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 […]
Happy map. 100,000 moments of human happiness, mapped. ~ learn more
How to talk to anyone – and why you should. “You don’t always know if it’s OK. Sometimes you have to take the risk and find out.” The Guardian argues we’ve lost the everyday habit of talking to strangers, and […]
Payphone tag. “Payphone calls in Australia are now free. No coins, no credit, just pick up and dial.” Someone turned the collection 14,000 free payphones across the country into a real world game of territory control. ~ learn more
Selection bias, the real teacher. “In the world of educational data, “too good to be true” usually means there is a hidden variable in how the data was collected or filtered.” Readers may remember that I’m bullish on Alpha School’s […]