👋 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
How I’m Preparing My Parents—And Myself—To Be Fluent in AI:
Where the internet age demanded technical literacy, the AI age demands epistemic fluency. It’s no longer enough to know how to use the tool; we must also learn how to question and guide it. It’s more than knowing where to click—it’s about knowing what to trust…We have a chance, and a responsibility, to bridge the gap for those who might otherwise be locked out of the next wave of change.
Vivian Meng—Every | 11 minutes
What is an AI-first software company?
Deterministic-native software organizations have been struggling to generate substantial enterprise value using GenAI. LLMs represent a shift from deterministic to stochastic software. This shift has substantially taxed the capabilities of these deterministic-native organizations to handle the increased burden of nebulosity injected by stochastic software.
Varun Godbole, Dan Hunt—Varun Godbole's Newsletter | 10 minutes
Chasing Freedom: Species Mismatch in Room 203
Traditional classrooms were optimized for …those who could absorb information in predetermined chunks, build knowledge incrementally, demonstrate understanding through standardized assessments…The same openness that makes AI ideal for roaming intellects might overwhelm these sequential thinkers. Without structure that helps them build systematically, without knowing if they've "covered everything" or are "ready to move on," they might feel lost.
Anthea Roberts—Dragonfly Thinking | 5 minutes
🎧 Listening
Meta's Billion-Dollar Hires: Bubble or Genius?
This is exactly what happened right after iOS came out. There was this mad dash moment where everyone needed an iOS app, and there were no iOS developers. So there was this emergency moment where all of a sudden iOS engineers were priceless…There was this incredible market displacement, just like there's a rift in the universe, and for three years comp gets ridiculous for a small number of people, and then it kind of all rights.
Sam Lessin—More or Less | 52 minutes
AGI and the Economy:
Everybody seems to think that AI is a perfect substitute for humans and that's what it should be and that's what it will be; everyone seems to think of it in that case. However, every other tool that's ever been made, every other technological tool was a complement to humans…And yet when people talk about AI and think about AI, they essentially never seem to think in these terms. They always seem to think in terms of perfect substitutability.
Noah Smith—a16z | 70 minutes
AI, Gaming & Success:
AI is going to be a cheat code…Put yourself into a situation where you can iterate in the context of feedback from a user base and they'll teach you how to get better at what you do much faster than almost any other mechanism that I'm familiar with…If you can do that while capitalizing on the new capabilities that AI gives you, then you're off to the races and you're very, very well situated.
Gabe Newell—Zalkar Saliev | 36 minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago—The Human Premium in the Age of AI
2️⃣ years ago—We Have Entered the Self-Loathing Stage of the Internet
3️⃣ years ago—Do We Still Need Teams?