About this episode
screen capture of a presentation agenda with a photo of a painting of a mountain
Published 23 March 2025
e506 with Andy and Michael M – stories and discussion on the attention economy, focus, pirated data used in training LLMs, snarky software and much more.
Andy and Michael M get things rolling with an intriguing article dealing with focus and attention. Part of their reaction was that there are so many competing sources for attention. And that the pressure to respond with speed to these competing sources compounds the challenge. The conversation reminded Michael of a memo that Steve Jobs wrote to his team at NeXT 39 years ago imploring them to have time of uninterrupted individual work. Check that out in the show notes below. Michael and Andy give a couple examples of what they suggest to bring balance and creativity back to the fore.
Continuing on to the advances made with large language models, Andy and Michael take up the discussion on the data needed to train the LLMs. The Atlantic article on the use of pirated books to train AI also includes LibGen, their search tool The Atlantic created for their analysis of the Library Genesis data set. This subject has cropped up in earlier episodes – such as the discussion on the Sarah Silverman example. Next, the team turns to an AI coding assistant named Cursor. After a developer ha
