The Kilonova Edition
How to tame your AI, a cosmic death spiral, Succession's final season and how to write shorter but more gooder comms
Dear Readers
We got kilonovas, (alleged) business bestseller-list fraud, how to tame your AI, and reaction to the news that Succession is about to start its last season. Dunn-dunn-duhhhh!
Let’s start with literally the biggest story of them all…
🤯 Kilonovas!
So you think supernovas are big? Nah, mate – you haven’t seen a kilonova. A what?
A kilonova – a.k.a. a macronova – explosion happens when two neutron stars (the collapsed cores of stars many times the size of our sun) or a neutron star and a black hole, combine. After developing a complex detection system, scientists were able to antcipate and record data from one of these for the first time in 2017.
In a wonderful bit of science writing, Anjana Abuja in for the FT describes what they saw:
Two neutron stars in a binary system, each with a mass comparable to that of the Sun but compressed into the size of a city, had been rotating around each other uneventfully for 11bn years in ever decreasing circles. Then, in an instant, the superdense duo entered a ferocious death spiral, spinning around each other 100 times a second, before colliding and exploding.
Now that’s a paragraph. I’ve read it a few times now and get a kind of vertigo as my brain tries to make sense of it, almost does, and then flinches from the hugeness of what it describes.
Heavy metals like gold, platinum and uranium are formed and thrown out into space during kilonovas. The deposits we find on earth are from them, arriving as meteors and striking our planet millions of years ago:
It may take decades to decode the mysteries of kilonovas. Billions of stars, meanwhile, carry on their infinite business of living and dying and colliding, their matter continually remade and redistributed elsewhere in the universe — some of it, remarkably, into the slender platinum band on my ring finger.
We are all made of stars. Wedding bands and computer innards, however, they are made of kilonovas.
Quote of the week
They say that everyone has a book in them, but no one ever tells you how hard it is to get that book out of you.
Charlene Prat, The Neuroscience of You
Time to tame your AI
The technology macronova that has been public access to AI continues to develop. After the initial weeks of shock and wonder from users of ChatGPT, the first widely used AI chatbot, and accompanying moral panic and some wilful misreading of its uses by commentators, we’re entering a new phase: integration.
I was part of a beta test – where some users are given access to test an app before it goes live – to an AI assistant in the Notion note-taking app. If you’ve not used Notion, it’s a bit like Apple Notes or Evernote, but you can turn any note you make into a webpage and it does lots of other clever things, like build databases and synchronise with other apps.
Notion’s not the only company integrating AI and ChatGPT-like features. Here are a few others:
Raycast: a productivity tool that replaces Apple’s Spotlight search function on Macs.
Mem: a note-taking app that promises to use AI to organize notes
Craft: a note-taking tool with an "AI assistant" powered by OpenAI's GPT-3 tech
Readwise Reader: a read-later app that let’s you highlight and save notes about web pages, PDFs and other media.
Microsoft, as previously mentioned, has already integrated ChatGPT tech into Bing, and now its Office products like Teams, Word, and PowerPoint. Given how few of the huge range of features and functions are used by all users, it will be interesting to see how much and how well we all put AI to work.
The real advantages of AI in tools like these will come to organisations and users once they have figured out what to do with them. However, the tech is not as reliable, predictable or simple to put to work as some may have initially thought. My advice is to start learning how you can use it everyday now and to keep a record of things that work.
In Readwise and Notion, I’ve found it almost more useful than the standalone ChatGPT. But often it seems like tricks you’ve used once don’t work again, and if you’re not careful errors creep in to text and summaries.
That said, things that do work more consistently and where risks can be managed, have already saved myself and colleagues hours of time.
One brilliant writer said that having ChatGPT or similar AI tools is like having “1000 interns”. That sounds like both an incredible benefit and a daunting responsibility. How would you manage 1,000 junior people, all happy to work heard and learn but turning in work of variable quality and without the insights and understanding of how to do the work.
Another danger in the “we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us” category, is that we use AI only within the parameters of the app suggestions and prompts. We start to work in the way that suits tools. This is how we end up with PowerPoints that should be documents and Excel spreadsheets that should be databases or diagrams.
We’re going to need to take responsibility for working out how to work with AI tools and get it to speed up our work. We’re going to need to tame our AIs ourselves.
Book: Smart Brevity
Smart Brevity is about how to write concisely, in the house-style of the authors’ company Axios: making use of bullet points, bold-type and emojis aplenty.
