I felt a slight rumble while standing at my desk today. No big deal, a very small earthquake, it felt like a subway was passing under our apartment. Only, we don’t have a subway under us. Tyler came in to say his girlfriend texted from the Lower East Side to say she felt it too. Nothing big, it really was just a gentle rumble. I found out later it was a 4.8, which, as someone who has lived in Japan and California is barely enough to interrupt a conversation.
But anything that happens to the citizens of the Tri-State Area, Media Capitol of the Universe, is worthy of an all points bulletin. All local TV stations freaked out and interrupted regular programming for the next couple of hours for breaking news coverage. As with all live coverage, the disaster playbook told everyone to go full-court press, and send everyone out to interview people and experts and, of course, look for damage and casualties.
“Lots of people shook up, recovering, 10-15 seconds of pure terror!”
I wonder if they’ll give this story any airtime on the national TV news tonight.
The SXSW conference in Austin, Texas is overwhelming. The sheer number of keynotes, sessions, branding pop-ups (aka “activations”), movie premiers, concerts and satellite activities make it impossible to catch it all. With over 1,500 events just on the schedule, it took me a couple of hours just to browse through what was available before I could even try to plan how to spend the limited time I had each day. Many attendees spoke of an intense FOMO as there was no way to hit everything there was to see in any comprehensive way.
That said, here are a few tips I picked up over the years (2024 was my 4th South By) that I hope help you get the most out of this annual smorgasbord of ideas and culture.
Watch your inbox and browse the schedule and program as soon as it’s available. I made the mistake of waiting until the flight down to Austin to begin to browse the program and spent most of the flight just trying to narrow things down to a subset of things that I wanted to see. Use the “favorite” star to build your schedule because you’re going to want to have that subset readily available when plans shift (as they always do).
Download the mobile app and add it to your first screen. You’re going to be using it A LOT.
Each day you get four Express Passes that can be used to shortcut your way to the front of the line at busy sessions or talks. These passes can be applied to reserve your space at events the following day at 9am the day before. For example, Monday’s events open up at 9am Sunday morning. The most popular events go almost immediately, Taylor Swift ticketmaster style, so you’ll want to be ready to swoop in on events that you think will go fast to claim a spot quickly. Sessions are 10-11, 11:30-12:30, 2-3 and 4-5 so plan which event you want to go to in each of these slots ahead of time. Make use of the “favorites” mentioned earlier so you can quickly browse your 2nd and 3rd choices for a slot should your first choice fill up.
Be sure to drop by the temporary bookstore set up in the Austin Convention Center where you can pick up hard to find books related to sessions at the conference, some even autographed by the author.
Sold out RSVPs sometimes open up later. If there is a workshop you want to go to that requires an RSVP and is full, check back later in the day as these sometimes open up as people cancel.
There is way more than just what is on the schedule. Be sure to ask about the Unofficial SXSW Master Slide Event List and other event listings such as Blprnt, a local Austin events app, and Eventbrite for last minute events that are not on the official schedule.
Do NOT limit yourself to just the sessions. Be sure to check out a film, some stand-up comedy, and a concert. There is stuff happening all over Austin and SXSW is your chance to get outside your comfort zone and discover something new. Almost everything is with walking distance or a short scooter ride so the time invested to check something out is minimal.
If you want to get away from the South By scene, walk all the way up Congress and tucked behind the Texas state capitol you’ll find Texas Chili Parlor where you can pull up a seat at the bar and have a bowl of venison chili and a bottle of Shiner to set you straight.
My favorite place to grab a breakfast migas taco is at Veracruz in The Line hotel. While I’m at it, The Line is also a chill hotel and has a nice cafe as well.
If you want to eat brisket, skip breakfast and have an early lunch after the 10-11 session. I went two days without BBQ because the lines to Iron Works or Coopers in Downtown Austin were out the door and down the street. Go around 11:15 and you’ll have the place to yourself.
A crowd spontaneously turned on a Waymo robot car when it tried to push its way through a Chinese New Year’s crowd in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
So there were fireworks happening – pretty fun night and folks watching the fireworks. Every now and then traffic would build up and the crowd would make way for it to clear.
There was a small traffic holdup with waymo at the front of it. Then someone in a white hoodie jumped on the hood of the car and literally WWE styel K/O’d the windshield & broke it.
The crowd was shocked. People started paying attention and gathered around. Nothing happened for another 30 seconds until someone else jumped on the hood.
