I’ve enjoyed Chris Arnade’s photography and his writing from his various travels around the world. He takes a somewhat unique approach of just walking - a lot - in whatever town or city he’s visiting. I’m always struck by the seeming serendipty of the encounters - chance meetings with locals with interesting stories he would definitely not have met traveling a more touristy way.
He recently wrote a piece about how he travels. Some good tips there, and an important reminder that even serendipity (or luck, if you will) requires right conditions to happen. He encourages those conditions with good planning - a lesson for all of us trying to create serendipity in other ways - innovation, invention, discovery. You can “plan” the conditions, even if you can’t plan the discovery itself.
- How to Travel: The piece I mentioned above.
- Chris Arnade: In case you want to know more about Mr. Arnade, whose backstory is also interesting.
- Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America: His book featuring his photography and the stories he’s collected along the way as he walked across various parts of the US. (affiliate link)
Reads
- Warren Craddock on Twitter - a thread: A Twitter thread on how culture can doom a startup from someone who worked on Lytro, Google Glass, and more.
- Meta’s flagship metaverse app is too buggy and employees are barely using it, says exec in charge: Speaking of organizations where culture may be getting in the way of some hard conversations…
Code & Tools
- Amazon EC2 Trn1 Instances for High-Performance Model Training are Now Available: Amazon rolling out a new instance type focused on ML training. I just like the name - Trainium. :) 800Gbps networking is a mind blowing number…
- Prefixed API Keys: A neat idea on structuring API keys. Lots of feedback in the linked Hacker News Thread.
- Interior.ai: Take a photo of your current room, and get interior decorating ideas rendered into the photograph by a generative model.
- Phenaki: Generative AI for creating videos from text.
- Imagen from Google Research: Same thing, different team and implementation. Generative models are the new research hotness.
