Steve Newman: preference

Transcript context

…One big question I have on both of those projects is how are you handling context? With the newsletters, there's sort of a question, I guess, of like any individual newsletter, you could say, Will this be of interest to me? Here's my interests, scoring on that basis. So how are you handling context? And there's obviously multiple dimensions or layers to that, but at least two that jump to mind are like, how do you make sure that the information is being filtered effectively against like what it is you care about, want to learn about, et cetera. And the other is sort of when you have so many things coming in and there's so much duplication, How are you managing to cross-reference these things against each other to try to tease out like what is genuinely new from each bit? Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I'm not. It's the dumbest possible thing. It literally this tool literally just takes the full text of each Substack post or podcast transcript, dumps it into an LLM and says, summarize this. And like, I've done a little bit of iteration on the. exact prompt, like, you know, what kind of information I want it to surface and what I don't, but it's completely static, no context at all. Last year, I'd, you know, I'd been sort of envisioning this a little bit, and I had was thinking in terms of, yeah, like I wanted to know everything I've already read so it can identify what's new and so forth, and I didn't bother with that in the first iteration, and I haven't been motivated to do anything about it. So it just gives me the summary Again, with a little bit of finesse in like-- I think the prompt says things like, surface any novel ideas. But that's a novel against the LLM's training date, what the LLM from first principles thinks is novel. And obviously, it would be better if it could contrast that with what it knows I've already read. And to my surprise, it just hasn't been-- like, I know what I've already read. I can skim a one paragraph summary in about 10 seconds, and that's efficient enough. You know, there's a whole other side of this where, you know, the road a lot of people are going down, at least seemingly, and I've not gone down at all, is actually like responding to emails or just kind of, you know, acting on the content of my, at least, digital life. And... I haven't gone down that road at all. I know a lot of people are. And partly because it just feels a little daunting, both in the complexity of the project and the security concerns it brings in and so forth. And I'm sort of conservative by nature. I don't like to use a tool unless I really know I can trust it and I understand what it's going to do. So that does feel like that's a pool I feel like it's going to be so worthwhile to jump into that I will eventually find myself forced to, but I haven't gone there yet. AvePoint is building the control layer for AI agents so you can securely govern, audit, and recover every action at scale. Design trusted agentic outcomes from day one at https://avpt.co/tcr VCX, by Fundrise, is the public ticker for private tech, giving everyday investors access to high-growth private companies in AI, space, defense tech, and more. Learn how to invest at https://getvcx.com…

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