NYTimes: “Wars are a crucible that very often exposes changes in the physics of the world around us — who has power, who doesn’t have power and how power is being wielded. Nothing better captures the new power equation produced by this war than Trump’s unhinged and obscene rant at the Iranian leadership for not bending to his bombs. This new physics of war is equally present in the conflicts between Ukraine and Russia, Hezbollah and Israel, Hamas and Israel and the Houthis and everyone else. My summary of this new dynamic is that the small can now act really big, really accurately and really inexpensively. And while the big can also act really small, really accurately, it is far more expensive for them to do that while bearing the burden of vast legacy arms systems. The net advantage, for the moment, seems to be to the small.”
SaaStr: “If I were running CS at a B2B company right now, I’d stop treating usage as the primary signal and start asking a different set of questions about every account. How many jobs do we do for this customer? An account that uses you for one narrow workflow is more exposed than an account with lower total usage across five workflows, whatever the seat count says. Single-job accounts get absorbed first. Is this customer building? If your champion is spending their week in Replit, Claude, or Lovable, they are one conversation away from an agent offering to do your job instead. That’s how our sponsor pages, our heat mapping, and our staff meeting all got rebuilt in the last month. Can our data get out and our agents get in? Marketo is deprecating the API we needed and we’d have blown through the rate limits in an hour, which made them unusable for us regardless of features. Agent-hostile architecture is a churn cause on its own now.”
Mint: “As AI gets embedded in the operating fabric of organizations, acquiring a competitive advantage will depend less on building systems than on deciding which systems must be built. Companies that consistently discard weak assumptions before they become expensive commitments are likely to fare better, as would those that reward sceptics who ask inconvenient questions as readily as they reward engineers who deliver working models. While understanding grows abundant, judgement is becoming scarce. This is the reality businesses must confront.”
FT: “K-Pop fans, meme pages, political theorists and occultists devote themselves to creating the world they would like to see. This begins with an understanding of how ideas now spread. Our music, language, aesthetics and politics all emerge from amorphous pockets of algorithmic space — and they can all be manipulated.”
