Been heads down on something the past month plus. Not a lesson, nor a Tea round but more like the layer under all of it. Kept seeing the same thing in comments and onboarding calls: People not knowing where to even start or if something’s already been covered somewhere in here. We're working on fixing that. Not ready to put it in your hands yet.

Following along here, I have just secured a very large project. "Turn our messy internal documents into an ICM system allowing us to automate large swathes of manual admin". Before I met with the prospect, I'd been re-watching and reading everything that's going on in this community. I wouldn't have had the confidence or baseline knowledge to approach a project like this without this group! I wanted to pass on a huge thanks to Jake and the team. I'll share what I am building (as much as I can) and no doubt I will have a ton of questions!

Am I the only one that wants to take sick-day from the old 9-5 and just work on this stuff?

My background is working in quality assurance in medical device companies, and I've always worked with software teams. I remember always walking past the software department and seeing their big black screens with all this code. It gave me a little bit of anxiety, but it also looked so cool because they looked like these hackers, just like in the movies. They were all sitting there so nonchalantly, but they're literal geniuses. One day I was sitting in a meeting with one of my colleagues, and I had to deal with an Excel spreadsheet that had like a thousand lines of information in it that I had to parse. I was doing this manually because the data hadn't been entered uniformly. One of our engineers was like, "Give me 30 minutes. I'll write a script." I paused, looked him dead in the eye, and said, "Hey man, I need to know how you do that. I want to watch you," and so I did. That was the day that I found out you can literally just control your own machine with scripts. The moment I found that out, paired with GPT-3 at the time, I started making scripts for everything. I even made a little desktop pet that, if you clicked it, would spawn a motivational message in the command prompt. I've also recently learned about bit flips (video in the classroom course) literal cosmic rays from SPACE can hit your RAM and make pretty big changes?????? Anyway, the thing is, I think you all are magicians. ˙⋆✮⋆˚࿔ Every single person who works with software and code and tech ...just makes things, you are all creators, and everyone's being so nonchalant about it. It's crazy. ✧˖°.

I've been reading more lately because i'd like to think of myself as a lifelong learner... but also partially because I had a bunch of credits piling up in Amazon's audiobooks app (so technically I'm not reading, I'm listening). Recently it's been Range by David Epstein and Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey. Greenlights was partly just fun, partly curiosity about how a celebrity writes a book. McConaughey reads it himself, and honestly, it's cool to hear where he puts his own emphasis on certain words + sentences because he's the one who wrote them. One chapter in Range stuck with me though. There's a section about "centaur chess"... after Kasparov lost to Deep Blue (IBM's chess supercomputer), they started running tournaments where humans play with computer assistance. The surprising result: the winners weren't the best grandmasters, and they weren't the strongest computers. They were average players with the best process for working with the machine. A mediocre player who knew how to use the computer well beat both grandmasters and supercomputers playing alone. That feels like exactly where we are with AI right now. The game isn't "how good are you at marketing" or whatever your domain is anymore. It's "how good are you at working with this superhuman teammate." And how good are you at understanding, building, + utilizing the new, A.I teammate. Anyways, two things I'm curious of: 1. Any Systems Thinking book you'd recommend. (Since systems thinking is essentially the core/foundation of everything we do here.) 2. Any book outside your usual lane that helped you in ways you weren't expecting. Something you picked up deliberately or not, and it ended up shifting how you think. Curious what everyone is reading these days. Cheers! Shawn