From walking to wizards: What we’re reading

May, 2024

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👋 This is The Pipette – a monthly newsletter for product builders with links so good their ideas warrant a reply, a forward, or even a discussion in real life.

• Productivity – Walking has been a habit of creative minds for centuries. An inspiring piece in The Marginalian covers some of the history and mental benefits of walking from a range of sources, including philosophers, artists, and writers.
• Productivity – An interview with Cal Newport (author of Deep Work, Digital Minimalism), covers some ways to do more by doing less – learning to improve autonomy, focusing less on being busy and doing fewer things, better.
• Workforce – Non-compete clauses mostly banned in US – read about it straight from the FTC here.
• AI – What happens when you put 25 AI agents in a virtual town? Researchers gave AI agents backstories and let them interact in Smallville, a sandboxed, RPG-like world. Some unplanned behaviors emerged, like spontaneous event planning. Wondering what an AI agent is? This article from Zapier has you covered.
• AI – OpenAI is expected to release GPT-5 this summer/mid-year. There’s lots of buzz about its coming features.
• Internet – Net neutrality is back, baby! The FCC restored Net Neutrality in a 3-2 vote last week. An article from ZDNet covers the history, and what might come next.
• Prompt Engineering – 🧙‍♂️ Can you beat the wizard? Test your prompt skills with this tricky, multi-level security experience. Fair warning – it took a looot of time to beat level 8!
• Design & Dev – Google Fonts is a great resource to browse fonts, but have you checked out their learning resources? Their intro to typography series has a little something for everyone.
• Machine Learning – Relevance-based prediction math beats machine learning in some applications. It provides confidence attached to specific predictions & informs researchers and statisticians how to use the information.

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