Tech continues to be political | Miriam Eric Suzanne - ”I don’t know how to attend conferences full of gushing talks about the tools that were designed to negate me. That feels so absurd to say. I don’t have any interest in trying to reverse-engineer use-cases for it, or improve the flaws to make it “better”, or help sell it by bending it to new uses.”
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AI Alone Won’t Drive Revenue - What Are You Missing? - Some light ROI talk.
Why are big tech companies so slow? - Because they build, sell, and support a lot features.
How to add a directory to your PATH - Computers are easy, they said. You just need to read the manual, they said. It’s so intuitive!
All hat, no cowboy - A bicycle for your hands: “Becoming a good programmer takes time, so does becoming an artist. What if all the people with ideas but no time or skills or persistence or real interest could participate and _turn their ideas into the thing?_Surely non-musicians have great ideas for songs that they could turn into great songs if it weren’t for the inconvenience of musical instruments.” Yes, and: “One way to look at this – not a charitable way, but a view that feels true to me – is that managers view all need for human labor as an inconvenience. In part because they rarely get to experience what it’s like to be closer to a creative process, but also because they constantly experience the inconvenience of checking on deadlines and paying invoices. They would simply rather manage a robot than a human, so the only other people they have to interact with are other executives. Peak economic efficiency."
The “AI Agent As Coworker” Narrative Is Nonsense The AI agent co-worker narrative is nonsense - Against the agentic hype: “You have to admire Benioff’s chutzpah in defining digital labor as some brand-new massive market opportunity. But to many, it just sounds like automation. Like every other phase of automation since the beginning of the industrial age, this phase is also about doing more with fewer human resources."
Do Marketers Need To Be Writing for AI? - SEO for AI model training. Yup, better start doing that. The good news is, all those SEO-trap pages that you generated (those long one you never actually show to users/customers) would probably work here…are working here. But, it’s likely a good idea to start doing more of this ongoing.
Context-switching is the main productivity killer for developers - #1 way to improve developer productivity, 30+ years running: stop interrupting them while they’re coding. // ”Research from UC Irvine shows that developers need an average of 23 minutes to rebuild their focus after an interruption fully.”
Emerging GenAI Use Cases and Spotlight on Secure Content Generation - If your AI stuff is using the same pool of knowledge as your competitors, you won’t get much competitive advantage. You need to add your own secret info. // “A common challenge, however, when employees use public generative AI tools or foundation models, is a lack of organizational specificity.”