Ben Mann Monthly Oct 2023
London, Vancouver, memory palaces, acarbose, parenting, becoming a TPM
Purpose
An index for my memory
A menu of topics for my next conversation with you
A faster way to share what I’m excited about without the barrier of writing a complete blog entry on it
A skimmable way to spread content I found valuable
Experiments and experiences
Acarbose and CGM
I wore a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) for the first time since 2018 to see if I'd learn anything new. Mostly it was all the same, but this time, the low glucose alarm went off every night for the first few nights until I changed my eating habits to have a low carb snack before bed.
I also tried acarbose, which is a drug that inhibits the breakdown of carbohydrates in the gut. It's supposed to help with postprandial glucose spikes. It worked! Pretty cool to see the effect of a drug on my glucose levels in real time. The most common side effect is gas, but I didn't notice much more than usual.
10 days in Vancouver
Grouse Grind was closed, so we tried the BCMC trail instead. It was a great workout, and at the top we met Diana's parents, saw some bears and a lumberjack show, and took the gondola down. It felt about as Canadian as it gets.
Last time we were in Vancouver we carted thousands of photos to Staples to get digitized. They finished, so we uploaded them all to Google Photos to index them. Diana's family had a lot of fun looking through them and telling stories!
5 days in London
There for a work trip, some disjointed observations:
It looks like Europe, so I kept expecting people to speak some language other than English, and yet, they spoke English!
Woof, jet lag was tough.
It was nice not having any meetings during the day, but when San Francisco woke up at 4pm, it was a bit rough to keep going. One meeting was from 11pm to midnight. Next time maybe I'll take the mornings off instead, though I definitely enjoyed coding every day for the first time in at least a year.
British immigration policy must be good. Just walking around in King's Cross, I thought I saw a lot more different kinds of people than in San Francisco. Could've been a small sample size or sample bias.
Dad life month 13
One afternoon while I was in London, Diana, Euda and I had our regular video call. At some point she decided to stand up and stick there, for the first time! It felt special to see and capture that milestone. Serendipity.
One evening in Vancouver when Diana and I went to see Girls Gone Hueco, her grandparents decided to bathe her in the kitchen sink. She loved it, and it’s now our standard bedtime routine. She splashes around for maybe 15 minutes, instead of the usual 5 minutes in the plastic baby bathtub, and our sink is sparkling clean to boot.
New role at work
Since we hired Brian Delahunty, I've transitioned from manager of managers to technical program manager. I feel like reading An Elegant Puzzle and Scaling People helped me finally get some traction on the previous role, so I was slightly disappointed that I wouldn't get to see that through, but on the other hand he's doing a much better job than I'd been by dint of having been through it many times, and I'm learning a lot from him in the process. The new role's been new and fun too, and since it was something unowned before, it's easy to make rapid impact. I'm not sure how long I'll be in this role, so it's a bit tough to know how much to invest in it, but we'll see!
Brief thoughts on OpenAI dev day
Price drop was inevitable, and I think many of the other players will also drop prices soon.
Custom GPTs could be good, or they could flop like the plugins did. I think search/discovery will once again make or break the experience.
GPT-4 Turbo matches the speed and context length of Claude 2. Although Sam said on stage that it's their best model, it's behind GPT-4 in a couple of benchmarks. We'll see how much adoption it gets!
100m WAU is a lot, but it's not clear how many of those are paying customers. Either way, they certainly have the bully pulpit.
Life updates
🎂 Turned 35
🔬 Huge language model interpretability breakthrough published
🧑⚖️ Published Collective Constitutional AI paper
🚀 Launched Claude.ai in 95 countries
🎥 My AI Conference talk recording is up
Content
5 point Likert ratings for “I would recommend this content to a friend”, sorted
Scaling People 4/5 for VP+ level, 3/5 for manager-
While I enjoyed this book, I don't think it summarizes well. The summary bullets sound like obvious aphorisms like "make your onboarding good" but of course it's the execution that matters. I'll be treating this as a reference manual as I hit the problems described. For example, she has a table explaining the differences between teams, projects, and working groups. When I'm forming a new thing, am I using the right abstraction? I'll look up the section to make sure.
While I probably won't end up using most of the techniques in this book, I like having them in my back pocket. Could have been a blog post instead of a book.
The central one is the "memory palace", in which you imagine a familiar place and place objects in it to remember them. For abstract concepts, you have to think of something concrete and visual. For example, replace "e-mail" with "She-Male." I have been using the house I lived in from ages 4-12 to remember the 5-step dental care procedure my dentist recently gave me. Five items is below the magic seven where most people start to have trouble, but it's felt useful nonetheless.
Girls Gone Hueco premier 3/5
The documentary itself was well-shot. The climbers were not the best in the world like they are in Reel Rock, but I liked seeing them become "semi-pro." It made me want to get out and climb more--though nowhere near as much as these folks do. The panel discussion by the filmmakers after the showing added an extra dimension. Amusingly, we met the MC at the local boulder gym they day before.
Asteroid City 3/5
Even more self-referential and recursive than most Wes Anderson films
Favorite line: "Am I doing him right?" starting on the bottom of page 122. The main character is an actor playing an actor playing a war photographer. He peels back one of these layers to ask his fictional director if he's figured out the his character, but in doing so he provides a moment of sudden reflection for everyone, including perhaps the audience (which itself is welcomed into its own fictional role as the viewer of a documentary about a play). Am I doing him right? It doesn't matter. Just keep telling the story. You're doing him right.
Babylon 3/5
Watched half of the movie in the plane. Big style, but weak answers to questions like "but why do you want to be a movie star?" "Because I want to do something big and important." Later, I watched a Rotten Tomatoes interview with the cast and director, and the cast had roughly the same answer.
