jsulz

The Bitter Lesson

from Richard Sutton

The Baader–Meinhof phenomenon is a cognitive bias that takes place after the introduction of a new concept wherein suddenly this concept appears everywhere you turn. I’ve been experiencing this with this essay as of late - seeing it crop up in pieces like Dario Amodei’s Machines of Loving Grace.

I’ve been re-reading it; trying to distill the core elements that capture my attention. The opening is a summation of the key point:

The biggest lesson that can be read from 70 years of AI research is that general methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin.

Continue Reading >> Read the original article

Retheming With ChatGPT

Near the end of 2023 I left my job at Pantheon and in doing so severed my professional connection to WordPress. After over a decade toiling away, it felt like as good of a time as any to take a break from the CMS that powers 43% of the internet (try as Matt Mullenweg might to take that number down a few points). Hugo was my choice because at the time I wanted a static site generator and to learn more about Go. While I never did dive into Go, it didn’t effect how I felt about the choice. Hugo is rock solid - it just works.

AI Product Management

from Andrew Ng

Even today, most companies have difficulty finding people who know how to develop products and also understand AI, and I expect this shortage to grow.

This is especially true as modern machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms become more complex. Decision trees are easy to understand. Reinforcement learning is intuitive. Deep learning architectures, on the other hand are obtuse.

Increasingly, I also expect strong product managers to be able to build prototypes for themselves. The demand for good AI Product Managers will be huge. In addition to growing AI Product Management as a discipline, perhaps some engineers will also end up doing more product management work.

This is reality. AI in its myriad of forms is here to stay. More and more, I’m thinking of a product team as less of one where each team member plays a specific, defined role and more of one where everyone does similar work but fills slightly different gaps. There are no product managers. There are no engineers. There is only delivering value to people anyway you can.

Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

Found on February 17, 2025 Read the original article

On Bravery, Love, and the Good Life

On December 9th, 2024 at 10:33pm my wife and I welcomed a new member of our family. Daphne Sulzdorf Kirsch came into this world announcing her presence with a scream.

A month later, the screams have more space between them, although her growing stamina and strength have conspired to make them louder and longer.

It's Never Been Easier to Build Online, It's Never Been Harder to Find It

I don’t have an RSS reader anymore. When Google Reader shut down, I briefly tried to incorporate Feedly as my daily RSS driver, but it never stuck. Instead, I’ve turned to a compilation of Substack publications, independent blogs, and curated newsletters. My inbox has become my RSS reader, which it was never designed to be (that’s a conversation for another day).

In my inbox and in conversations with other friends of mine who are also internet denizens, I’m noticing a trend: It’s the end of the internet as we know it, and it has been for a while.

Improving this Feisty Little Blog's Lighthouse Score

The short version of this article goes something like:

Improve your Lighthouse score with this one simple trick!

The longer version is only slightly more complex, and owes much of its simplicity to Netlify (for providing the simple Lighthouse integration and seamless PR-based workflows to test my changes) and Hugo (for making it easy to tinker around in theme templates).

My Take on 'Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager'

After taking three or four months off from work, I’ve been looking around for my next landing spot after leaving Pantheon in November of 2023. That amount of time bought me a lot of clarity in how I want to practice the art of product management. It also gave me a lot of time to read! I’m still cranking through a lot of books, but one that I’ve been thinking about a lot is Ben Horowitz’s “Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager” essay, especially as I’ve been interviewing again and it’s hard to avoid thinking about what makes me a good (and bad) product manager.

Making the Most of My Netlify Setup

Along with learning about Hugo, I’m also digging through Netlify as a customer for the first time. This isn’t my first time examining their offering. As a product manager at Pantheon working on the Front End Sites product, they were a platform that was definitely on my radar.

In November 2023, I left Pantheon and, as I did so, took my blog off WordPress for good. Over the years, this content has lived on WP Engine, GoDaddy, and Pantheon. Now that I was venturing off WordPress platforms, it was both freeing and nerve-wracking. What was the port for this little boat? I knew I wanted to shift to a static site generator, and so Netlify and Vercel were top of mind. Ultimately, Netlify won out as I think their product caters to smaller hobbyist sites, like this one.

Digital Farming: The Great Slog

If you use a computer, you are a digital farmer. Maybe you are tending to your garden of emails. Perhaps you are pruning your digital catalog of photos. If you’re particularly advanced, you might be moving around old flower beds as you refactor a codebase.

Whatever it may be, you are now the proud manager of a digital landscape. It doesn’t matter if this farm produces for you (although for many people it’s their lifeblood); the tending must happen regardless lest the weeds run amuck. This the the great slog. Our systems, our digital gardens, they require constant vigilance and cleaning. You can put it off, but avoiding it entirely is not a winning strategy.

My gardening today consisted of a variety of small tasks around the blog.

Kringle Kayak 94: A Santa Collection

The Decembers of my childhood were brutally cold. We lived in a converted general store and post office near a railroad in Waterloo, Montana. Our section of the Jefferson river valley was narrow. Bracketed by mountains to the west and east. In the winter, it was a wind tunnel.

Before our furnace was installed (sometime in my middle school era), we warmed our house with the three wood-burning stoves scattered about the house. I remember my mom frantically stoking the fires before we went to bed. No matter; our beds would be frozen against the walls every morning. Winter vacation during the school year was less a vacation and more an exercise in fighting off cabin fever while chopping wood.