Bloomberg: “Aside from solving the returns conundrum, physical stores enable spur-of-the-moment purchases, nudging shoppers to fill up their baskets with goods they never planned to buy. Both Target and Ikea are experts in this. Target’s store layout is designed to inspire or remind shoppers to buy a few more things than they intended. At Ikea, its path of vignettes prods shoppers to pick up unplanned (sometimes unnecessary) odds-and-ends.”
WSJ on drone swarms: “On today’s battlefields, drones are a manageable threat. When hundreds of them can be harnessed to AI technology, they will become a tool of conquest…The future of warfare won’t be decided by weapons systems but by systems of weapons, and those systems will cost less. Many of them already exist, whether they’re the Shahed drones attacking shipping in the Gulf of Aden or the Switchblade drones destroying Russian tanks in the Donbas or smart seaborne mines around Taiwan. What doesn’t yet exist are the AI-directed systems that will allow a nation to take unmanned warfare to scale. But they’re coming. A few Shahed drones are mostly a hassle, easily swatted from the sky except in the rare case when they score a lucky hit. They are best at blinding radars, disrupting communications and attacking small numbers of troops, as they did tragically in Jordan. But dozens or hundreds of drones in AI-directed swarms will have the capacity to overwhelm defenses and destroy even advanced platforms. Nations that depend on large, expensive systems like aircraft carriers, stealth aircraft or even battle tanks could find themselves vulnerable against an adversary who deploys a variety of low-cost, easily dispersed and long-range unmanned weapons.”
Anne Lamott: “Age is giving me the two best gifts: softness and illumination. It would have been nice if whoever is in charge of such things doled them out in our younger years, but that’s not how it works. Age ferries them across the water, and they will bring us through whatever comes.”
FT: “In the past year or so, Slack has lost some of its lustre. This is partly the aftermath of a staggering $28bn takeover by Salesforce in 2021. Instead of being a rogue upstart, it is now part of software giant Salesforce. Sales growth has fallen. In the last quarter, it was 16 per cent, down from 33 per cent the previous year. The co-founders have left. Along with every other tech company, it is pinning its hopes on generative artificial intelligence. But Slack’s dip in popularity is not a reflection of workplace-messaging aversion. It is the result of rivals such as Google using their resources to take its share. The culture of nonstop, informal workplace chatter that it helped to create is going nowhere.”
The Generalist: “More interesting than Farcaster’s metrics or trajectory is the strategy behind it. After five years at Coinbase, Dan Romero set out to found a different kind of social network – one that wasn’t simply an application but a true protocol. The result is a piece of foundational social infrastructure that others can build upon, remix, and tweak. In essence, Farcaster is building a permissionless version of the skeleton that supports platforms like Twitter – then allowing the world’s developers to decide what it should look like and how it should act. To galvanize that process, Romero’s team has built its own client on the protocol, Warpcast. What started as a Twitter facsimile, albeit with a radically different architecture, is slowly morphing into a space with distinct social norms and novel user behaviors. The best example is Farcaster “Frames,” mini-applications that live within the social app’s feed. These might be a poll, a game, or an NFT minting experience.”
