👋 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 ⚡
The past is written, but the future is left for us to write. And we have powerful tools, openness, optimism, and the spirit of curiosity – Capt. Jean-Luc Picard
📚 Reading
TectoAI is Building a Feature, Not a Future:
An employee has agency, intent, and consciousness. An AI agent is a complex chain of statistical probabilities designed to generate a plausible output based on a prompt. It doesn't have a career, it doesn't get tired, and it doesn't have motivations. Calling it an "employee" is a cognitive shortcut that leads us astray.
Mike Boysen—Practical Job-to-be-Done | 13 minutes
It’s time to work different:
Look, AI won’t save you. Frameworks won’t save you. Hype won’t save you. Your people might—If you help them to. Leaders who bet on them—and evolve with them—will still be standing when the music changes again. Bank on hype and tools and maybe you catch a rocket today (I doubt it), but what goes up will either crash or drift out of orbit. That’s not the play. The play is to regroup, reform, and build resilience, adaptability, and confidence—in your people, your work, and your future.
Greg Storey—Brilliantcrank | 7 minutes
Eating the Future: The Metabolic Logic of AI Slop
The AI slop aesthetic is more than a technical artifact or cultural curiosity. It’s the consumer-facing product of computational capitalism—created by transforming human culture into a standing reserve of data. Each uncanny image, synthetic influencer, and AI-generated article is part of a much wider transformation. Slop is waste, but it’s also fuel. […]
Kate Crawford—e-flux | 11 minutes
🎧 Listening
Alex Komoroske:
[A] thing that changes everything is, we've presumed that software is expensive to write and cheap to run for the last 30, 40 years […] LLMs mess with both of those because software that uses LLMs to execute now has a marginal cost greater than zero […] and shitty software is now basically free to write. That can create a world of infinite software where you just take software for granted […] because I just thought it or just mentioned it, and then now it exists.
The Slow Hunch | 74 minutes
Hard truths from Ben Horowitz: Why founders fail and why you need to run toward fear
If you're doing it for the money, that's a very bad reason and it'll be extremely difficult to get to an outcome. You really have to have an irrational desire to do something larger than yourself to improve the world in some way that; that is your purpose. And if you don't feel that, then you'll never get through it. It's just too many bad things happen along the way.
Ben Horowitz—Lenny’s Newsletter | 98 minutes
iPhone Air or Pro: Apple Ignores AI and Wins?
I find a lot at YC is that most people came in there, they didn't have an idea. There's some trendy thing that everyone's working on right now. So in this case, it's apply AI to some vertical and 50% of the startups are made to chart. They're not made because it's coming out of somebody's deep passion. That was the dichotomy of the day: when you're at Apple, they're still doing this thing out of deep passion. Like they love making computers and you can just see it.
Dave Morin—More or Less | 53 minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago—Challenging The Myths of Generative AI
2️⃣ years ago—Vertebrate technology
3️⃣ years ago—AI risk is Modern Eschatology