👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture. Three reads and three listens; no fluff, just stuff ⚡
⛱️☀️ Thoughtforms will be off on a belated summer break. The next few issues may be lighter on content, be late or not show up at all 🙀 The regular schedule resumes Friday, 20 September.
There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening—Marshall McLuhan
📚 Reading
Breaking the streaks of engineer-CEOs:
"He/she was the first CEO not to come from an engineering background" is not something that happened once or twice, it looks like it was an economy-wide trend, not just in the U.S. but Japan too […] The irony is that many of these MBA/finance CEOs in fact succeeded at greatly increasing revenues, profits, and shareholder value—even while making fundamental strategic errors that would effectively kill the company in the future. And they were lauded for it at the time!
Marko Jukic—X | 3 minutes
The big stack game of LLM poker:
[U]ntil an efficient frontier is reached […], or we run out of electricity, or a group pulls ahead with an untouchable lead thanks to some smart algorithmic work, investment in this space by these giants should continue to increase dramatically, and costs necessarily precede revenue. The prize is theoretically so large, and if a clear winner emerges, their market opportunity so uncapped, you have to keep increasing your bet.
Sarah Tavel | 5 minutes
LLMs and the Final Internet Engagement:
There will be a second internet wave […] If society cycles between the digital and the physical (as the young look for new cultures to ‘own’) that means a NEW internet will come. Not ‘internet 2.0’ or ‘internet 3.0’ BS — but a different way of thinking about digital space and creating high-quality highly fulfilling human experiences in frictionless space.
Sam Lessin—X | 2 minutes
🎧 Listening
Navigating Tech Antitrust and the Future of AI:
[T]he most plausible way to reduce the power of any one company, but also not degrade the user experience, is to require companies to open up more of their private APIs. It's really hard to negotiate exactly what that looks like. But if you could have a search engine where the organic results are powered by one provider and the ads are powered by someone else and you can do your own distribution deals, that does exist to some extent and it used to exist a lot more.
Byrne Hobart—The Riff | 63 minutes
Body Futurism and Why Gen Z is Ditching Tech:
The thing that we got to claim was the internet […]that turned out to be unbelievably economically valuable […] The younger generation desperately wants to own things, they're searching around, is it crypto? Is it AI? […] How do they establish a counterculture that they can own and deal themselves into society? And then will that thing that they define be defensible and ownable by that generation? Or will older generations just take it?
Sam Lessin—More or Less | 59 minutes
The Olympics and the Future of TV:
The only thing to survive outside of what I think of as the library, […] which is modern streaming, are sports, live spectacle, whatever that event is, and maybe news and local news. But everything else that's kind of timeline based is gone […] So I didn't think I would see this so quickly, which is basically cable television looks like the magazine industry did a decade ago, scrambling to make up print losses with digital progress.
Troy Young—People vs Algorithms | 43 minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago—Now is the time for grimoires
2️⃣ years ago— Don’t Let Hierarchy Stifle Innovation
3️⃣ years ago—Why Are So Many Knowledge Workers Quitting?