The Cost of Easy Answers
“When every gap in understanding gets filled instantly, we lose the conditions that make human curiosity possible.”
AI perspectives
Practical AI usage, workflows, prompts, and patterns.
93 records updated
Be more human
15 RECORDS
No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious
Mathematical algorithms on graphics cards cannot become conscious because they lack a complex biological substrate
i drink wine, i don't count my sleep score, i never use AI, i cancelled my amazon AND I AM HAPPIER THAN YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
“Everyone jumping off the bridge to feel the wind in their hair.”
Choosing to Stay Human
My colleagues at Wharton call this “cognitive surrender,” and they documented how people would stop thinking about problems and just let the AI do the work, even when the AI was wrong.
The rise in plastic surgeons asked to create ‘AI face’
“Make me look like more of a chad,” I then instructed the chatbot.”
After the Feed
If trust is the new economy, thick reputation is the new currency.
Stewart Brand on 'Maintenance of Everything'
“The anti-technology romantic is almost always: 1) wrong, and, 2) mistaken in his arguments.”
AI learns language from skewed sources. That could change how we humans speak – and think
“Machine-generated text reads as smooth and polished, but it loses the meanders, interruptions and leaps of logic that communicate emotion.”
Our Horizon of Possibilities: How Algorithms Contract Our World
“We can’t consider a career we’ve never heard of, read a book we don’t know was published, or explore an idea that never reaches us. The boundary of our awareness shapes the boundary of our choices.”
The Un-Fuckening: Stop talking about AI like this
“I advocate for a narrative that does not discard people like a horse trying to rid itself of an annoying fly.”
Beware software brain
“You can't advertise people out of reacting to their own experiences”
"if you hate AI you're probably white"
“It's important to recognise the difference between ai as a whole and generative ai. Ai has been used positively for decades to benefit societies, but generative ai is the one actively going against that, spreading misinformation, being used to exploit people, and so on.”
Tech’s new generation and the end of thinking
“The future will belong to people with a very specific combination of personality traits and psychosexual neuroses.”
BONFIRE OF THE INANITIES: enshallowfication
“I think my problem - perhaps yours too - isn’t just unfinished projects. It’s unfinished thinking.”
More links
- Americans Are Speaking Less. Here's Why That's Worrying The Wall Street Journal Saved #178
Future of work
17 RECORDS
He Quit Baidu. But First He Had to Build an AI Version of Himself
After he left, coworkers could still message “Wei” with technical questions, assign tasks, send voice notes, or upload pictures.
Claude Code's creator on the end of the software engineer
If you project the trend a little, everyone who's not an engineer is going to code a little more, and engineers like me are going to code less.
Value creation, bullshit jobs and the future of work
“Figure out who is seeking value and create it for them.”
You can't beat AI.
“What happens when the thing you used to sell becomes almost free?”
When Magic Becomes Mundane
A reflection on how AI tools transition from feeling revolutionary to becoming part of our everyday workflow
Marketing engineers are the hire of 2026
“Marketing engineers are the hire of 2026. period.”
AI will make your marketing team faster and worse
A sharp take on how AI acceleration might compromise marketing quality and strategic thinking
Are You Coal or a Horse? The AI Job Paradox
“When technology leads to huge numbers of jobs disappearing quickly, bad things happen”
AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It
“On their own initiative workers did more because AI made “doing more” feel possible, accessible, and in many cases intrinsically rewarding.”
ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did
“The true force of a technology is felt not with the substitution of tasks, but the invention of new paradigms.”
Sloperators
“If you give steroids to a Little League baseball player, they’re still a ten-year-old boy. Give them to Barry Bonds and he breaks every record in the books.”
Something Big Is Happening
“I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job.”
More links
- Thinking Ahead, Building Ahead Alephic Saved #178
- Tech Has Never Caused a Job Apocalypse. Don't Bet on It Now. The Wall Street Journal Saved #177
- Young People Are Switching Careers to Avoid Being Replaced by AI The Wall Street Journal Saved #176
- Don’t Mix Up Artifacts With Processes Paul Ford Saved #175
- Agentic AI is nothing without understanding your org Ethan Mollick Saved #173
AI & writing
8 RECORDS
If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you
“Nice little personal essay you’ve got there, lady, but I know what you really are; time to get my knife out, time to start digging around under your skin until I find the wires.”
After AI stole his clients, one Big Tech ghostwriter is using AI to get them back
“What can the future look like for me?”
Using AI makes writing more bland, study finds
“The LLMs are pushing the essays away from anything that a human would have ever written”
The Science of Why AI Still Can't Write Like You
“Most people are wildly inconsistent writers.”
AI Style Guides: How to Help AI Write Like You
“It takes what you know instinctively about your own writing and makes it legible for a machine to use.”
The Science of Why AI Still Can’t Write Like You
“Most people are wildly inconsistent writers.”
More links
- AI Students Cheating Homework Classrooms The New York Times Saved #179
- We'll soon find out what is truly special about human writing Psyche Saved #178
Educate thyself
2 RECORDS
Learn AI Layer by Layer
An interactive guide to understanding AI from first principles.
More links
- Agentic Web Playbook Delightful Archive Saved #179
AI & research
6 RECORDS
On AI Search with Tom Critchlow
“For example, I’ve worked with a brand that used to rank number one for all of their commercial terms on Google — drove a ton of traffic and revenue for years. They’re cited very heavily in AI search now, but often cited as, “by the way, don’t buy from these people.”
