”Tech is a pop culture. Very few of the decisions made in the industry are made rationally or empirically. Studies and tests are used to justify the emotional decisions of the executive or management class. Infrastructure and stack decisions are made hedonistically – “cool” tech that makes the engineers and devs feel good about themselves almost always gets a priority over “boring” tech that has no risks. The industry, especially the software side of tech, is driven by emotion and a sense of what is fashionable.

With some generalization, this is good advice for any pitch, from corporate presentations to call for papers. The point that you need to make it easy for other people to advocate for you is a good one, rarely mentioned. 🔗 What Grant Reviewers Actually Look For (and What They Ignore)

The decline of the US Rust Belt is directly linked to the rise of China, driven by US free trade policies that incentivized companies to relocate manufacturing overseas for cheaper labor and less regulation.

The Gruber: “When is the last time an investigation regarding the legality of the App Store’s dominant market position went in Apple’s favor, in any country? I can’t recall one.” 🔗 Apple Loses Landmark U.K. Lawsuit Over App Store Commissions

Tips on doing corporate videos. It’s almost: be less polished. Plus, The Kids Slang. 🔗 high production value ≠ rizz.

As always, if you want your people to get more work done, interrupt them less and invite them to less meetings. This applies to all people, not just programmers. A meeting is not work, it’s talking about work. 🔗 Meetings and interruptions are still the biggest obstacles for developers, even with AI

I think the point is: it’s nice the professionals can make excellent content. It’s fun that the rest of us can now putter around the edges of that, ten seconds at a time. // Also, looks like a good example of a “Strasian reading” with Casey, there. While he is condemning AI generated images, he is showing the cool things he can make with it. // At some point we’ll have to confront the elite/commoner conflict between experts and goofballs using new tools to ape the experts.

blogging as art!!! why not? i am drowning in information. all i want is a little fun. a respite from postmodernity. folk say the internet used to be fun. i was there, it kind of was. we can do better! 🔗 blogging as art

Excellent comparison of various LLMs doing AI image generations. Cool UI for looking at the output too. 🔗 GenAI Image Showdown

There’s a lot of knowledge work that can be automated: ‘Where Altman’s comment holds water is in what it hints at, even if it doesn’t spell it out. Most jobs aren’t fake, but many have accumulated layers of automatable junk: compliance checklists, reports nobody reads, emails summarizing meetings that could’ve been Slack threads. That’s the kind of “game-playing” work LLMs are already good at. When Altman says these models will wipe out tasks, not just roles, this is what he likely means.