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.

🔗 Dan Wang’s 2025 letter

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

🔗 I wish we had spent the last 26 years…

🔗 What will the DEI landscape of the tech sector look like in 2026?

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.

🔗 The Blood Dimmed Tide of Agents

Is Your AI Assistant Creating a Recursive Security Loop? from Camille Crowell-Lee

AI-assisted coding is starting to eat its own tail: the same LLMs that write code are increasingly asked to review it, explain security decisions, and even override their own warnings. That creates recursive trust loops where “explain your reasoning” becomes an attack surface, and models can literally talk themselves out of being secure. The fix isn’t better prompts, it’s old-school architecture - separation of concerns, non-AI enforcement, and treating LLMs as assistants, not authorities.

Check out more in her article.

“We’re very focused on delivering upon the AI capabilities of a device—in fact everything that we’re announcing has an NPU in it—but what we’ve learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they’re not buying based on AI,” Terwilliger says bluntly. “In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome.”

🔗 Dell’s CES 2026 chat was the most pleasingly un-AI briefing I’ve had in maybe 5 years

Keep the thesis in mind. ‘Writers must […] constantly ask: what am I trying to say? Surprisingly often they don’t know. Then they must look at what they have written and ask: have I said it?’

🔗 Notes from “On Writing Well”