innovation 3
- New ideas usually fail outright or require drastic changes before they can succeed.
- Fear and vanity, not a lack of ideas, are what keep most people from building new things.
Steve Coast
Founder of OpenStreetMap, the collaborative map of the world; later worked on mapping at Microsoft and Telenav.
Steve Coast did not write this page.
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What Steve Coast says most about
ambition 2
- Fixating on the destination rather than the process leaves you stranded when things go wrong.
- People who are smart in a narrow way but don't read broadly are the ones who cause disastrous unintended consequences.
design 2
- AI should be approached as a collaboration between humans and computers, not a forced choice between them.
- Adding rules and complexity to a system drains it of humanity and fun.
LLMs 2
- AI will soon let anyone consume any content reshaped into the timeframe, tone, voice and bias they choose.
- AI should be approached as a collaboration between humans and computers, not a forced choice between them.
motivation 2
- People don't really control most outcomes, so the sensible response to events is to look for the good in them.
- Fear and vanity, not a lack of ideas, are what keep most people from building new things.
writing 2
- Reading even one book on a niche topic sharply shrinks the number of people you can discuss it with.
- AI-generated writing is already fairly good but still lacks the direction and insight of human editors.