Just regular, you know?

Welcome to another Tuesday. The day that feels slightly less daunting than a Monday. The day when you slowly start accepting the rhythm of the work week.

The timely alarm. The quick shower. That cup of coffee which never seems to end and you don’t even want it to. That breakfast. Or the lack of one. That commute that is filled either by thoughts or music or conversations. Or, the lack of one.

So much happens in a work week. So many conversations, so many efforts. So many transactions and so many connections. It’s all in a day but it’s quite a lot for a day.

Yet, somehow, sometimes, it all ends up feeling like the same. An amorphous, ambiguous blob that may or may not always make sense.

Does this ever happen to you?

Then maybe, today’s poem is for you!

Alright, poem starts in 3… 2… 1!

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A regular life with a regular vibe.
A setting of regular defaults applied.

A regular night and a regular day.
A walk on the path of the regular way.

A regular feeling, a regular time.
A routine of habits you silently mime.

Some regular moments you'll surely forget,
that won't make you happy or even upset.

A regular tale that forever gets told.
A regular story that never gets old.

But when you are done with this regular dance.
And want the unexpected to have one more chance.

Then carefully, slowly, take down all your walls.
That keep you so safe in these regular halls.

Go on then, step out from it just for a while.
And something not regular might make you smile.

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That’s it!

Keep reading for “Some fun stuff” below…

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Some fun stuff:

This is a place where I share something cool to read, something cool to listen to, and something cool to watch! The underlined words are links that you can click to visit the recommended content.

1. Read about DALL-E 2: OpenAI is a company working at the cutting edge of AI today. This is their latest breakthrough technology. An AI that takes a text input like “an astronaut riding a horse” and generates sharp, high quality images as output that look like this:

Source: openai.com/dall-e-2

How! WHAT! 🙀

I’ve been following the product roadmap of OpenAI very closely and think that this company has the potential to have one of the largest impacts on the next 20 years of humanity. Currently, it needs viable business models for these pathbreaking products. It has slowly gotten better at business models since its symbiotic partnership with Microsoft began. Also, their CEO is Sam Altman, the former president of Y Combinator - this means he has seen so many technology business models that he could teach others.

This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of capabilities they are developing. I am excited to be alive at this time in humanity’s history.

2. Listen to this interview of Google CEO Sundar Pichai: All of us would agree that technology is a natural part of our world. It is no longer strange to look at screens and consume information at scale.

Google is on top of that list of companies that can be credited with this integration of technology in our day to day lives.

There is so much value in this interview because you get to hear first hand from the person who runs this behemoth how he sees it working. It leads to such amazing gem quotes like:

How he looks at talking about the future:

There may be times there’s a probabilistic outcome, and so that there may be one or two elements in it which we fail. And so that there is that risk of talking ahead.

How he looks at the concept of “constraints”:

I’ve always felt constraints help, right? Having constraints helps you actually deliver a product. And so I’m a fan of that.

How he looks at the evolution of idea to execution:

…there’s a difference between intellectually understanding it a few years earlier versus the actual practical ability to get scale…

And finally, his obsession with Google’s mission:

Becoming CEO, I wanted the company to go back and think a lot about its core mission because I felt it was important to ground ourselves there and really focus on knowledge.

He really talks very often about Google’s mission in other public appearances as well. If you’re curious, that mission is “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” This focus on mission bleeds into his point of view on R&D as well.

I have no interest in being an R&D lab.

We actually genuinely believe we’ve been doing cutting-edge R&D, right? We are one of the world’s largest R&D investors, probably over $100 billion in the past five years. And so we are definitely doing [tip of tree] R&D, but the goal is all with a clear lens of our mission, how we will apply it, and working it backward.

Neat.

3. Watch “The man who starred in 5 Best Pictures and nothing else”: Before watching this video, I had no idea about John Cazale. Now I love him. One of the most beautifully crafted video essays ever, about a man who beautifully crafted his own performances. Watch it now.

I would love it if you also shared some fun stuff that you love to read/ listen to/ watch across the internet, down in the comments.

See you next week!

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P.S. - I spent a lot of time today covering stuff about technology - Dall-E 2 and the interview with Sundar. I am super passionate about tech and have been engaged with it quite strongly for the last decade and a half. I love talking about it, and am thinking if I could keep talking more about it here on Hello Universe. Alternatively, I could start a newsletter about the business of tech? Could that be something you would read?

“Hello Techieverse”?

Let me know your thoughts in the comments below or as a reply to this email. Thanks!