Don't Die

Hey,

this is yours truly writing to you. Straight from Antalya beach, where I am sitting in a chair, 8m from the beach, the waves breaking on the shoreline and the sun slowly crawling up.

We’re here for our company retreat. And while I’m in Turkey, some of my team members like to joke, that we are in Germany, because we’re staying at a Robinson Club. These are the most German all-inclusive hotels you can imagine. As I am looking to my left I see about three dozen sun -beds, half of them already reserved with towels and it’s not even 8am yet.

But now let’s get to it.

📸 Photo of the Week

Two ideas

1. Yearly tradition: Once a year we go on an offsite, this year it’s a Robinson Club in Antalya (Turkey). This is the fourth time we’re doing it and I want to share a couple of observations:

   • It’s relaxing that I don’t have to organise it. Thanks Tamara.

   • We’re more international and it’s enriching. Nations present: Austria, Turkey, Switzerland, Bulgaria, India and Germany (I hope I didn’t miss any).

   • We tried something new with a writing exercise and I am proud of how everyone showed up and shared. Everyone wrote down their dream day in 10 years from now (Thursday September 21, 2034) for about 40 min. After that we listened to each others dream day for about 60 mins.

     • Family and the desire to spend time with kids and their partner showed up again and again.

     • No one was looking forward to solving a customer complaint.

     • Some were excited, because they got to work on a project that is completely new to them.

     • Friends (TV show) seems to be really popular (I know my girlfriend loves it, maybe I have to give it another shot)

     • I think people enjoyed it. Some even came up to me and thanked me. That felt nice.

   • Robinson Club is a bit like Schlaraffenland, there’s infinite drinks, food and sun.

   • The team is coming up with improved processes and hearing the perspective on an end-to-end process like estimations for projects was eye opening. Here’s how delivery looks at it, here’s how consulting looks at it and here is how sales looks at it. Now I wonder how do our customers look at it? Because we want to improve the customer experience.

   • It felt harmonious, people sharing, laughing and dancing. Thank you.

2. I’m reading Stephen King’s “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft” and one idea I cannot get out of my head that Stephen shares: “What writing is? Telepathy, of course”
   
   My name is Dennis Knodt. I’m writing my weekly newsletter at a desk overlooking the sea at the beach of the Robinson Club Pamfilya on a sunny morning on September 22, 2024. There are things on my mind. Some are worries (is anyone going to read this, a co-worker is sick since last night), some are good things (taking a swim in the sea after finishing this post, meeting the team for breakfast), but right now all that is up top.
   
   You get the idea? What if writing is the purest form of telepathy that we have? Think about it.

Three cool links

1. Yann LeCun (Chief AI scientist at Meta) “A 4-year-old child has seen 50x more information than the biggest LLMs that we have.“ → sounds like an exciting research opportunity to use more high-bandwidth data like video for training future models.

2. Richard Socher’s (founder you dot com) mental model on when a generative ai application makes sense → GenAI is amazing when it would take a long time to create an artifact but very little time to verify correctness.

3. Bryan Johnson on how the future is less predictable than it once was and what to do about it → I don’t think his graphic is on point, or did readers above 45 years know what they wanted to do at age 19? Still the Don’t Die idea is interesting and worth learning more about.

Personal note

Thanks for making it this far.

Now do me a small favour, I live off of compliments. Just send me a short email and say what you’re thinking.

I wrote it. You read it. How was it?

Dennis

P.S. - if you wanna go read this on a rad website (seriously) or send to a friend, here’s the link: check it out!