WSJ: “The main difference between America’s brand of capitalism and elsewhere: a focus on the individual and an incentive to take risks.”
NYTimes reviews “The Story of CO2” [via Business Standard]: “Almost all of the energy that we have access to comes from the sun, and photosynthesis requires CO2. In the usual processes, that energy trickles up through the food chain until it’s exhausted and released as waste heat. But the great luck of this planet is that rather than being consumed or rotted (same thing), reduced to waste and raw materials, some carbon stores — washes of plankton and heaps of swamp life — were instead entombed for millennia in stone. Thus, fossil fuels are “fossilised sunlight”: solar energy on reserve. This buried carbon also acts, in one of Brannen’s running metaphors, as a giant capacitor. It was charged by geology; it is now being discharged by human workings “on a planetary scale.””
New Yorker: “A.I. is coming for culture…We’re used to algorithms guiding our choices. When machines can effortlessly generate the content we consume, though, what’s left for the human imagination?”
SaaStr: “Everyone thinks their AI tool will save labor costs, but you can’t all get credit for the same labor savings. When five different AI vendors are each asking for $60K-100K+ a year to automate parts of your sales process – SDR tools, BDR tools, conversation intelligence, pipeline tools – the math stops working. Again, yes it’s cheap than a human. So that gets the budget nod — today. For now. But ultimately, the pressure will come as we spend millions and millions on different, paid AI agents from different vendors that seem to overlap…Smart companies are already moving toward the Rippling approach: “Give us five agents and an orchestration layer, and we’ll handle it all.” Why manage five point solutions when one vendor can deliver the complete workflow?”
WSJ on how to use AI to learn a difficult concept: “AI offers the ability to dive into fields we never thought we’d learn—as long as you watch out for hallucinations and proceed step by step. First, whether it is French existentialism or principles of building, ask the AI for a big-picture overview: Tell it that it is delivering a first-year university lecture, or explaining the idea to a 10th-grader. Ask it to tell you the major terms in the field, summarize key findings and describe areas of uncertainty and disagreement. Once you’ve grasped that overview, do your own research: Look for peer-reviewed articles that have plenty of citations (100 or more is ideal; 20 or 30 is all right for niche topics). Give the articles to the AI and ask it to synthesize the findings. If you learn better out loud, use Claude or ChatGPT’s audio interface to talk to the AI about each article and ask questions. You can also upload a collection to Google’s NotebookLM, and ask it to generate a podcast on the subject, based on the articles.”
