there are 9 posts from June 2024
handicapped
Golf Distillery’s guide to handicaps:
The handicap index is a one-decimal number used to compare golfers regardless of where they play golf or which sets of tees they use. A golfer with a low handicap index will be better than a golfer with a high one. Very good golfers whose handicap index is better than 0 are assigned a + sign in front of their index number. For example, a golfer with a handicap of +2.0 should score better than one with a handicap index of 2.0, and much better than one with 10.0.
Richard Haass, Handicap:
It is tragic that things were allowed to reach this point. Biden should not be the Democratic candidate. He should have announced sometime in early 2023 that he would not stand for a second term. Yes, that would have made him a lame duck, but it also would have given him the ability to do the right thing about the border and the Middle East without having to worry about how activists in the Democratic Party would have reacted. … The critical difference between Biden and both Bush 41 and Carter is that Biden would be losing to someone who constitutes a grave threat to an American democracy that has served this country well for close to 250 years and a world order that has served this country well for 75 years. If Biden loses to Trump in November, it would overshadow all of his achievements over the past four years and define his legacy. To allow it to happen would be irresponsible and unforgivable. If democracy is truly on the ballot, as Biden and his campaign often argue, then he owes it to the country to step aside.
The question is whether Biden has the self-awareness to realize how devastating his debate performance was and to step aside. My guess is that he’s not even close to it. My heart sank yet again when I saw a clip of him thanking supporters immediately after the debate, and he was gracious and optimistic — exactly as if he hadn’t just spent the previous hour-and-a-half struggling to get to the end of his sentences in full view of 100 million Americans. The only hope is for the people who have any possible influence over him — let’s say Barack and Michelle Obama, Jill Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, maybe the Clintons — to sit down with him in the Oval Office and break the hard news to him. They can wait for the next round of polling to come out — if there’s a swing of five or even ten points against Biden, as there may well be, there’s a chance that that can get through to Biden. For the sake of the country, I hope it’s ten points — whatever it takes to get the message across. And it does have to happen very, very soon. The point is that the Democrats have a losing hand right now. There is no other shoe that will drop between now and November — Trump is not going to go prison or drop dead, Biden will not magically rejuvenate. The only thing to do is to reshuffle the deck, but it will take Biden to do that and Biden won’t do it unless he is very firmly pushed.
Counterpoint from Heather Cox Richardson:
Immediately after the debate, there were calls for Biden to drop out of the race, but aside from the fact that the only time a presidential candidate has ever done that—in 1968—it threw the race into utter confusion and the president’s party lost, Biden needed to demonstrate that his mental capacity is strong in order to push back on the Republicans’ insistence that he is incapable of being president. That, he did, thoroughly. Biden began with a weak start but hit his stride as the evening wore on. Indeed, he covered his bases too thoroughly, listing the many accomplishments of his administration in such a hurry that he was sometimes hard to understand.
What a fucking mess.
Conor Niland, who used to be the number one tennis player in Ireland, on being “at the bottom of the top” of professional tennis. I loved this bit about seeing Andre Agassi at an ATP event in San Jose…
“Can we get you anything, Andre?” the gaggle circling him asked earnestly. “Uh, sure, I’ll have some water,” he replied half-heartedly, even though he was standing a few paces from a fridge full of bottled water. He wanted to give them something to do. One of them was dispatched and quickly came back with a plastic glass full of chilled water. Andre took a small sip and put it down on the table beside him, the one I was sitting at. He didn’t pick it back up. After a few moments, Andre and his entourage moved on.
If you like Niland’s piece, and you’re even mildly into tennis, then you should absolutely read Andre Agassi’s autobiography, Open. The opening chapter (“The End”), has this brilliant bit:
It’s no accident, I think, that tennis uses the language of life. Advantage, service, fault, break, love, the basic elements of tennis are those of everyday existence, because every match is a life in miniature. Even the structure of tennis, the way the pieces fit inside one another like Russian nesting dolls, mimics the structure of our days. Points become games become sets become tournaments, and it’s all so tightly connected that any point can become the turning point. It reminds me of the way seconds become minutes become hours, and any hour can be our finest. Or darkest. It’s our choice.
