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The Epictetus method for task management
Epictetus’s productivity method starts with a filter: Is this mine? Original: Epictetus Ran a Better Productivity System Than Any App You’ve Bought by JA Westenberg. List extracted by AI. Separate what you control from what you don’t. Your judgments, choices, desires, and actions are yours. Other people’s decisions, opinions, deadlines, mistakes, markets, algorithms, and outcomes…
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house plants
George Gessert ornamental plants as a form of domestication. Under that framing, Gessert argues, humans have actually domesticated more species for aesthetic purposes than we have for eating… and “interesting” has been just as common an aesthetic aim as “beautiful” has been. Also: I have a hunch: kitsch discards “the interesting” as a desirable aesthetic…
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AI remove’s labor’s toil, capital doesn’t know what to do with AI – Elusive Enterprise ROI
Another way to say that is, AI has opened the door to humans spending more time making things instead of being crushed by meetings and process and bureaucracy. Also, from the same: Another way to say that is, AI has opened the door to humans spending more time making things instead of being crushed by…
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Relative to your interests, Wednesday
Gemini crossed a billion users, most of them just talking to it. Eight Pulitzer winners admitted to using AI. Adobe moved its whole suite inside ChatGPT, which I think is the correct move: the stuff you can reach through an agent is the stuff you keep paying for. Also: agent skills escaping the laptop, DOGE’s…
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Make it easy to use AI with your apps to retain customers
Adobe hasn’t done well in the “AI era.” Perhaps the answer is this: people are happy to use Adobe, and if let them use it through AI too, they’ll keep using AI. In my experience, once you integrate with AI tools (through skills, MCP servers, or just having an API that agents can use), those…
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Once you realize AI is a great tool, you have a new great tool to use to get your work done better
The industry [used to be] far more apprehensive about AI tools than it is today, with a clearer understanding now of what uses might be appropriate — data collection and analysis, for example — and when it might not, such as in writing and editing stories in any format that might be considered for a…
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Gemini has a billion users now
Google LLC’s Gemini artificial intelligence app has passed 1 billion monthly active users, making it the 14th product in the company’s history to reach that mark. … Alphabet Inc. put the app at 650 million monthly users last October and 750 million by February. Pichai cited 900 million on stage at Google I/O in June,…
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Relative to your interests, Friday
From: The adorable love story behind Wikipedia’s ‘high five’ photos ICYMI Original content published since last time. Shadow AI and Who Is Watching What the AI Bill Actually Looks Like People Actually Using It More Wastebook All things are possible, but this thing is more possible. AI Summaries I wanted to read these, but I…
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Relative to your interests, Thursday
From Marc Weidenbaum, June 22, 2026. ICYMI Original content published since last time. Where the Developer Day Actually Goes Theoretic charts: Only three of the eight bands move. Source: The AI productivity gap by Bjorn Roche. Juniors spend more of the day on the one thing AI speeds up, so they gain more, not less.…
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Six to eight weeks, down to two days – How Tanzu Product Management Uses AI
I talked with Chris McClanahan and Purnima Padmanabhan about how the Tanzu product management team actually put AI to work. Ideation went from six to eight weeks to a couple of days, and almost none of what got them there was tooling. It was org chart work: one pod instead of hand-offs, onboarding the AI…
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A totally custom, one-off D&D battle map, made by ChatGPT and prompted by Claude
Here’s another, totally custom and one-off battle-map AI made for me: This was just a random encounter in a D&D adventure I was doing with solo role-playing with AI (Claude). I asked it to generate a prompt to give to ChatGPT to generate the battle-map, and the results were amazing. Here’s the prompt that generated…
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AI ends up like spreadsheets – Software Defined Talk #124 with Bryan Ross
I’m old enough to remember how much time and agony we spent explaining to managers the importance of context switching for developers, and how they should have meeting free Fridays… And now the same people that we’re trying to help are bragging about how distracted they are. Bryan Ross, SDI #124. Check out this week’s…
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What’s up with these AI jailbreaks and security breaches?
Check the rest of our conversation on last week’s Tanzu Catsup.
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AI makes people more productive, not organizations – Elusive Enterprise AI ROI
For enterprises to get the most out of their AI investments, they should think about going deep with their AI deployments, not wide, Ashraf said. Instead of applying AI across every process in an organization, find the few instances where automating workflows with an agentic system could make the most impact. And: While 78% of…
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sell on story, or sell on revenue
If you’re an entrepreneur in the venture game, you should internalize this. You either get sold for a strategic multiple (that would be Airtable at $11.7B), or you get sold for a multiple of revenue (2-5x, likely driven by your ability to turn a profit), or you reach public markets and hopefully a self sustaining…
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when exporting your data is difficult
The client could copy the database, but the database structure was so complex, they couldn’t make sense of it, and had been working for ten months with limited progress. My colleague’s idea was to use an AI to build JavaScript scripts that scraped the UI. Since the data was presented from the UI, it was…
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AI layoffs get mixed results
[Forrester’s] survey of leaders found 55 percent of employers regret having made tech-driven staff cuts—leading its analysts to predict ‘half of AI-attributed layoffs [will] be quietly reversed.’” And: ‘Staffing company Robert Half has estimated that a third of hiring executives who said they’d eliminated roles due to AI automation had rehired those employees or recruited…
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