Matt Rickard

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Is Data Still a Moat?
“Data is the new oil” was the slogan of the last decade. Companies were told how valuable their data was (or could be). They rushed to invest in a…
2
Multi-Modal AI is a UX Problem
Transformers and other AI breakthroughs have shown state-of-the-art performance across different modalities Text-to-Text (OpenAI ChatGPT) Text-to-Image…
Observer-Expectancy at Scale
In 1968, a group of teachers and students participated in a psychology study. The students were given an IQ test by the researchers. The results were…
2
LLMs as System 1 Thinkers
The distinction between fast and slow thinking, or system 1 and system 2 thinking, made popular by Daniel Kahneman’s book *Thinking Fast and Slow…
5
The Fundamental Attribution Error
The fundamental attribution error is our tendency to (wrongly) attribute the behaviors of others to internal, personal characteristics and our own…
3
Good Enough Abstractions
Markdown isn’t a perfect abstraction. In fact, when it was initially released (2004), the spec (if it could even be called that) was so ambiguous that…
1
Automate (But Automate Last)
Besides black art, there is only automation and mechanization. — Federico García Lorca In 2018, Musk was trying to ramp up production in his Tesla…
1
AI Biographers
I just finished the Musk biography by Isaacson. It was a good read with original reporting that I had never read before. Musk is a complicated figure…
10
Customized End-User Software (with AI)
The web is no longer as programmable as it was, but there’s still hope for end-user software. And AI might bridge the gap. Excel is one of the world’s…
Five Principles from Renaissance Technologies
Renaissance Technologies (“Ren Tech”) is one of the world's most successful and secretive hedge funds. It was founded by Jim Simons, a mathematician…
2
Moving Upmarket
Product-led growth and bottoms-up distribution can be a very powerful business model. Dropbox was a poster child of both. Besides being a product that…
1
The Age-old Resistance to Generated Code
“AI-generated code is making me a worse developer.” “GitHub Copilot code is riddled with bugs.” “Generated code is way less efficient than something I…
3
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