Shift Run Stop is back! This was one of the most influential podcasts for me. It showed an attitude about podcasting that was new and fun. That attitude was fun, curious, dorky, and joyous. You could do whatever you wanted, whatever you enjoyed.
Labor vs. AI
Automation creates a temporary rent for whoever controls the remaining bottleneck. Whether workers keep that rent is a power question, not a technology question.
ChatGPT summary of this paper on automation and wages.
And I would add:
The firm is seeking to get rid of human workers as much as possible. So once that high value, bottleneck job is automated, labor is fucked.
Containers running in VMs 4ever
“IDC forecasts that nearly 85% of all containers will continue running inside VMs through 2028 because enterprises trust the virtualization layer for governance, security, and operational control.”
🔗 Why a Single Platform for VMs and Containers Is the Future of Modern IT
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?’
Books: Stubborn Attachments
Stubborn Attachments is a weird book. Perhaps because it was published in 2018 it has an out of time agenda that no longer seems to need arguing for. The book obsesses over a “we can all agree on cheese” argument: it’s desirable to be more prosperous in the future than today.
We can all agree that given the option of being worse off or better off tomorrow, the next week, or even in 100 years, that we would like to be better off.
I became one of a countless number of young men who found solace in Nietzsche’s thought. A life-affirming philosophy compensated for not being very good at life. Wasn’t I smart enough to reject God, and strong enough not to need a supernatural crutch?
And:
We continue to see demonstrations of some of the same pitfalls of Nietzscheism today. Somewhere in Silicon Valley, there is a venture capitalist telling himself he is the Overman because he is investing in an app that more efficiently separates sports fans from their money.
“Yes, a book about parking can be fascinating.” 2025 in Review: Reading and Writing Highlights
Employee optimism about work-place productivity
Employees think working from home is fine:
Hybrid work has moved from novelty to normality, but employers and employees are no longer aligned on what it should look like. More than half of employees (56%) now work in the office full-time, yet only 15% would choose this pattern, with three-quarters (75%) preferring a more balanced approach.
This widening gap signals that organizations face a choice: continue to rely on presence-led models or shift toward purpose-led ones.
Related to your interests, Wednesday
More than 20% of videos shown to new YouTube users are ‘AI slop’, study finds - “Together, these AI slop channels have amassed more than 63bn views and 221 million subscribers, generating about $117m (£90m) in revenue each year, according to estimates.” // Assuming The Algorithm" is working (showing people things they will watch and they verify this by watching more), this is some revealed preference in action. “I think of Trumpian policy, first and foremost, as elevating cultural policy above all else.