Also: Claude Managed Agents, Antigravity, Project Glasswing, repugnant economics, and writing observations.
From: Wes Anderson's Impossible Dreams Related to your interests Innovations from Google I/O 26 on Google Cloud - Google seems the cleanest when it comes to describing their AI stuff…it’s something like a mix of clear naming (aside from “Antigravity”) and functionality, and not carpet combing you with tools like AWS. Announcing Claude Managed Agents on Cloudflare - “Integrating with Claude Managed Agents is another step in this direction.
The coming AI backlash
Along with datacenter backlash, 2026 and 2027 is shaping up to have a big, general population backlash against AI.
Polls show that 70% of Americans think AI is moving too fast, over 50% have negative views of it, and just 18% of young people say they feel hopeful about it. Partly, they are turned off by AI’s upending of the job market. ‘Every other day, a new AI agent is being released in the market,’ said Vaishali Hireraddi, 23, a University of California, Davis, graduate student who’s applied to 500 jobs so far.
Rampant shadow AI
Of the 45 percent of all professionals using AI in the workplace regularly, 67 percent of those were accessing the platforms using personal accounts that were not authorized by their IT teams, data from Verizon’s annual data breach investigations report showed.
Verizon said that the proportion of users accessing AI through personal accounts now represents a fourfold increase in non-malicious insider actions detected across this year’s dataset of more than 22,000 breaches globally.
Use AI to write more shorter pieces
While people are all excited shout using LLMs to write - which is awesome, I am all about AI empowering people to do things they didn’t have the agency to do, writing being one of them - I am imploring y’all to get the LLMs to write more concisely. I am looking at all y’all Substack writers with my sternest Strunk & White spectacles.
The number one use case I have for AI, used countless times a day, is “wow, my digital brochacho, this is really long and convoluted.
Tokenmaxxing at Amazon, Potato Stamp Fonts, and Tax Code Hacking - Related to your interests, Monday
Also: Elon’s OpenAI lawsuit, build-vs-buy for agentic AI, and rethinking observability.
From: Wakamai Fondue, the tool that answers the question what can my font do? Related to your interests Amazon employees admit to using AI unnecessarily to pump up internal usage scores - workers complain of intense pressure to use AI tools - Tokens are the new lines of code. Also, yes, of course, “Goodhart’s Law," blah blah.
Weekend of May 16th, 2026 to May 17th, 2026.
Tatermaxxing
We had the idea to make a Bodoni interpretation with potato stamps, so we bought 8kg of potatoes, some knifes and carved a long, long evening in the kitchen. When we finally had the full aphabet we stamped it on paper, made a font out of this and called it Bodedo.
Maybe my new mindset on presentation should be: an excuse to use a cool font.
🔗 HVD Bodedo
Buy your platform, AI edition
Building an internal agentic AI platform in banking or insurance demands a multi-year orchestration engineering commitment with a regulatory surface area that most organizations underestimate. [Bryan Ross]
Tinkers and opexmaxxers take in huge risks when they decide to build their own platforms. And it usually fails, for at least seven reasons.
🔗 The hidden cost of build vs. buy for agentic AI in regulated industries
5G versus _The Grapes or Wrath_
From the recent cellphone ban in schools study:
The share of students using cellphones in class for nonacademic reasons declined to 13 percent from 61 percent in schools using the pouches, according to teacher surveys, which suggested that students were not widely able to circumvent the bans.
Even so, the bans had a “close to zero” effect on test scores, according to the paper. Test scores are affected by many factors, including the stability of students’ home lives and the quality of teaching and curriculum.
Aesthetic Computing
Consider “ascetic computing”:
Here’s what “ascetic computing” means to me:
- Doing without things that compromise my personal standards or morals.
- Learning to live Fearlessly in the face of Missing Out.
- Resisting the Endless Pursuit of Shiny Things. … The goal is to live a (computing) life of principle, purpose, and focus. … Nothing I do on computers is masochistic self-denial or performative mortification to impress anyone. Quite the opposite! I find my habits pleasurable and satisfying.
Yes, and: (1) many people’s aesthetic is ascetic computing, (2) for me, hey, man, I just don’t want to use vi.
I throw around the word “aesthetic” a lot. What I mean by that is that people’s selection of any given technology, and even their evaluation of it is driven by how it feels or looks. This is something like preference, but it’s also driven by their gut reaction regardless of function.
For example, every few years I check in on the Windows UI. It just looks weird. Or last time I saw Android, that just looked weird. Functionally, they’re all the same. TypeScript vs. Java, those versus Python. As is evident by numerous applications over the years, you can achieve the same ends with any of them. But, people have aesthetic reactions to them, and select which to use according to their perception of beauty or ugliness.
Nerd of course don’t use the word beauty. They say things like “this code is elegant.” The opposite is usually something like “this code is so wordy and bulky” (they usually mean Java).
I am no job scheduler expect, but it feels like a good example is from vs launchd vs some GUI with drop-downs that lets you select when a job runs with a UI similar to creating a reoccurring meeting.
cron is ascetic, like Mondrian, but if it was only one square. Launchd is probably something like “mass-market consumer,” like a picture of a cup of coffee you’d see in the eating room of a Marriott Courtyard. The GUI is decadent, something like Jeff Koons.
But, whichever you choose, the job runs.