The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius Quote: "I’ve always liked Hamming’s famous double-barrelled question: what are the most important problems in your field, and why aren’t you working on one of them? It’s a great way to shake yourself up. But it may be overfitting a bit. It might be at least as useful to ask yourself: if you could take a year off to work on something that probably wouldn’t be important but would be really interesting, what would it be?" (categories: ideasinnovationtimefocus )
Better presentations through storytelling and STAR moments Quote: "Every talk should start with an AIM: Audience, Intent, Message. Who are the audience for the talk? What do you intend to achieve by giving the presentation? With those two things in mind, you can construct the message—the actual content of the talk. Try to include at least one STAR moment—Something They’ll Always Remember. This can be a gimmick, a repeated theme, a well-selected video or audio clip. Something to help the talk stand out. The human brain is incredibly attuned to stories. If you can find an excuse to tell a story, no matter how thin that excuse is, take it." (categories: presentationsstoryspeaking )
A Failed SaaS Postmortem · Matt Layman Quote: "Where I was horribly wrong was in thinking that Ember and Semantic were the only pieces of new technology that I needed. The list was so much longer and included: Datadog for infrastructure monitoring. DigitalOcean for virtual machine hosting. Django REST Framework for APIs. Drip for marketing email campaigns. Jekyll for the marketing site. JSON API as a communication protocol. Let’s Encrypt for TLS certificates. Mailgun for transactional emails. Mixpanel for behavior analysis. Rollbar for error tracking. Segment for data aggregation. Stripe for recurring payments. wal-e for database backups. webpack for JavaScript asset bundling" (categories: innovation-tokenstechnology )
Many Strategies Fail Because They’re Not Actually Strategies Quote: "A real strategy involves a clear set of choices that define what the firm is going to do and what it’s not going to do. Many strategies fail to get implemented, despite the ample efforts of hard-working people, because they do not represent a set of clear choices." (categories: businessstrategydecision-making )
The problem with metrics is a big problem for AI · fast.ai Quote: "A recent Harvard Business Review article looked at Wells Fargo as a case study of how letting metrics replace strategy can harm a business. After identifying cross-selling as a measure of long-term customer relationships, Wells Fargo went overboard emphasizing the cross-selling metric: intense pressure on employees combined with an unethical sales culture led to 3.5 million fraudulent deposit and credit card accounts being opened without customers’ consent. " (categories: aialgorithmsanalyticsmetrics )
MIT-STS-AI-snakeoil.pdf Quote: "AI is already at or beyond human accuracy in all the tasks on this slide and is continuing to get better rapidly. The fundamental reason for progress is that there is no uncertainty or ambiguity in these tasks — given two images of faces, there’s ground truth about whether or not they represent the same person. So, given enough data and compute, AI will learn the patterns that distinguish one face from another." (categories: aialgorithmalgorithmsmachinelearning )