Also: Bob picks the model, AI-BOMs, $37.5M DIY platforms, and AI slop on tap.
Related to your interests
- 🤖 The Venture-Capital Populist - Packer’s profile of David Sacks as architect of Silicon Valley’s MAGA alliance, who delivered crypto legitimisation and AI deregulation to the Trump administration while keeping his venture fund running and benefiting from the policies he wrote.
- don’t call it “social media,” call it “parasocial media”
- Most AI coding is “like taking your Ferrari to buy milk”: IBM’s Neel Sundaresan - Harness talk from IBM: “Bob doesn’t expose the underlying model to users. It routes tasks automatically - to Anthropic Claude, Mistral open-source models, IBM Granite, or one of several proprietary, fine-tuned models built specifically for Bob’s environment - based on what the task actually requires. That routing intelligence is where Sundaresan thinks the real architectural work is. ‘It’s not slapping on a model into the system,’ he says. ‘It is bringing the model, bringing the experience, but also bringing the architecture that provides a great experience. All three have to come together. The model is only one part of the equation.'”
- AI-BOMs replace SBOMs as way to track AI agents and bots - Yup…
- How can engineering leaders calculate the return on their AI investments? - You have to learn how to use a new technology before you can get the benefits, and learning looks like failure because you’re worker slower.
- Notes on SKILL.md vs MCP - With skills, you’re relying on the LLM to follow your prompt begging.
- What you’re actually writing when you write a SKILL.md - “Skills are loader specifications, not prompts.”
- Lessons on Building MCP Servers
- Writing is thinking, presenting is deciding - “[S]imilarly, the other day I asked someone at work to write me a note about a project we were working on. And he did. He came back to me (much too quickly) with a note that had been written by AI. And, obviously, that was my fault. Because really what I meant by ‘write me a note’ was ‘think about this problem, reflect on it for a while and then write down your thoughts, so you can transfer your thoughts to my head and we can think about it together.'”
- 🤖 State Department Looks to Build on Online Passport Renewal Success - State’s online passport renewal hit 7.3M users and 94% approval by switching from waterfall to agile and replacing only the front end. Now they want to expand to first-time applicants and digital credentials, but the team that built it has been gutted by layoffs and the shutdown of 18F. // They switched the UI development to agile and user-centric design…including the end users in the cycle to figure out how to best design the UI.
- 🤖 War on Adobe - Roundup of commentary arguing Adobe’s subscription-era strategy has invited a coordinated attack from free rivals like Canva-owned Cavalry/Affinity and DaVinci Resolve, while in-app upsells and bloat erode trust with the professionals who built the company.
- 🤖 Aura through the Cult of Self: opportunity creates authenticity - Art as affirmation therapy: ‘Under this “Cult of Self,” art’s authenticity is judged not by the artist or the medium, but by how well it lets the audience express and actualize themselves. Spotify Wrapped resonates because it validates listeners’ self-image; the art’s aura builds the audience’s aura.’
- Failover Weekly: Ask the Hard Question - “The best podcast interviews this week had one thing in common: the host didn’t let the guest off easy.”
Wastebook
- Now that conference organizations are on-edge about AI-written abstracts, I bet it’s actually better to be unprofessional in your abstract, less than perfect, and put a few grammar and spelling errors in.
- “an infinite scroll of cotton candy content,” Here.
- “lot of ‘modernization’ is really just moving failure modes around” Here.
- “A lesson is something taught by someone.” Here.
- “The future is full of robots that don’t do much yet” Here.
ICYMI
- DIY platforms: $37.5 million, 60 people, and you’re still not done
- Surfing taco
- Philips lightbulb packaging, found in Diemen
- Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam
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