Linked List: December 5, 2022

Monday, 5 December 2022

The Mickey Mantle ‘Under the Right Field Bleachers’ Letter Is for Sale ★

Paul Kafasis, writing at One Foot Tsunami:

I’ve actually heard this hilariously vulgar story before, but I had no idea there was a physical artifact written in Mantle’s own hand. Now, incredibly, it’s available for sale. The current bid, at time of publication, is $24,826. Despite the sum involved, I hope whoever wins this auction donates the letter to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, where it can be displayed publicly. That belongs in a museum!

As a result of this auction, additional details have come out. However, I’m undecided if I believe them. Give the following a read, and decide for yourself.

Baseball collector Keith Olbermann describes the Mantle letter as the second-most obscene piece of memorabilia in the sport’s long (and sordid) history. First place — in Olbermann’s mind — goes to the 1898 “Special Instructions to Players” memo, which, as Letters of Note describes, “was in fact so expletive-laden and obscene as to be “unmailable” to its intended audience via the postal service, and so was delivered by hand to each of the League’s 12 clubs and their foul-mouthed players.”

It’s a close call.

Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT ★

Jonas Degrave:

Unless you have been living under a rock, you have heard of this new ChatGPT assistant made by OpenAI. You might be aware of its capabilities for solving IQ tests, tackling leetcode problems or to helping people write LateX. It is an amazing resource for people to retrieve all kinds of information and solve tedious tasks, like copy-writing!

Today, Frederic Besse told me that he managed to do something different. Did you know, that you can run a whole virtual machine inside of ChatGPT?

There is so much to say about ChatGPT, but perhaps its biggest breakthrough is its statefulness. These are actual conversations where your subsequent commands build on what’s happened previously in the chat.

ChatGPT and A.I. Homework ★

Ben Thompson, writing at Stratechery:

What has been fascinating to watch over the weekend is how those refinements have led to an explosion of interest in OpenAI’s capabilities and a burgeoning awareness of AI’s impending impact on society, despite the fact that the underlying model is the two-year old GPT-3. The critical factor is, I suspect, that ChatGPT is easy to use, and it’s free: it is one thing to read examples of AI output, like we saw when GPT-3 was first released; it’s another to generate those outputs yourself; indeed, there was a similar explosion of interest and awareness when Midjourney made AI-generated art easy and free (and that interest has taken another leap this week with an update to Lensa AI to include Stable Diffusion-driven magic avatars).

ChatGPT is brand new but already astonishing. Even seemingly silly input can result in remarkable output. I feel like I ought to have something profound to say, but I’m struggling to come up with anything beyond “Wow” for now.

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield Is Leaving in January ★

Stewart Butterfield, in a memo to Slack employees obtained by The Verge (posted, of course, on the company’s internal Slack):

So: why?? Well, we started this company 13.5 years ago (though it’s “only” been 10 years since we started development of Slack itself). It’s been a long and wild run. I am not going off to do something entrepreneurial. Though it may sound hackneyed, I actually am going to spend more time with my family. We have a new baby coming in January. Can I tell you something? I fantasize about gardening. So, I’m going to work on some personal projects, focus on health, and try to learn as many new things as I can.

I suppose this is not surprising at all. Salesforce inked the deal to acquire Slack for $28 billion on December 1, 2020. A two-year stay agreement would mean Butterfield is free to leave ... this week. Butterfield is a consumer-minded product person, and Salesforce is as enterprise-y as enterprise-y gets. The numbers are much bigger for Slack, but it’s kind of amazing how similar the story has been to Yahoo’s acquisition of Flickr in 2005.

I have a zillion complaints about Slack, but there’s no denying that, on the whole, it’s a great product and service, and has defined the modern framework for remote work and collaboration.