ZD 25.20: Spring Variety Show
A variety of links for your exploration.
In the Issue: Drones, trade war kayfabe, the end of Stack Overflow, venture whaling and a sea shanty inspired musical coda.
The Distilled Spirit
Drones, Missiles and Hacks
🚁 Drones Rule Everything Around Me ()
Drone Delivery is happening in Dallas. Drones respond first to Las Vegas 911 calls. The drone wave is coming, is it time to embrace it?
⚡ Anti-Drone Warfare Primer (War Quants)
Everything you wanted to know about anti-drone warfare in one compact package. Cost asymmetry and rapid iteration make it a huge challenge.
🌊 Fighting Through the Pacific Dead Zone ()
China can launch waves and waves of missiles to defend its coast, creating an effective dead zone thousands of kilometers deep. How can the US navy penetrate that zone without unacceptable losses?
💻 Hacking TeleMessage in 20 Minutes (Wired)
TeleMessage Signal was a signal clone that also happens to archive all the messages centrally, compromising the security of the platform. It was used by government officials and the CPB among others. It was so poorly built it took someone 20 minutes to gain complete access to the system.
Economic Questions
🤼♂️ Kayfabe and the Trade War (Kyla’s Newsletter)
Incentives align to make our trade policy operate like a WWE match.
🏪 Why all the Vacant Storefronts? ()
Vacant storefronts are a fact of urban life. It turns out there are reasons why they are so common.
🚄 A Workable Plan for US High Speed Rail (Slow Boring )
A creative plan for high speed rail along the northeast corridor that is actually practical.
💵 Why Two Decades of US Wage Stagnation? ()
Wages in the US stagnated between 1973 and 1994. We don’t quite know why.
Things AI Killed This Week
📚 Stack Overflow is Almost Dead (The Pragmatic Engineer)
Stack Overflow was once a place near and dear to my heart — I spent a lot of time there in the growth phase in the late ‘00s. Its popularity lead to its demise — LLMs that were trained to program not in small part by reading the site’s data, have now superseded the tool and caused a traffic collapse.
👷♀️ Klarna Uses More AI (Big Technology)
It has been often quoted that Klarna’s AI experiment had failed. The company is not pulling back — they are deploying more AI even as they bring humans back into some parts of the business.
📃 AI Killed The College Paper (SatPost by Trung Phan)
The era of the college paper as a testing tool is over. Why aren’t we grading workflows not outputs?
📱 Phone Bot Farms (Fast Company)
Bot farms using masses of mobile phones connected to USB hubs and mobile proxies allow for very sophisticated manipulation operations. Trust nothing.
AI Tips
🤖 Proper ChatGPT Setup (AI Adopters Club)
ChatGPT has a lot of customizability now. Here is a systemic way to leverage that functionality. Really worth a look if you have a paid ChatGPT account.
🗣 Claude as Duolingo (The AI Maker)
How you can use Claude to build an interactive learning application.
👩🏭 Future Proof Yourself (Behind the Craft by Peter Yang)
AI is coming for just about everyone’s job on some level. Here are some things you can do to not lose the race with the robots.
⁉ Will AI Replace Me? (Sideroad 38)
How to become a T-shaped professional by leveraging AI to broaden your skills.
Curiosity Catnip
👎 Thinking Different is Never Popular ()
Apple does many things that are very widely panned before becoming the new standard. Fear of change is real.
🔔 Why Bell Labs Worked (1517 Fund)
Bell Labs was an amazing scientific institution because of Mervin Kelly.
👖 A History of Blue Jeans (Histories)
The back story on blue jeans.
🥛 Making American Milk Safe (The Works in Progress Newsletter)
Like many things in America, pasteurized milk is a story of better, faster, cheaper.
🐳 Venture Whaling (Byte-Sized History)
What do 19th century whaling and modern venture capital have to do with each other? Lots as it turns out — they were similar sorts of investments and whaling created the distribution constructs and legal structures we still use for venture capital today.
Out to Sea This Week
It was a very intense week of travel — I didn’t have the time and facilities to pull together a formal post worthy of publication. Stay tuned for next week.
Musical Coda
The Look
AI is becoming more independent. I am not sure where Skynet is on this chart from Our World in Data.
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