"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness, that is life." - Captain Jean-Luc Picard
Movies are shot months to years before release but sometimes are so coincidentally timely that their stories seem plucked from the headlines.
Have any two movies hit that perfect spot as well as Glass Onion (Elon Musk’s reveal as a vacuous billionaire not a tech genius) and Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning (AI doomerism)?
Microsoft stock price is at an all-time high as they announce charging $30 per user per month for Copilot, their AI for business offering.
I’ve seen many people argue that the biggest winners in the AI boom will be the incumbents and now I’m starting to believe it.
Satya Nadella continues to add more paragraphs to his entry in the CEO hall of fame.
This article is a great counterpoint to all the coverage about Threads. If a product whose launch in 2012 was universally covered as an unmitigated disaster can become more loved than the incumbent a decade later, it’s absurd to write off Threads which was a hit at launch within 2 weeks.
It’s just silly reporting and shows everything that’s wrong with the tech press.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-maps-app-popularity-iphone-8e52aec1
Netflix got 3.5 million subscribers in June which is their best month of sign ups in years. It looks like Netflix made two brilliant bets
1. Creating a cheaper subscription tier with ads.
This tier now makes them more money than no ads tier.
2. Clamping down on account sharing which converted a bunch of freeloaders into paying customers.
Disney TV on the other hand is in distress. They want to sell ABC & FX and will lose $800 million streaming this quarter 😫 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-07-16/bob-iger-shifts-from-building-an-empire-to-a-disney-yard-sale
Stop the presses, I just saw Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning and it was ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ out of ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Tom Cruise is on some Benjamin Button ish because he looks younger than he did in the last movie and did crazier stunts.
AI detectors are snake oil. If someone is trying to sell you software that claims it can tell if text is written by ChatGPT then you’ve met someone who thinks you’re a fool who needs to be separated from your money.
Notion is at risk of being the next Evernote. A $10B valuation implies it needs to be doing $1B in annual revenue at some point. So they’re going to bloat the product and branch out seeking ways to 10x revenue.
This will open the door to a simpler, more focused competitor and they’ll start bleeding users. Eventually there’ll be a down round or acquisition at way less than $10B and the cycle starts over.
A lot of the hysteria around job loss due to AI is a combination of a generation to young to have experienced displacement and those being displaced this time around having a louder voice.
In the 1980s, companies had secretaries to answer the phones and type up dictated notes of execs. In the 2000s, we had film camera companies like Kodak and 1 hour photo kiosks to develop those photos.
Microsoft Office & iPhones made both obsolete. Many jobs will similarly disappear in the 2020s.
There are a lot of aspects of tech where a little knowledge is worse than no knowledge.
A little knowledge is knowing enough about X to write your own implementation. A lot of knowledge is knowing that’s a stupid idea that creates more problems than it solves.
Bill Gates recently wrote about various risks of AI including deep fakes & misinformation, job loss, students failing to learn due to over-dependence on AI and automation of biased decision making.
He compares AI to cars and says we will figure out how to manage the risks. I think the comparison is apt since cars cause 40K deaths a year in the US and dump millions of tons of pollution into the air every year. They have also reshaped how cities are built and where we work
https://www.gatesnotes.com/The-risks-of-AI-are-real-but-manageable
Sony has signed a Call of Duty deal with Microsoft which will go into effect if the Activision acquisition goes through. As a PlayStation gamer, I’m glad Sony has decided to sign the deal.
With this signed, there’s nothing the FTC has left to object to about this deal besides not liking big tech acquisitions.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/16/23792215/sony-microsoft-call-of-duty-cod-deal-signed
For pennies a day, you can save a South African child from bankruptcy. Act now, before it’s too late.
I want to print this out and staple it to the wall of every engineering team in our industry. The ability to get questions answered by the team is great but it’s not a replacement for documentation.
At best, it’s a great complement to it. The users of your product or APIs would be a lot more productive if you just wrote down how things are supposed to work and shared some sample code.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/07/discord-is-not-documentation/
Manager explaining how they solved a complex problem and the engineer who actually did the work.
Promotion driven development and the idea of level appropriate work are the bane of big companies.
Once you get to a critical mass of senior people at a company, you start incentivizing complexity and redundancy because for those people to get promoted they need to show company-wide or organizational impact.
Why do you think Google has so many chat apps instead of everyone just working to make one or two of them great?
A friend shared a controversial opinion about the WGA strike I’ve been noodling on. The argument was no industry owes people jobs in the face of technological advancement.
If ChatGPT means Netflix can go from 6 regular writers to 4 for Stranger Things, should they never be able to do that to preserve 2 writing jobs?
Industries typically don’t ignore software productivity to preserve jobs. Why should Hollywood be different?
The online outrage about Google using crawled data to train AI is getting ridiculous. Google shipped predictive text in Google Docs years ago.
The feature was announced in 2018. So Google has been training generative AI to auto complete sentences in Google Docs for at least 5 years.
Weird to start freaking out now because OpenAI shipped the same feature in a chatbot interface.