It’s first sentence sets out the problem it is trying to address:
Never in the history of humanity have we vomited more words in more places with more velocity.
I might borrow that as a slogan if ever do a marketing push for Antonym.
Terry Pratchett once compared a character who was being reckless to someone standing in a copper bowl full of water on the top of a hill during a storm and shouting “All gods are bastards!” The authors of Smart Brevity reminded me of that when it came to their tempting the wrath of book reviewers. I’ve never read a book which was perfectly useful and interesting and then seen such vicious responses:
“Riddled with bullets”
“Neither smart nor brief”
“Dubious wisdom”
Ouch. And those are just the headlines… the reviewers, being people who make their trade with long form writing, really go to town on Smart Brevity and its authors, coincidentally former journalists who have made a lot of money by writing very concise newsletters.
But Smart Brevity is a useful book about communicating concisely. Yes, advice about writing in a direct style has been around for a while – some of the critics point to the venerable Strunk & White The Elements of Style – but this isn’t a book for writers, it’s for everyone else who has to write, even just on Slack and in email and probably does go on a bit (I know, glass houses etc…).
The only thing that irritated me was the frequency of the promotion of the company owned by the authors, Axios HQ. But more of that in a moment.
Digging themselves in deeper?
More damning than the reviews of Smart Brevity was a piece in The Atlantic last September which – with a sarcastic adoption of the writing style it advocates – accused Axios HQ of having told employees to bulk-buy copies of the books to boost its chances of getting on the New York Times Bestseller list, something that would help promote its Axios HQ platform and services to prospective clients (primarily, HR and internal comms departments at large corporations).
The book is currently promoted on Amazon as being “now a Wall Street Journal and USA Today Bestseller”. No mention of the New York Times. In fact, I can’t find a proper review there either. Whatever happened with that accusation from The Atlantic, I wonder…
Succession ending
A decade ago, at one of those self-help group for chronically tired people also known as parents at the periphery of a children’s birthday party, I got chatting to a dad who was a TV screenwriter. He was a quiet, thoughtful chap. I mentioned I’d started watching the last season of The Sopranos on DVD. The writer looked at me briefly with an expression of mild wonder: “You lucky bastard,” he said mildly, “To have that ahead of you.”
With a month to go to the start of the final season of Succession I know how he felt. We’re all lucky so-and-sos to have this as-yet-unwatched treat ahead of us. The three preceding seasons have been so sure-footed in their execution, I’ve no concerns that it will be anything other than the completion of a triumphant arc. None of the bombastic short-changing of Game of Thrones, the look-at-me clever plot engineering of Breaking Bad or the strange singularity effect that has shows like Sherlock, Billions and Westworld slowly collapse inward after one season, crushing themselves with the weight of their self-regard.
The golden age of TV drama began with The Sopranos in 1999 or so and was then super-charged by the money from the new DVD formats. in the first series the New Jersey gangsters were selling DVD players, replacing the head of the mob’s previous favourite format: laser discs. (If you’re under 40, think lower resolution blu-ray discs the size of 12-inch vinyl records). Then ten years later, streaming revolution, led by Netflix, poured big tech billions into TV production.
Investment may have peaked now as streaming services saturated the market. There may be fewer HBO/Netflix/Amazon-funded blockbuster shows arriving in the next decade than there have been in the past couple of years. That’s OK – there is more excellent TV drama to watch available right now than we could binge watch in the rest of our lives.
If we go by AJP Taylor’s observation that all empires look at their most glorious just before they fall, I think Succession could be the belle epoque, the crowning glory of the Golden Age of TV (1999-2023).
When the box-sets were funding the first part of this two decade boom, Jesse Armstrong was the co-creator of the genius Peep Show, a sitcom about the string of banal tragedies that made up the lives of a couple of flat-mates living in Croydon. One of the main actors went on to become the finest of her generation, and Armstrong went on to lead the creative team on Succession.
This week in an interview with The New Yorker, Armstrong confirmed that the fourth season, which starts a month from now, will be its last. A sadness and a relief for fans like me – the writers room system and artistic direction of Succession needed to find an ending, and it seems likely it will end on a high.
The End of “Succession” Is Near , by Emily Nussbaum – The New Yorker
Et c’est ça! All the Antonym that’s fit to print.
See you next week
Antony