Then a group of people joined in affirming the behavior w/ positive feedback. Clapping etc.
That was when it went WILD. People with skateboards breaking the glass, and others graffitiing the car.
Now, more than ever, Silicon Valley should be paying attention. We all should. Because the torching of the Waymo car may well prove to be a turning point. If no one in power is going to listen to the growing chorus of people shouting their fears that big tech has concentrated too much wealth, influence, and control over their lives — or to the legion of New Luddites organizing against the excesses of Amazon, generative AI giants, and self-driving car companies — then this smoldering husk of an AI-driven robot may merely be the first.
I’m as guilty as anyone of the careless typo but sometimes the stakes are higher and it really pays to double-check your work.
There was this post from Friday last week in the Financial Times’ Alphaville,
Last year, Norway’s $1.5tn sovereign wealth fund revealed that it had lost NKr980mn, roughly $92mn, on an error relating to how it calculated its mandated benchmark.
Less than an hour after issuing the statement, Lyft Chief Financial Officer Erin Brewer joined a call with analysts and said the company is actually expecting adjusted earnings margins, calculated as a percentage of bookings, to expand by 50 basis points — not 500 — acknowledging, when asked by an analyst, that the press release was incorrect.
OpenAI’s DevDay keynote had the look and feel of all Silicon Valley product announcements – a well-scripted parade of announcements, a couple live demos, and even a “one more thing” that is revealed with low-key fanfare but, by it’s placement at the end of the talk, signals to the world that this is the game-changer.
That thing was the app store for custom AI chatbots. To make it easier to grok and talk about, OpenAI has co-opted the acronym for the rather technical mouthful that is “Generative Pre-trained Transformers” and made it into a product name. Custom versions of ChatGPT are now GPTs. This makes it easier for the broader public to understand and makes it a whole lot easier for marketers to fold into their campaigns in the same way, “There’s an App for that” became a catch phrase for Apple’s app ecosystem, I can see “Just GPT it!” becoming a verb for leveraging AI to do some grunt work for you.
That’s my 30,000 foot view before diving in and playing around more. Stratechery has a much more informed deep dive on the significance of what was announced and I recommend reading Ben Thompson’s analysis which includes important observations around the significance of OpenAI using Microsoft’s infrastructure and what that partnership means for the market going forward.
As a teaser, I found this passage thought-provoking,
This has two implications. First, while this may have been OpenAI’s first developer conference, I remain unconvinced that OpenAI is going to ever be a true developer-focused company. I think that was Altman’s plan, but reality in the form of ChatGPT intervened: ChatGPT is the most important consumer-facing product since the iPhone, making OpenAI The Accidental Consumer Tech Company. That, by extension, means that integration will continue to matter more than modularization, which is great for Microsoft’s compute stack and maybe less exciting for developers.
“This changing weather pattern is the result of climate change, and the sad reality is our climate is changing faster than our infrastructure can respond.”
The Mayor asked citizens to unclog any drains to help drain the streets. Some places were so inundated with water that the drains turned into full on whirlpools
New York City is starting to prepare for storm surges by constructing enormous sea walls around the perimeter of Manhattan. It gives me Game of Thrones vibes.
It’s ten feet high and set a bit inland; instead of hugging the waterline precisely, it approximately traces the outer rail of the FDR, perhaps 30 or 40 paces from the shoreline for much of its length. For those skeptical that a wall can stop the force of a coastal storm surge, there’s more to the gates than what’s aboveground: The foundations go deep and incorporate waterproof barriers to stop water from seeping past them from below. Their design life is specified at 100 years. They have enough structural strength to support an added three feet of height on top, should the worst projections of sea rise come into play. But it’s worth keeping in mind that they are meant to protect against one kind of storm but not another. They won’t be able to do anything about the immensely heavy rainstorms we’re now getting, including Ophelia, the storm we just had in late September. The gates weren’t closed for Ophelia, because that flooding came from above, not across.
John Battelle has a wonderful reminisce about what’s lost as information moves from analog to digital. He specifically writes about the college course catalog and what’s lost as these guides have moved online in Digital is Killing Serendipity. In the comments, I shared an experience I had with a printed catalog at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and found there was more I wanted to share about that experience so here we are.
In the ’90s, I toured Europe by bicycle and one evening rolled into Edinburgh, Scotland during a three week festival called Festival Fringe. I did not know it at the time (I had to ask why all the hostels were booked solid) but this is the largest performing arts festival in the world. For three weeks there are literally hundreds of performances of stand up comedy, theater, dance, musicals, opera, children’s plays, spoken word, circus acts, street performers and everything else.
