A Hodge-Podge of Thoughts // BrXnd Dispatch vol. 023
Getting back to writing after a busy summer.
You’re getting this email as a subscriber to the BrXnd Dispatch, a (roughly) bi-weekly email at the intersection of brands and AI. I am working on finalizing SF Conference dates and should have those in the next few weeks. As always, if you have any questions, you can reply to this email or send me a note.
I have been an absentee newsletterer. My last Dispatch was over two months ago. Life got in the way: I bought a house and moved to the suburbs, it’s summertime, and the kids are home. I’ve also been busy building things and am off on vacation tomorrow. All those excuses aside, it’s time to get back to all things marketing x AI (not that I really left, during my time off from writing, I’ve been working with a handful of brands on various AI-related projects).
As a reminder, my goal for this newsletter specifically, and BrXnd more generally, is to try to help move the conversation forward around all things marketing and AI. To do that, I try to build and share as much as possible—because I believe hands-on learning is the only way to start figuring out how all this stuff works. With all that said, as a way to kickstart this engine again, I’m going to make today’s Dispatch a bit of a hodge-podge of thoughts and ideas that have been rattling around my head. Some of these need to turn into more substantial essays, and others are probably just passing thoughts.
Oh, and one last thing: I am working on a series of events for the fall in partnership with various brands. As part of that, I am curating a set of AI companies to come present to those companies and am looking to schedule as many product demos as possible. If you fit into this and are interested in getting in front of hundreds of hungry marketers, can you be in touch to schedule a demo?
Ok, onto some thoughts.
Management?
Earlier in the summer, I was out in San Francisco and sitting down for coffee with my friend Eric Nehrlich. Eric went to school for physics, started his career as a software engineer, was a product manager, and spent ten years doing various business-side jobs at Google. Now he has an executive coaching practice. Needless to say, he’s a fun person to talk to about anything that happens at the intersection of technology and psychology.
I was telling him a bit about the odd parts of my experience getting an AI shopping assistant into production with Ride Review, which I described in my last newsletter:
Outside the code, the process of getting the personality and quirks ironed out feels like a very new kind of thing. I kept describing it as “massaging the prompt,” and that’s really what it felt like. I was trying to smooth the edges of the bot by adding minor updates and addition to the various prompts that are used with lots of conditional logic.
It’s a funny thing. You write all this code, then you run through this decidedly un-code-like process where you try to coax the thing into doing what you want. Eric quickly replied that it sounded like management, which I realized was exactly right. The act of “massing the prompt” is actually a lot like trying to help a person understand what you need and expect of them. It’s about articulating the objectives correctly and finding the right balance between being explicit and still allowing for creativity. Of course, you don’t have to worry about feelings when you’re working on AI projects, which makes things decidedly less complicated, but I still found it to be an interesting observation.
Overhangs
For my other newsletter, Why is this interesting?, I wrote about AI, transformers, and the concept of “overhangs” in tech. The piece was inspired by this quote from an excellent piece about transformers from the FT: “This has led to a period that Silicon Valley insiders call a technology overhang — time that industries will spend integrating the latest AI developments into products, even if research does not progress at all.” The article does a nice job explaining what a transformer is and does and why it matters. If you want to go deeper into transformers, I also really liked this 2021 piece from Dale Markowitz.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Feb117a59-9e29-4410-a25e-9bbaa9a2398a_1530x1600.png)
Taxonomy Building
One of the use cases I continually come back to ChatGPT for is taxonomy building. I will give it a list of anything and ask it to help me come up with a taxonomy that fits my needs. I did this for the conference, asking it to help me build out a taxonomy to help sponsors understand the seniority level of the attendees based on their titles. It’s really great at this kind of task.
And so, as I try to unpack into my new house and find myself with hundreds of random computer wires collected over the years, it struck me that I could use a good taxonomy to help me organize them.
My prompt:
i am trying to organize my hundreds of random cables. to do that i need a taxonomy so that i can put them in different storage containers. they're mostly, but not limited, to computer cables like usb, hdmi, displayport, etc. -- what's a good organizing taxonomy?
ChatGPT’s response:
By Purpose/Use:
Data Transfer:
USB cables (Micro USB, USB-A, USB-B, USB-C, Mini USB, etc.)
SATA (for hard drives)
Ethernet cables (Cat5, Cat6, etc.)
Display/Video:
HDMI
DisplayPort
VGA
DVI
Mini DisplayPort
Audio:
3.5mm audio cables
RCA audio
Optical audio
Power:
Computer power cables (for desktops, monitors)
Charging cables (for laptops, mobile devices)
External power bricks/adapters
Specialized/Other:
Serial cables
Parallel cables
Proprietary connectors (e.g., specific to certain devices or brands)
By Length:
Short (0-1 feet)
Medium (1-6 feet)
Long (6 feet and above)
By Connector Type:
Male vs. Female
Different versions/types (e.g., USB 2.0 vs. USB 3.0, or HDMI 1.4 vs. HDMI 2.0)
By Frequency of Use:
Frequently used (those you access weekly or monthly)
Infrequently used
Rarely used (you might want to consider if you really need these)
By Device Type:
Mobile device cables (smartphones, tablets)
Computer cables (desktop, laptop)
Audio/Video device cables (TV, speakers)
Gaming console cables
Networking equipment cables (routers, switches)
Peripheral cables (printers, scanners)
Special Categories:
Adapters & Converters: This would include items that change one type of connection to another, such as HDMI to VGA or USB-C to USB-A.
Cable management: Items like cable ties, velcro straps, cable sleeves, etc.
It’s insane and kind of amazing.
Ok, that’s it for this week. I hope to have some conference videos to share with you next week. Thanks for hanging around, and feel free to be in touch if there’s anything you want to talk about or I can help with.
Thanks,
Noah