• “‘CEO said a thing!’ journalism” - fantastic new phrase!
• How AI Is Redefining Product Teams - What do product managers do in AI code gen land?
• NatWest hails progress after £1.2bn spent on tech last year, but true AI transformation to come - “According to the bank, more than 70,000 hours were saved through automated AI call summaries in its retail business, while relationship managers in its wealth business were able to spend 30% more time on customer conversations by using AI. According to NatWest, through agentic and voice AI, customers will receive ‘more intuitive, personalised and seamless interactions’ this year.”
• Poor Deming never stood a chance - “The beauty of a set of key results is that they take the messiness of the system as input and create a neat summary in spreadsheet or slide format as output.”
• On Keeping AI in the Critical Path - “The instruction produces a summary. The axiom produces an audit. The instruction asks the model to describe what it sees. The axiom asks the model to evaluate what it sees against a standard. One is retrieval. The other is reasoning.”
• UK bank bosses plan to set up Visa and Mastercard alternative amid Trump fears - ‘“If Mastercard and Visa were turned off, it would send us back to the 1950s,” before cards dominated the UK economy, and businesses wholly relied on cash, one executive familiar with the project told the Guardian. “Of course, we need a sovereign payments system.”’

• “Don’t hook up where you VLOOKUP.” Work advice
• “Bawdiness requires two things: humour and the body. Both need to exist together to truly earn the epithet.”
• Related: “Sex Recession”
• Meanwhile, in 1828: “Goodridge was sending Webster the 19th-century equivalent of ‘a saucy nudie pic’”
• How ‘Dump Him’ Became a Marketing Strategy - “This is not a pivot away from love, but a shift towards autonomy”
• Ludovic Slimak on Neanderthals: ‘It was suicide. Humans disappear when they no longer want to live because their values have collapsed’ - “Is it possible that for Neanderthals, their relationship with the world was to have a small territory and stay there forever?”
• “Fill your own cup with what gives you energy” - Productivity is always about stopping interruptions: “What’s your optimum time of day and week where you feel most energised or in the flow for deep work? The other way of looking at it is this: when do you not like being interrupted during the day?”
• The hype is as important as the tech. Often more.
• Is Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, “full of shit”? - The latest from Bitcoin land.
• Good thread of pictures of vintage computers and peripherals, like dot matrix printers.
• “Every milk-carton has a QR code.” Bruce Sterling
• Trump’s Favorite Strategy Stops Working - “It worked because Trump understood a basic rule of modern politics: attention beats substance.” // Sounds like the Internet “discourse” post-Facebook.
• Agipo, Font Review Journal - “Agipo follows a growing trend I’ve seen from type designers, which involves taking a familiar genre, picking a handful of characters, and making those characters blindingly distinct.”

ICYMI

Some original content and other posts from my weblog:

• Your Boss Doesn’t Know What to Do With AI, a short video.
• VMware is just fine, it seems.

Logoff

I’m thinking of moving my newsletter to the newsletter service in micro.blog.

This would be slightly weird for weblog readers. You would see some duplicate posts in the ICYMI section above. However, since I’ve been batching up links instead of posting them individually, most of what you get would be fresh content, you could just skip the ICYMI.

You could think of it as a digest post…kind of…but not really.

Newsletter only subscribers would miss a few posts (they’d only get the ones I have in this round-up). But, it would mean the newsletter goes out more, and be less work for me. We’ll see what it looks like.