产品随想 | 周刊 第107期：To Invent the Future, You Must Understand the Past

• The Age of AI：拾象大模型及OpenAI投资思考 https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/AxX-Q7njegNTAxMkYFwsfA
  AI信息密度极高

• Ente https://github.com/ente-io/ente
  Fully open source, End to End Encrypted alternative to Google Photos and Apple Photos

• 跨年对谈：千亿美金豪赌开启 AI 新摩尔时代 https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/lK1HZZE-szWucRA1l986sw

• 对话月之暗面杨植麟：向延绵而未知的雪山前进 https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/qVXcyw96IEPjrvZeA_1VMQ

• 对话李广密：拿下最大的市场是全球化创业的关键 https://new.qq.com/rain/a/20230112A07KKI00

• 专访月之暗面杨植麟：lossless long context is everything https://foresightnews.pro/article/detail/53994
  https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/UMY0qZsCGh87KnW4wjfvoA

• How Sora Works (and What It Means) https://every.to/chain-of-thought/sora-and-the-future-of-filmmaking
  Sora 的工作原理（及其意义） [译] https://baoyu.io/translations/sora/sora-and-the-future-of-filmmaking

• 视频生成模型：构建虚拟世界的模拟器 [译] https://baoyu.io/translations/openai/video-generation-models-as-world-simulators

• 伟大的巫师经常独自行事，只要空气中的元素依然回应他的咒语和呼唤 https://quail.ink/lyric/p/great-wizards-usually-act-alone

• 专访VideoPoet作者：LLM能带来真正的视觉智能 https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Hamz5XMT1tSZHKdPaCBTKg
  非常多的科技洞见，后续值得重新看几遍！！！

• To Invent the Future, You Must Understand the Past https://medium.com/backchannel/why-silicon-valley-will-continue-to-rule-c0cbb441e22f

• “I don’t think my taste in aesthetics is that much different than a lot of other people’s. The difference is that I just get to be really stubborn about making things as good as we all know they can be. That’s the only difference.”

• “Be aware of the world’s magical, mystical, and artistic sides. The most important things in life are not the goal-oriented, materialistic things that everyone and everything tries to convince you to strive for.”

• “Don’t be a career. The enemy of most dreams and intuitions, and one of the most dangerous and stifling concepts ever invented by humans, is the “Career.” A career is a concept for how one is supposed to progress through stages during the training for and practicing of your working life. There are some big problems here. First and foremost is the notion that your work is different and separate from the rest of your life. If you are passionate about your life and your work, this can’t be so. They will become more or less one. This is a much better way to live one’s life.”

• “I’ve always viewed technology from a liberal arts perspective, from a human culture perspective. As such, I’ve always pushed for things that pulled technology in those directions by bringing insights from other fields.”

• “Apple’s strategy is really simple. What we want to do is put an incredibly great computer in a book that you carry around with you, that you can learn how to use in twenty minutes. That’s what we want to do. And we want to do it this decade. And we really want to do it with a radio link in it so you don’t have to hook up to anything—you’re in communication with all these larger databases and other computers. We don’t know how to do that now. It’s impossible technically.” — 1983

• “We started with nothing. So whenever you start with nothing, you can always shoot for the moon. You have nothing to lose. And the thing that happens is—when you sort of get something, it’s very easy to go into cover-your-ass mode, and then you become conservative and vote for Ronnie. So what we’re trying to do is to realize the very amazing time that we’re in and not go into that mode.” — 1983

• On Macintosh: “It’s the first “telephone” of our industry. But the neatest thing about it to me is, the same as the telephone to the telegraph, Macintosh lets you sing. It lets you use special fonts. It lets you make drawings and pictures or incorporate other people’s drawings or pictures into your documents.”

• “The problem at Apple was that they stopped innovating. If you look at the Mac that ships today, it’s 25 percent different than the day I left, and that’s not enough for ten years and billions of dollars in R&D. It wasn’t that Microsoft was so brilliant or clever in copying the Mac. It’s that the Mac was a sitting duck for ten years. That’s Apple’s problem, is that their differentiation evaporated.” — 1996

• “Today is a good day to remember Apple’s legacy, which is to bridge the gap between sophisticated technology and “the rest of us” who make up most of humanity. It’s our job to make complex technology easy to use and fun to use.”

• “Our strategy in the early days of Pixar was: find a way to pay the bills… We were trying to pay the bills and just buy time. That strategy really turned out not to work. Probably if you look back in the rearview mirror, we would have been better off just funding the animation efforts and not trying to pay the bills through these other products, such as the Pixar Image Computer and software, but that was our best attempt to try to keep the company going. In the end, I just ended up writing checks to keep the company going — and that basically went on for ten years.”

• “One of the things that we encountered was that the Hollywood culture and the Silicon Valley culture each use different models of employee retention. Hollywood uses the stick, which is the contract. And Silicon Valley uses the carrot, which is the stock option… And we prefer the Silicon Valley model in this case: give people stock in the company so that we all have the same goal, which is to create shareholder value. But [not having contracts] also makes us constantly worry about making Pixar the greatest company we can, so that no­­body would ever want to leave.”

• “Walt Disney realized many decades ago that animation was so expensive that you couldn’t afford to animate ten times more than what you need. Matter of fact, you don’t want to animate even 10 percent more than what you need. And therefore, the only conclusion you can come to is, you have to edit your film before you make it. Disney pioneered a lot of techniques for doing that, and they’ve refined those over the last sixty years. Working with Disney gave us access to that wisdom that you can’t buy for love or money.”

• “Pixar is a company that has one new product a year, at best. That’s the holy grail for us: to have a movie a year… As CEO, you make a few important decisions a quarter—maybe three—but they are very hard to change if you decide you want to change them.”

• “Things get more refined as you make mistakes. I’ve had a chance to make a lot of mistakes. Your aesthetics get better as you make mistakes. But the real big thing is: if you’re going to make something, it doesn’t take any more energy — and rarely does it take more money — to make it really great. All it takes is a little more time.”

• “Character is built not in good times, but in bad times; not in a time of plenty, but in a time of adversity.”

• “It’s not just shopping for goods and services. It’s shopping for information.”

• “There are no shortcuts around quality, and quality starts with people. Maybe shortcuts exist, but I’m not smart enough to have ever found any.”

• “Ultimately, it’s the work that motivates people. I sometimes wish it were me, but it’s not. It’s the work. My job is to make sure the work is as good as it should be and to get people to stretch beyond their best. But it’s ultimately the work that motivates people. That’s what binds them together.”

• “The most important lesson I ever learned was that you have to hire people better than you are… In normal life, the difference in dynamic range from average to best is usually 30, 40, 50 percent. Twice as good: rarely… But I saw that Woz—one guy—having meetings in his head could run circles around two hundred engineers at Hewlett-Packard. That’s what I saw. And I thought, “Wow.” And I didn’t really understand it at first. Then I started to understand it. It took me about ten years to actually try to put it into practice. Because you’d try to hire and find those people. And they’re really hard to find.”

• “Nobody in their right mind wants to be a manager. It’s true. It’s a lot of work, and you don’t get to do the fun stuff. But the only good reason to be a manager is so some other bozo doesn’t be the manager—and ruin the group you care about.”

• “A really smart guy I met a long time ago who used to teach at Disney University—Walt Disney recruited him to run Disney University, actually—he told me about his point of view, which I’ve remembered to this day. He called it management by values. What that means is you find people that want the same things you want, and then just get the hell out of their way.”

• “To me, marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world. It’s a very noisy world, and we’re not gonna get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. And so we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.”

• “Brands take decades to build.”