Though the scripts look completely different, hieroglyphs emerged after cuneiform was established. This suggests Egyptian travelers or diplomats encountered the *idea* of writing in Mesopotamia. They then developed their own system using culturally relevant pretty pictures instead of adopting abstract cuneiform signs.

The "generative" label on AI is misleading. Its true power for daily knowledge work lies not in creating artifacts, but in its superhuman ability to read, comprehend, and synthesize vast amounts of information—a far more frequent and fundamental task than writing.

Similar to the Rosetta Stone, scholars cracked cuneiform using a monument with the same text in three languages. They first decoded the simpler Old Persian script by identifying repeating patterns like kings' titles, then used that knowledge to unlock the more complex Babylonian text.

Current LLMs abstract language into discrete tokens, losing rich information like font, layout, and spatial arrangement. A "pixel maximalist" view argues that processing visual representations of text (as humans do) is a more lossless, general approach that captures the physical manifestation of language in the world.

While writing enabled literature, its initial large-scale driver was administration. The Sumerians quickly developed sophisticated numeracy and bookkeeping to manage tithes, track goods, and run their city-states. This established accounting as a foundational use of the written word.

Vision, a product of 540 million years of evolution, is a highly complex process. However, because it's an innate, effortless ability for humans, we undervalue its difficulty compared to language, which requires conscious effort to learn. This bias impacts how we approach building AI systems.

The most effective way to convey complex information, even in data-heavy fields, is through compelling stories. People remember narratives far longer than they remember statistics or formulas. For author Morgan Housel, this became a survival mechanism to differentiate his writing and communicate more effectively.

An ancient tablet recounting the flood story omits phrases like "he said," which are standard in later texts. This suggests it was a script for a live narrator performing different character voices, capturing literature at the exact moment it was transitioning from oral performance to written text.

Cues uses 'Visual Context Engineering' to let users communicate intent without complex text prompts. By using a 2D canvas for sketches, graphs, and spatial arrangements of objects, users can express relationships and structure visually, which the AI interprets for more precise outputs.