šĀ On time for your weekend: a round-up ofĀ this weekās remarkable storiesĀ at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture. Three reads and three listens; no fluff, just stuff ā”
We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely āE.O. Wilson
š Reading
We Need To Rewild The Internet:
Up close, internet concentration seems too intricate to untangle; from far away, it seems too difficult to deal with. But what if we thought of the internet not as a doomsday āhyperobject,ā but as a damaged and struggling ecosystem facing destruction? What if we looked at it not with helpless horror at the eldritch encroachment of its current controllers, but with compassion, constructiveness and hope?
Mara Farrell, Robin BerjonāNOÄMA | 32 minutes
The Death ofĀ Code as Craft:
The automation of low-level tasks will free up developers to be more creative and focus on the big picture rather than getting bogged down in the detailsāor worrying about code beauty [ā¦] thereās no need to care about the beauty of code. The LLMs will sort out our mess [ā¦] Code as craft is dead. Long live code as craft.
Jon ChristensenāEvery | 15 minutes
AI is not like you and me:
We are under-investing in more precise, high-value applications of LLMs that treat generative A.I. models not as people but asĀ tools. AĀ powerful wrenchĀ to create sense out of unstructured prose. TheĀ glue of an application handling messy, real-word data. Or aĀ drafting tableĀ for creative brainstorming, where a little randomness is an asset not a liability. If there's a metaphor to be found in today's AI, you're most likely to find it on a workbench.
Zack Seward | 6 minutes
š§ Listening
Business strategy:
The difference [between network effects and network economies] is materiality: whether the value benefit is large enough to engender a price delta significant enough to give you materially different margins into the future. It's a material impact. So, it could have if it's a penny to your bottom line.
Hamilton HelmerāLennyās Podcast | 68 minutes
Is a one person $1B company possible?
You have to fundamentally change the incentive away from expansion [..] What's wrong with expansion is as companies grow, they basically reach further and further into basically worse and worse lower margin businesses in order to continue to grow [ā¦] And then you basically over time become a giant inefficient mess, which is what a lot of big companies turn into.
Marc Andreessenāa16z | 81 minutes
Everythingās a cult now:
There was no way to free ride Bitcoin. You were invested in it [ā¦] So in a way, I think crypto was a kind of perfect, secular, strict church because it was a theory about the future, a theory about technological progress that for its hardest believers did somewhat require that you sacrifice a bit of your own savings in order to participate in the church.
Derek ThompsonāThe Grey Area | minutes
š Timeless
1ļøā£ year agoāNoise-Canceling Filters for the Internet are Coming
2ļøā£ years agoāThink Bigger About Remote Work
3ļøā£ years agoāThe Death of The Middle