“For the last year or two, we’ve been tinkering with it,” Daniel Danker, executive vice president of AI acceleration, product and design at Walmart, said at the ICR Conference on Tuesday. “This is the year where tinkering becomes transformation. This is the year where we’ve built a level of mastery around that and we’ll start building things that deeply address customer problems.”
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Relevant to your interests, Friday
Texas judge throws out second lawsuit over CrowdStrike outage | Computer Weekly - “the plaintiff’s claims were dismissed in their entirety in part because the shareholders had failed to establish any plausible motive of intent to commit securities fraud on CrowdStrike’s part.” How Daimler Trucks North America built a living knowledge graph of its business - ”Analyze our recent warranty claims, correlate them with all available datasets, and tell me why they’ve increased.
Goes over lots of use cases for AI at a grocer. Some internal facing ones:
The platform provides Kroger workers with a single point of access to check their shift schedule, request time off, set shift availability and view their pay stubs from one mobile app, according to a video Kroger played during the panel. And from this, Kroger’s store leaders can get real-time labor data insights as well as view their shift changes, pending punches and time-off approvals
Relevant to your interests, Wednesday
RIP the metaverse - It’s fine to use your mountains of spare cash (and voting control) to try out new things. We’re all about innovation and expect it; you have to embrace lots of failure, giant failure. // The actual problem is then discarding all the people you hired to help you. It shucks the “with great valuations comes great responsibility” principle that big tech shits on. (Except, maybe Google and a little bit Microsoft?
Facebook shutting down metaverse.
It’s fine to use your mountains of spare cash (and voting control) to try out new things. We’re all about innovation and expect it; you have to embrace lots of failure, giant failure.
The actual problem is then discarding all the people you hired to help you. It shucks the “with great valuations comes great responsibility” principle that big tech shits on. (Except, maybe Google and a little bit Microsoft?)
Also, once again, we show that VR/cyberspace is a solution that will never find its problem.
Relevant to your interests, Tuesday
- 3 + 4 - On the three day work week.
- AWS in 2026: The Year of Proving They Still Know How to Operate - “Internal documents reportedly show 69-81% ‘regretted attrition’–meaning the people leaving are the ones Amazon desperately wanted to keep. Where have the senior engineers who’ve been through this dance before gone? They’ve walked out the door with decades of hard-won knowledge about how AWS’s systems actually work when everything’s on fire at 3 AM.”
- Joint statement from Google and Apple - Apple to officially use Gemini, though still host it on its own infrastructure (I think). Also, very weird press release. The title is like an after thought, rather, not even a thought. I mean, I’m sure it’s all incredibly thought through, which is what makes it so much the weirder.
- My town looks okay, for now (photos) - ‘I wonder why the river is called “Varmá” (literally “Warm River” in Icelandic)?’
- These 36 Airlines Offer iPhone Feature That Helps Find Your Lost Bags - A practical, everyday use of computers.
- Welcome to the Party: Why Healthcare AI Needs More Than a Chat Box - Advanced product thinking for AI healthcare apps and workflows.
- How Home Depot, Wayfair executives are preparing for an agentic AI future - Home Depot’s experiments with AI. At the moment, better search and finding out what projects people are working on. The second leading to more sales and stickyness/loyalty, I guess.
It’s good to keep building the future, though it’s sometimes absurd to hear someone pivot, mid-breath, from declaring that salvation lies in the blockchain to announcing that AI will solve everything.
California tech people can be really exhausting. Read the rest from Dan Wang for a very accurate write-up of why.
the reason the 2000 bug didn’t destroy a significant amount of our infrastructure is because we caught it and spent thousands of hours fixing it BEFORE the year 2000
Small, independent and with some degree of autonomy, what ultimately came to be described as the “agentic'“vision of AI was one describing fleets of individual AI agents operating in concert with one another and various third parties both human and otherwise. All of which means that the next challenge in front of the AI market is management.
AI sprawl.