — to another, more tractable state. What is critical in a topological transformation is honoring those fundamental properties that must be preserved.

For instance, a series of reorgs that end up back in the same structure may look wasteful. Still, the interim transformations may have unlocked new potential, surfaced new data, or created new relationships. This can be an effective strategy if it can be done without losing valuable parts of the organization along the way.

Like last week’s exploration of data and models, we should not take this flattening view too far. However, used thoughtfully, the idea that we can transform between disparate things while preserving key properties can be a way to find creative solutions that we would not uncover if we had to keep all the complexity in mind. This can enable us to ‘unknot’ systems (or resolve puzzles) by transforming them, solving the problem in a new, easier form, and then transforming them back with the solution preserved in the resulting structure.

🌀🗞 The FLUX Review