ZD 26.18: The Systems Holding Us Back
Things take too long, cost too much, and it is all our fault.
🤦 The $375,000 Drinking Fountains (People vs. the Machine)
Replacing a broken water fountain should be easy and not insanely expensive. But a stack of well-intentioned rules and a system nobody designed conspired to drive costs to ridiculous levels. This is not an outlier but rather a symptom of the Machine.
🧒 Job Disruption: Now, Soon or Never? (Full Moon)
Young workers want to know if they get a share in the AI disrupted future too.
🌐 The Hidden World of Undersea Cables (Brian Klaas)
We all know the internet travels the world in a series of tubes. Sometimes those tubes are deep under the sea, living in shark-proof Kevlar and are regularly scanned for sabotage.
⚡️ 100 Fun Facts about the Grid (Climate Drift)
Squirrels have shut down NASDAQ twice; China is adding a new medium-sized power plant a week and many more fun facts about energy.
🛢️ How an Oil Refinery Works (Construction Physics)
Oil refineries are huge, complicated complexes the size of small cities. Making big, naturally occurring mixes of hydrocarbons into little, refined batches of hydrocarbons is fascinating business.
📊 The Most Important Charts in the World (Zvi Mowshowitz)
The Zvi asked X for the world’s most important charts. X delivered.
💵 Compounding Success (Luca Rossi)
Software teams enforce hygiene and grow shared knowledge to build the right things and compound success.
🫧 End of the Open AI Bubble? (REGENERATOR (alpha))
Henry Blodgett wonders if OpenAI looks more like MySpace than Facebook?
🥊 Musk v Altman Begins (Internal Tech Emails)
Elon took the stand last week; Sam will be on the stand soon. But it started a long time ago and you can read the love letters.
🧑🏫 Google’s Secret Reference Desk (Card Catalog)
Gemini is amazing, but sometimes you need to be more deterministic. Here is how to use Google like a reference librarian.
💔 UI Patterns That Will Not Survive AI (Syntax Stream)
Legacy UI patterns will not survive the era of intelligent assistants.
👍 Speak in the Affirmative (Wes Kao)
Telling people what to do is much more powerful than telling them what not to do.
📝 How To Read Like Virginia Woolf (Knowledge Lust)
Virginia Woolf might have been a better reader than writer. Her book review technique is worth emulating.
🏇 The OG Sporting Spectacle (Club Sportico)
Horse racing is a sport few Americans follow, save one Saturday in May where we put on our best hats, sip mint juleps, and soak in the Run for the Roses.
🏖️ When Club Med Met Atari (The Retroist)
There was a brief moment in history when people went on vacation to learn to program Ataris.
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