What inspired me to share this story is that my entry into the Fringe performances was via their printed catalog which was found in stacks around town. The guide was the size of a small phone book and had hundreds of entries with details of the where/what but also a few lines written (usually by the performer or producer) to entice people to come. As someone who has spent many long days solo, on the road, I was gobsmacked at the richness of what was on offer and overwhelmed with choice.
Festival Fringe programme entry, 1994
I was in town for three days and I realized I had spend most of the morning of the first day just reading the guide. In some effort to give my days a rhythm and theme, I went to the index (which was also a wonder in its variety) and chose “Vincent Van Gogh.” Over the course of three days, I was going to see several plays about Vincent Van Gogh.
Being a lone traveler it was easier to meet people and during those three days I had the chance to fall in with a group of Australian performers that had an excess of energy and talent. They were in town for a performance but they wanted to do something else on the side. The idea was they wanted to put on a cabaret to curate and showcase all the talent that was in town. One of them had a friend that had a space with a stage that was empty during the day so all we needed to do was line up some talent and we could sell tickets at the door.
Each of us pulled in people we had met during our stay. One guy had his haircut by a barber that told hilarious jokes so he was invited, I invited a busker who was popular around town, others performed short bits from their plays or performances as teasers for their scheduled acts.
I forgot what we called this extemporaneous cabaret show and couldn’t even tell you where the venue was but I do remember having the best time because the whole thing was totally chaotic in a wonderfully theatrical way. The audience was part of it, we all wanted to make it work. The show must go on! I remember a bunch of burly rugby guys were in the front row and getting antsy because the barber got stage fright and the punchlines to his jokes were falling flat. One of our group ran on stage and explained that he was actually really funny and, perhaps, if anyone would like to come up on stage to get their hair trimmed for free, it might calm the barber’s nerves so he could deliver his jokes. It worked brilliantly, the rugby team calmed down and someone got a free haircut.
On another night, I was in a pub and the band didn’t show up or maybe the electricity went out. Anyway there was no music or entertainment. Somebody jumped into the fray and started reciting a sports commentary of an entire soccer match of as if it were live. I don’t know if he was reciting a famous match from memory or just making it up as he went but as he described the skillful blocks of the back line, pinpoint passes and near misses hitting the crossbar in such wonderful detail that the entire audience in the pub was right there with him, “oohing” an “ahhing” at each turn it up as we could all see in our collective mind exactly what he was describing. Somebody later borrowed a couple of spoons and made music for awhile and, of course, there was singing. It was a night to remember, one reminding me that humanity is always able to entertain itself.
There were so many things I experienced during those three days in Edinburgh and the printed catalog was my trusty guide the whole time. There were things happening all around me and I loved the fact that I could thumb through the listings and immediately find something interesting. There’s something about the printed magazine form factor, rolled up in your back pocket but immediately available with calendars, listings, reviews of places to eat, maps, and other pages designed to quickly tell you what you need to know. The heft of the pages made you appreciate the expanse of the festival. I’m sure there’s an app that puts this all into a screen on your phone with drop down menus but it’s just not the same.
Update: Looks like they are still printing the “programme” and you can even request one via mail. The festival also uploads all 350+ pages of each year’s guide into a PDF viewer so you can see what last year’s guide looks like and they even have an archive of all guides back to the festival I stumbled on in 1994. It’s nice to see they’ve recognized that print information design is sometimes better than online.
Simon Willison has been hacking on technology for years and blogging about it in his excellent blog where he posts on how to recreate his innovations and follow along on his adventures. He was a speaker at this year’s WordPress WordCamp US 2023 conference and gave a talk that I would highly recommend to anyone who wants to spend an hour to catch up on all the latest developments in the world of gen AI and LLM.
Posting this here today because I expect that I’ll be sending this link to people for weeks to come.
Large Language Models are the technology behind ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and more. They are weird and somewhat intimidating pieces of technology: we’re still trying to figure out how they work and what they can do, in a field that changes radically on an almost weekly basis.
In this talk I’ll break down how they work, what they’re useful for, what you can build with them and how to dodge their many pitfalls.
How do you get a First Person View of Tomas Slavik as he races the Red Bull Valparaiso Cerro Abajo? Shot in 2022, Red Bull hired the best FPV drone pilots and set up some hovering signal relay drones to put together this amazing video all done in a single take.
