The online poker boom up close. Taylor Caby describes watching the online poker boom up close, then realizing the whole thing was shakier than it looked. Also lots of other great story and nuggets here. “There was no like smartphones, […]
Why I may ‘hire’ AI instead of a graduate student. “AI requires no ramp-ups, no meetings, and absolutely no emotional support.” A professor writes about the quiet temptation to hand the messy early parts of research to a machine, and […]
The worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do. “We’ll bet that certain pitches will be balls; you throw those pitches into the dirt; we’ll win the bets and give you some money.” Thompson’s point is that modern gambling […]
Be wary of workers who buy into the corporate BS. “Corporate bullshit confuses rather than clarifies. It may sound impressive, but it is semantically empty.” Cornell researchers built a Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale and found that people most impressed by […]
Seeing like a spreadsheet. “This is a story about how a piece of software transformed the way that American businesses understood themselves, and how they were understood by others.” David Oks argues the spreadsheet quietly rewired corporate life, from what […]
Letting an LLM write for you. “Letting an LLM write for you is like paying somebody to work out for you.” The argument is simple: writing is where you do the thinking, and outsourcing it costs you both understanding and […]
Claude Code unpacked. Thanks to a leak of the Claude Code source code, we now have things like this. “What actually happens when you type a message into Claude Code?” A neat interactive explainer of the agent loop, the tool […]
Fungible factories. “Because the entire process is encoded in software and the hardware is identical, activating new cells is like installing a new program on a computer.” Ben Reinhardt sketches “fungible factories”: shipping-crate-sized manufacturing cells you can copy-paste to scale […]
Trials by PEAK6. During a chat with Matt Hulsizer I learned of their initiative to seed entrepreneurs with capital and distribution to build new fintech businesses. They’re calling it Trials. “Trials isn’t an accelerator or incubator. There are no cohorts […]
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