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.
Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam.
Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam, Duivendrecht edition.
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.
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.
“Labor is valuable only insofar as it occupies a constraint the firm hasn’t yet automated.”
It’s good to keep building the future, though it’s sometimes absurd to hear someone pivot, mid-breath, from declaring that salvation lies in the blockchain to announcing that AI will solve everything.
California tech people can be really exhausting. Read the rest from Dan Wang for a very accurate write-up of why.
“Your brain hates unbounded risk. When there’s no plan, it escalates into dread.”
the reason the 2000 bug didn’t destroy a significant amount of our infrastructure is because we caught it and spent thousands of hours fixing it BEFORE the year 2000
This week’s Software Defined Interviews episode is with Lian Li:
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. They also cover her unique improv workshops for engineers at conferences and the popular KubeCon karaoke parties she organizes.
Listen and subscribe, or watch the video (above) if you’re into that kind of thing.