Courage
The Value in Confabulation — Simplification Takes Courage — The Cracks in Big Tech
👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture. Three to read and three to listen to—no fluff, just stuff ⚡
There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening—Marshall McLuhan
📚 Reading
The teacher lies sometimes:
It’s dizzying for a machine to be so powerful, yet so clearly unsuitable for any kind of decision-making with actual consequences […] I have to say, if it was me, I would be too embarrassed to release a product that so confidently produces so much bullshit. I suppose I’m glad it’s not me, though, because there’s plenty of value to be snatched from the jaws of confabulation.
Robin Sloan | 2 minutes
Simplification Takes Courage:
The most challenging aspect of designing for today’s overwhelming digital ecosystem is not technology, it’s psychology. And contrary to the millions of user studies out there – no shade — it’s not the psychology of the “user,” it’s the psychology of the maker. Simplification requires courage […] It requires the confidence to believe that what you remove is as important as what you keep.
Christopher Butler | 5 minutes
Two weak spots in Big Tech economics:
Metaverse, cryptocurrency, AI. These technologies have each been at the forefront of Big Tech marketing and investor communications, but not solely because they represented a market opportunity. Rather, they represented a more-or-less plausible explanation for how these companies that were on the wrong side of the law of large numbers could continue to double in size, without breeding billions of new customers to sign up for their services.
Cory Doctorow—Pluralistic | 9 minutes
🎧 Listening
AI, data centers, and power economics:
We were looking at data that showed that AI-based software startups were growing three times faster than fast-growing SaaS startups in the pre-AI era. And that's compressed even further. The reason that's different to the telecoms infrastructure build-out is that the revenues are probably ramping faster than the infrastructure growth is ramping, whereas the reverse was true back in the telecoms bubble, which has been relabelled the dot-com bubble by some historians.
Azeem Azhar—Complex Systems | 74 minutes
Agent Experience:
We need to start thinking about what it is the best way to structure your programmatic interface in a way that’s really great for a LLM-driven agent. It won’t be the same what’s best for a developer to write a workflow based on coupling two tools together. It’s more like an UI in the sense that the agents want to instantly work and do things, and they probably need to be structured and documented differently.
Matt Billmann—Weaviate | 53 minutes
Creativity vs Control: Where AI Fits in the Creative Toolbox
The floor is going down, and suddenly more people can enter the world of storytelling. Whether you're a salesperson or a data analyst or a marketing person, you can do your own thing as opposed to rely on others to tell your story. And then at the other side of the spectrum, you have the ceiling going up, where suddenly, if you used to be an imaging professional or an illustrator or a motion graphics artist […] you're able to push your category to another level.
Scott Belsky—a16z (Apple, Spotify) | 42 minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago—Type 2 Growth
2️⃣ years ago—You Are Not a Parrot
3️⃣ years ago—What Evolution Can Teach Us About Innovation