Consider this your friendly reminder that Wimbledon kicks off on Monday; any point can become the turning point.
three book recommendations
It’s officially hot book summer; here are three things I’ve read recently and absolutely loved, because it turns out that every book is a beach book.
Moonbound, by Robin Sloan. Robin was kind enough to gift me an advance reader copy of his new novel, so I finished it a bit ahead of some friends of mine (#humblebrag). Set 10,000 years in the future, after the decline of human civilization (“the Anth”), it’s a delightfully weird take on the Arthurian legend, a hero’s journey through a strangely evolved planet that features talking beavers, multi-dimensional math, and a battle with AI “dragons” with a very unlikely narrator.
X and Y and Z, along with time, are sufficient for billiard balls and booster rockets-simple things. But real life, the complexity of it, demands more. This was our discovery: the world, like a sponge, will soak up as many dimensions as you provide.
Eastbound, by Maylis de Kerangal, translated by Jessica Moore. This brief novel (137 small pages – you might miss it on the bookshelf, or lose it in your beach bag!) follows two AWOL travelers on the Trans-Siberian Express: Aliocha, a deserting Russian soldier, and Hélène, a Frenchwoman who has left her Russian lover. They can’t speak, and yet there are sentences like this one…
In the end, whether it was this young man or a bear stretched out there, it would amount to the same thing, the same enormity, as though the real was suddenly crumbling, subverted by powerful dreams or completely other substances capable of catalyzing metamorphoses, as though the real was tearing apart under the pressure of faint but immutalbe deviations, something far bigger, far stronger than it – but no, there are no dreams in Hélène’s head, no drugs in her blood, the young man is well and truly there – indeed, he is the real, the tangible present moment of life, here, breathing with his mouth open a little, body rising and falling imperceptibly with each breath, and if she were to place a hand on him, on his pale and downy cheek, on his shoulder, she knows she would feel him alive, he would stir, open and eye and wake up.
The Best Minds, by Jonathan Rosen. What does it mean to be a friend? And what does it mean to be a friend with someone suffering from schizophrenia? And what happens when that friend stabs his girlfriend to death with a kitchen knife?
You would have to be very ignorant about schizophrenia, as I certainly was, and deluded about writing, as I continued to be, to think that telling the story of your struggle with psychosis could turn it into a past-tense affliction, like sorrow transmuted into words.
no i don't have a substack...
…but I finally wired up an email newsletter, powered by Buttondown, to automatically deliver new sippey.com posts to your inbox if that’s how you roll. Learn more at sippey.com/subscribe.
two by two
Long time readers know I love a good 2x2. After all, two of my most read blog posts feature them; one here on sippey.com, and one that’s been unceremoniously deleted from blog.twitter.com. LOL.
Which is why I absolutely LOVED Noah Brier’s deep dive into the history of the 2x2 at Why is this Interesting. From Igor Ansoff at RAND, to Boston Consulting Group to Clayton Christensen’s passionate defense of the form in 1997, Brier lays it all out.
While it may seem silly to spend this amount of time diving into the concept of the 2x2 rather than the content of some of the most famous matrices, in this case, I think the medium is the message. Strategy is far too often disconnected from execution and simple tools like 2x2 matrix attempt to make it more accessible and therefore more easily acted upon by individuals within an organization.
Emphasis mine.
Cal Newport compares ultra-processed food to ultra-processed content:
This analogy between food and media is useful because it helps us better understand responses to the latter. In the context of nutrition, we’re comfortable deciding to largely avoid ultra-processed food for health reasons.
…
This is how we should think about the ultra-processed content delivered so relentlessly through our screens. To bypass these media for less processed alternatives should no longer be seen as bold, or radical, or somehow reactionary. It’s just a move toward a self-evidently more healthy relationship with information.
National treasure Matt Levine on Safe Superintelligence:
OpenAI was founded to build artificial general intelligence safely, free of outside commercial pressures. And now every once in a while it shoots out a new AI firm whose mission is to build artificial general intelligence safely, free of the commercial pressures at OpenAI.
