Three Dumb Studies for your consideration - Delightful ideas for scientific studies: “experimenter’s urge: the desire to, quite literally, fuck around and find out."

1989: Japan Buys A Used President - This is an incredible piece of writing just one sample: “It is sad and disturbing to witness with what insouciance he now sells the stature which his country afforded him to any country which can afford him. It demeans us all to see him so available, so eager to please for a price, to become ‘‘Rent-a-Ron,’ the performing presidential seal."

Patterns Across 5 Years of YC Investing - There’s always money in the Security Stand.

Bluesky’s decline stems from never hearing from other side - ”When you never hear from the other side, it’s pretty easy to talk yourself into a political dead end. That might be enough for the political dead-enders. But it’s a terrible mistake for any political movement that actually hopes to rack up some durable victories.” // Speaking for myself, I try to “change the channel” and just not pay attention to (follow) anything political. The noise that comes from that is too much and un-actionable. I know: “must be nice…” and all that.

Starbucks to roll out Microsoft Azure OpenAI assistant for baristas - ”Instead of flipping through manuals or accessing Starbucks’ intranet, baristas will be able to use a tablet behind the counter equipped with Green Dot Assist to get answers to a range of questions, from how to make an iced shaken espresso to troubleshooting equipment errors. Baristas can either type or verbally ask their queries in conversational language.” // Do the baristas need that? After a few weeks, don’t you memorize everything? I guess if there’s a rotating menu, and some weird-o order…

OpenAI gives ChatGPT access to cloud-based documents and third-party research tools - The way to compete with AI is with the apps, the functionality they have, the outcomes they let you get - the stuff you can do with them.

PwC’s AI Agent Survey - ”Of the 300 senior executives in our May 2025 survey, 88% say their team or business function plans to increase AI-related budgets in the next 12 months due to agentic AI. Seventy-nine percent say AI agents are already being adopted in their companies. And of those adopting AI agents, two-thirds (66%) say that they’re delivering measurable value through increased productivity.”

Postfacto - Little utility to do team retros, from the Pivotal Labs folks. Open source, all that.

Tips on prompting ChatGPT for UK technology secretary Peter Kyle - Good tips on working with AIs: (1) use them a lot to build up an intuition of what works, (2) be aware of what they know, the cut off date for training and assume they have general, accepted mainstream knowledge, nothing too obscure, (3) use them for brainstorming and structuring your work. A crude summary: garbage in, garbage out.

MCP Best Practices - Including unit tests!