ZD 26.27: Old Panics, New Hardware
Radio rattled them in 1926; the agents rattle us now. Happy 250th.
📝 America at 250 Is a Lot Like America at 150 (Derek Thompson)
A century ago, Recent Social Trends reported on the state of the nation. It told a story about a country where the stock market was soaring and emerging technology companies were flying. People were panicked by machines taking their jobs while record-setting levels of immigration led to anti-immigration backlash. Sound familiar?
🏷️ Ben Franklin Wrote His Own Label (Emma)
Benjamin Franklin is the most interesting founding father. The polymath might have been America’s first brand manager. His life and legacy was much richer than the school book version would have you think.
👨👩👧👦 My Family Are All Mutts (Work Forward)
Put away the apps, pull up a bar stool and have a conversation with the person sitting next to you. Escape the bubble inside of yourself.
🧑🏭 AI Investment Grows Headcount (Ramp Economics Lab)
The public narrative is that AI is killing entry level jobs. The data is telling a different story, one where companies with high AI adoption rates also have a 10% increase in headcount rather than a reduction in roles.
⚡The AI Superforecasters Are Coming (Scott Alexander)
AI is performing nearly as well as the world’s best human forecasters. The upward trend is clear. How will AI superforecasters change the world?
🤖 Nobody Online Knows You Are Embodied (NOEMA)
Bots have long been a problem online. The new generation is much, much more effective. The new “prove you are a human” layer is under construction, effectively creating the digital bill of rights along the way.
🫸YAGNI Was Economics Wearing a Hoodie (Kent Beck)
”You Are Not Going to Need It” was a mantra drilled into this software engineer’s head. On the surface it feels like a thrift rule — don’t do work you don’t need to do. It is actually a risk management tool. Building too soon locks you in and has an entirely separate cost that still applies even as the price of creating code approaches zero.
🚗 Blackberry is Back and Running Your Car (Joe Pompliano)
Blackberry once dominated the smart phone market before a spectacular collapse. The stock is up 250% in the last six months because they happen to own another technology: QNX, the real-time operating system in your vehicle.
🤷♀️ Maybe Vibecession is Just a Broken Survey (Nate Silver)
The University of Michigan’s sentiment index changed to web polling in 2024, making results nine points gloomier and the sample skews sharply partisan. Has the mood really changed?
🪰 We Solved Screwworm. Then We Got Bored (Construction Physics)
We once carpet-bombed the flesh-eating parasite with irradiated, infertile males in one of applied science’s greatest unheralded victories. We failed to keep applying pressure and are now getting a chance to revisit the work.
🪘 Don’t Mute DC Go Go (Dubmatix)
DC has a unique form of funk. Here is a story of how it came to be, includes a mix of some curated songs.
The Look
Mythos-class models are finding a lot of software vulnerabilities according to Epoch AI.
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