Matt Rickard

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Pseudonyms in American History
Debates around the ratification of the Constitution and the early formation of the United States happened through pseudonymous authors. They often used…
1
Fairchildren
In 1956, William Shockley, Stanford professor and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on semiconductors, recruited a team of young Ph.D…
1
ChatGPT After One Year
ChatGPT was released on November 30th 2022. What has changed since then?
1
McNamara Fallacy
The McNamara Fallacy is named after Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War. The fallacy describes making decisions using…
1
Data Quality in LLMs
Good data is the difference between Mistral’s LLMs and Llama, which share similar architectures but different datasets.

November 2023

Discord and AI GTM
Midjourney is the largest discord server, with 16.5 million total users. It accounts for 13% of total Discord traffic. Midjourney launched in March 2022…
1
Standard Causes of Human Misjudgment (Munger)
In 1995, Charlie Munger gave a speech at Harvard on The Psychology of Human Misjudgment. It was filled with the research he had done later in life on…
5
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Monte Carlo
Monte Carlo methods are used in almost every branch of science: to evaluate risk in finance, to generate realistic lighting and shadows in 3D graphics…
Razor and Blades Model
The profit margin on Keurig machines is very low and sometimes even negative. On the other hand, the K-cup coffee pods have much higher profit margins.
1
Drawbacks of Moving to the Edge
Edge runtimes are often lauded as a fix to all latency concerns. But sometimes, moving to the edge can increase latency. The problem: databases are…
1
Are Things Getting Worse?
Cory Doctorow called it “enshittification”. Are things getting worse?
5
How AI Changes Workflows
GitHub recently said it was “re-founding” itself on Copilot instead of git. GitHub has always been about the workflow — there are plenty of other hosted…
1
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