Synthetic Personas Aren't the Enemy
Are we going to define how they should be used or let someone else define it for us?
Synthetic Customers Earn Their Stripes
“Market leaders that can iterate quickly, test more ideas, and kill weak concepts early consistently outperform those tied to slow, episodic, siloed insight cycles.”
A Report on AI Content Detection & Reality
“The real rates likely sit somewhere between what people claim they noticed, and what they actually encountered”
What 34 Studies Reveal About AI Search in 2026
“Branded queries tend to benefit from AI Overviews.”
Zefr and OM Media Trials Release First-of-Its-Kind Study on Brand Impact of Ad Adjacency to AI-Generated Content
“Some AI environments can drive positive brand outcomes, while others introduce real brand risk”
AI & creativity
14 RECORDS
Claude's Design Aesthetic Is Taking Over the Internet
“The preferences and tendencies and aesthetics are deeply baked into its machinery.”
AI in Design Report 2026
“Designers are using double the number of off-the-shelf tools than they did in 2025, and they're building custom software with AI that matches how they like to work.”
AI as a Design Medium
“If you treat AI as a tool, you ask: how do I get the right answer? If you treat it as a medium, you ask: what happens if I push this?”
Is Anyone Going to Make These Data Centers Beautiful?
What if data centers were less imposing? Less sensorially destructive? Less ugly?
The Secret to AI Adoption: Make It Fun
Smart people. Dumb AI.
“Working with agents feels much less like classic deep work, and much more like playing a game.”
“It feels more like a game loop: set direction, trigger action, watch what happens, evaluate, intervene, adjust, try again.”
Typography might be the last thing AI can't fake
“AI will make everything look the same. We're already seeing it. Most AI-generated images share the same aesthetic. Every template library offers the same layouts.”
More links
- How Creative Workers are Impacted by AI Strategic National Arts Alumni Project Saved #186
- AI companies are using serifs to project humanity. Critics are calling it “tasteslop.” Wired Saved #184
- AI makes designers get closer to the work, actually Christopher Butler Saved #184
- What AI Slop Means for Good Taste GQ Saved #182
- Nazi pedophile heroin suicide etymologynerd Saved #178
- Crisis Response: Trying the Old Thing Harder TikTok Saved #178
- The Veteran Podcasters Hanging Up Their Headphones The Wall Street Journal Saved #176
AI & strategy
6 RECORDS
The New Brand Folklore
“Today, a brand is far less what it says about itself, and far more about what a wide ecosystem of third parties, both human and non-human, can find, trust, rank, recommend, and sell.”
What strategy directors expect from your AI skills
Familiarity is no longer a flex, it's the floor.
The AI Search Manifesto: Why Every Company Needs to Become a Publisher or Disappear From the Conversation
“The brands that publish will be found. The brands that do not will be described by someone else, or not described at all.”
The Brand That Thinks
“The gap between these two kinds of brand is about to become unbridgeable. And most of the industry hasn't even noticed it's opening.”
More links
- Building a Second Brain for Strategists Phillip Lee Strategy Saved #181
- LLMs for Strategy: a Scorecard Delightful Saved #175
The AI economy
3 RECORDS
Capital Must Seek Delight
When investment ecosystems lose contact with delight, they lose sensitivity to fragile emerging futures.
More links
- AI eats the world Benedict Evans Saved #182
- AI Company Good Altruism The New York Times Saved #179
Not yet filed
22 RECORDS- Don't be a meat proxy gruhn.me Saved #190
- Too much of our technology is phony A Working Library Saved #189
- Being a Luddite Is Fun Again 404 Media Saved #189
- What will more intelligence actually do for us? Noahpinion Saved #189
- A New Narrative Framework for Data Product Lost by @hipcityreg Saved #188
- China Bans AI Romantic Partners, Virtual Relatives for Minors Sixth Tone Saved #188
- What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all Stephen Follows Saved #188
- AI Has Caused No Material Increase in Unemployment (Yet) X (formerly Twitter) Saved #188
- Google's AI & Economy ATLAS v1.0: Mapping Gemini Usage in the Economy Google AI Saved #188
- We Are Losing the Ability to Discover What We Didn’t Know to Ask The New York Times Saved #187
- Street Fighter subreddit has a better AI policy than universities Bluesky Saved #186
- The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows Waxy.org Saved #186
- Why Are People Using AI to Text Their Friends? Morning FYI Saved #186
- Legibility of Effort eieio.games Saved #186
- AI-Native Firms are 25% Smaller Marginal Revolution Saved #185
- Aboard Newsletter Aboard Saved #182
- People insist on having free will, and that's terribly inconvenient for billionaires Cory Doctorow Saved #181
- Dead Internet Theory Is 17% of the Way to Becoming Reality, Study Finds Gizmodo Saved #179
- Figma designers watching vibe designers work LinkedIn Saved #179
- https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/opinion/ai-software.html?unlocked_article_code=1.NFA.Q5V5.RFhmZVUFQ04Z nytimes.com Saved #171
- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-creator-economy-monetizing-your-ai-brain-rafat-ali-fkh8f/ linkedin.com Saved #171
- https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies-it hbr.org Saved #170