While Finland and Sweden consistently rank at the top of the happiness league table, for example, both countries have also persistently experienced some of the highest suicide rates in the European Union, ranking in the top five EU countries according to one recent statistic.
Posts in "links"
Weird-ass sounds from Russell's Dig
Also, see parts two, three, and four.
AI generated ads are more effective, but people don't like them.
Study finds that AI generated ads are more effective, but people don’t like them.
Some good old revealed preference.
The 🤖 says:
Ads fully created by visual genAI achieved about a 19% higher click-through rate than human-created ads. However, when ads disclosed that they were generated using AI, click-through rates dropped by about 32% relative to human-created ads.
🔗 Paper: The Impact of Visual Generative AI on Advertising Effectiveness by Hyesoo Lee, Vilma Todri, Panagiotis Adamopoulos, Anindya Ghose
Good actionable pondering on coming up titles that people will click on and word-of-mouth spread.
Full on management-by-magazine phase in effect
Executive mandates are racing ahead of reality. Boards and CEOs often expect payback in 6–12 months, but disconnected strategies, messy data, and immature governance stall progress. While two-thirds of AI decision-makers say their organization uses genAI in production, only 15% report a positive impact on earnings, and just a third can link AI spend to profit and loss. Confidence in ROI is dropping, as well: In late 2024, 81% of firms reported 5% or greater ROI; by mid-2025, that fell to 62%!
Relevant to your interests on Monday
Don’t let having an opinion and knowing what you like (being a critic in the classical sense) ruin your enjoyment of everything in life. Yet another cross-platform graphical process/system monitor, bottom. They travel with a knife-sharpener. Smart Tool Selection: Achieving 34-64% Token Savings with Spring AI’s Dynamic Tool Discovery People are often the largest part of an ROI sudy. Abby Bangser’s keynote at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2025. Check out Tyler’s theory of interview podcasts at the end.
“Oracle’s predicament is more acute than the hyperscalers’. Its business is smaller, its pockets shallower and its lot hitched more tightly to the fate of a single customer, OpenAI, which accounts for over half its $500bn in pledged revenue.”
Recently in the Netherlands:
The group of people experiencing anxiety or depression has grown over the past ten years. In 2014, it was 36 percent, and last year almost 44 percent. The increase is particularly noticeable among young people and women.
More than half of Dutch renters ages 18 to 34 fear they will not find a rental home because of high rents and growing competition among house-hunters, as the supply of available housing continues to shrink.
🔗 Over 40% of Dutch have anxiety or depression; 1 in 20 receive mental health treatment
“The question that actually determines success is simpler—and almost never asked: Are we ready to operate a private cloud as a product for the next 3–5 years?”
“a new AI-infested economy”