Via Simon Willison, Nikhil Suresh, I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again:
Most organizations cannot ship the most basic applications imaginable with any consistency, and you’re out here saying that the best way to remain competitive is to roll out experimental technology that is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than anything else your I.T department runs, which you have no experience hiring for, when the organization has never used a GPU for anything other than junior engineers playing video games with their camera off during standup, and even if you do that all right there is a chance that the problem is simply unsolvable due to the characteristics of your data and business? This isn’t a recipe for disaster, it’s a cookbook for someone looking to prepare a twelve course fucking catastrophe.
Neven Mrgn, How it feels to get an AI email from a friend:
It felt like the episode of Mrs. Maisel where Midge discovers that her husband’s comedy act features stolen Bob Newhart jokes.
Dynomight delivers 43 pieces of Obvious Travel Advice:
Time seems to speed up as you get older. And you wonder—is it biological, or is it because life had more novelty when you were a child? Travel partly answers this question—with more novelty, time slows way down again.
Finally, Phil Hazleden reviews The Iliad:
So I got basically no sense of what it was like to be on the battlefield. How large was it? How closely packed are people during fighting? How long does it take to strip someone of their armor and why isn’t it a virtual guarantee that someone else will stab you while you do? The logistics of the war are a mystery to me too: how many Greeks are there and where do they get all their food? We’re told how many ships each of the commanders brought, but how many soldiers and how many servants to a ship?
Steven Johnson on the capabilities of NotebookLM, and some of the interesting skills requried to get the most out of LLMs:
The core skills are not just about straight prompt engineering; they’re not just about figuring out the most efficient wording to get the model to do what you want. They also draw on deeper, more nuanced questions. What is the most responsible behavior to cultivate in the model, and how do we best deploy this technology in the real world to maximize its positive impact? What new forms of intelligence or creativity can we detect in these strange entities? How do we endow them with a moral compass, or steer them away from bias and inaccurate stereotypes? Can language alone generate a robust theory of how the world works, or do you need more explicit rules or additional sensory information?
Related, Maggie Appleton’s (gorgeous) presentation at the Local-first Conference in Berlin, Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers:
We first need language model agents that are designed to act as central orchestrators for home-cooked software projects. These agents can guide barefoot developers through the process of writing technical specifications and help them work out what kinds of tools they might need for a piece of software.
Sam Kahn makes an argument Against Stories:
When I read most work that’s out now — let alone most movies — what I see, basically, is fear. A fear of boring an audience. A fear of alienating an audience. And so there’s an obsession with a clever style. There’s an obsession above all with economy — with making sure that there is nothing extraneous in a work of art, nothing that detracts from the optimized story structure.
Craig Mod on his latest walk, this time through Bali. I love Craig’s writing, because so much of it is drum-tight; this one is loose and free, deliberately so. All of it is worth reading, but here’s my favorite sentence:
Us, a bunch of overachievers laid flat by jungle encroachment, sharing chocolate snacks and fruit and crackers and smokes against panoramic backdrops on an IMAX scale.
Greg Allen, Moby Dick is My Moby Dick:
I want a first edition of Moby Dick, but I think the psychic price of actually ever buying one will be too high.
Noah Kalina’s series of photographs Protect the Network.
We’ve all seen this. It happens everywhere. The trees trimmed to protect the wires. … I was curious about what goes into the pruning and maintenance of these trees, so I reached out to the person whose title is “Manager, Vegetation Management” at my local utility company.
He and designer Pablo Declan have published that correspondence and the photographs in a limited edition zine. Instant order.
Rebind recipe: combine one part Project Gutenberg, one part Chat GPT, two parts Masterclass, add a healthy dash of pretense, mix well. I don’t buy the “director’s commentary” metaphor (the Rebind experts, like John Banville, aren’t the “directors” in this movie), but I am really into using LLMs to help people dig deeper into difficult material.
Related: I hadn’t really been paying attention to Authors Equity, but in his newsletter a few days ago James Clear (author of Atomic Habits and an investor in Authors Equity) announced that Seth Godin is publishing his next book there, and Joseph Nguyen signed with them to distribute his best selling Don’t Believe Everything You Think. The biggest difference between AE and traditional publishers? Profit sharing. From their FAQ: “We work with a joint venture/profit share model, paying no advance but offering a much higher per-unit payout to the authors we work with.”