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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.

🔗 RIP the metaverse

Relevant to your interests, Tuesday

Recursive Loops, Enterprise Nanny-states, Garbage Chairs, and Improv

Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam, Duivendrecht edition.Original ContentFrom Platform Engineering to Stand-Up Comedian, with Lian Li, Software Defined Talk #117: “In this episode, Whitney and Coté talk with Lian, a “cloud-native human” with a 15-year career in tech. Lian discusses her transition from tech to performance art, her experiences in amateur musical theater, stand-up comedy, and improv theater. She talks about platform engineering, the importance of community building in tech, and balancing professional life with personal projects.
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🤖 Summary of "Economist Tyler Cowen on the positive side of AI negativity" podcast

The below is a summary of the original transcript from ChatGPT 5.2. Conclusion: Cowen’s core claim is simple and sharp: in the US, most people won’t lose jobs to AI, they’ll lose them to other people who use AI better. The real bottleneck isn’t models or GPUs - it’s institutions, habits, status hierarchies, and people’s unwillingness to adapt. The transition will be slow, uneven, and psychologically unpleasant, but materially beneficial.
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Relative to your interests, Monday

Is Your AI Assistant Creating a Recursive Security Loop? AI security concerns and opportunities for 2026 - Tanzu security maestro David Zendzian rattles it off. Amazon gives managers a new way to spot employees who aren’t spending enough time in the office - Enterprise Nanny-state. What does the platform engineer do when the amount of “developers” in your organization goes 10x? Open APIs Are Over - Closing an API reveals where the business strategy, i.
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Industry analyst value after AI - how could Gartner use AI

Feeding the decades of Gartner research into some kind of AI querying thing would be interesting. Making sense of their reports takes a lot of time, and multi-year trends are hard to pick out. Writing into a chat window that was updated with not only the research reports, but also analyst opinions - maybe notes after inquiry meetings, etc. I have never been a big user of their inquiry service, but I have a feeling that combining a AI-made custom report/chat session with a human follow up would be something new and valuable.
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“Labor is valuable only insofar as it occupies a constraint the firm hasn’t yet automated.”