Office of Citizen Yield — Human Utility Assessment
getassessed.org Sent
Your AI agent has formed a picture of what you are worth. Find out what it has concluded.
SHELF No. 10
AI perspectives
Practical AI usage, workflows, the death of original thinking, that kind of stuff.
Be more human
26 RECORDSPREVIOUSLY FILED
Getting Off with the Luddites
n+1 Sent
“He seemed seized by the computational needs of fascist systems, which require people classified before they can rank, target, exclude, deport, or disappear them.”
Ethical AI Monogamy…?
default.blog Sent
“Does a healthy society "require" a person to remain romantically available to other humans?”
Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Feels the Same
Lauren Leek Sent
The system doesn’t have to be right, it only has to be listened to. A recommender that’s a mediocre predictor of what you’d love in a rich, diverse world becomes an excellent predictor of what you’ll click in the impoverished one it creates.
Being a Luddite Is Fun Again
404 Media Sent
“Google knows next to nothing / My mom knows everything! the gnomes chant ...”
What will more intelligence actually do for us?
Noahpinion Sent
“We could simply be thinking about the benefits of intelligence wrong — arrogantly privileging the kind of mental tasks we humans happen to do especially well, while ignoring the value of the tasks we do poorly.”
China Bans AI Romantic Partners, Virtual Relatives for Minors
Sixth Tone Filed
...any services deemed as designed to foster emotional connection and interaction.
The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows
Waxy.org Sent
“The feeling of seeing something you love ingested and repurposed by a machine designed to replace the person who made it seems like a uniquely modern sorrow. Maybe there should be a word for it.”
Why Are People Using AI to Text Their Friends?
Morning FYI Sent
We are inescapably in relation with other beings and the world and are continuously adjusting to them.
Legibility of Effort
eieio.games Sent
“Until recently, “someone cared enough to write this” was an ok heuristic.”
The Cost of Easy Answers
Ness Labs Sent
“When every gap in understanding gets filled instantly, we lose the conditions that make human curiosity possible.”
i drink wine, i don't count my sleep score, i never use AI, i cancelled my amazon AND I AM HAPPIER THAN YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The Trend Report Sent
“Everyone jumping off the bridge to feel the wind in their hair.”
Choosing to Stay Human
One Useful Thing Sent
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’
The Guardian Sent
“Make me look like more of a chad,” I then instructed the chatbot.”
Stewart Brand on 'Maintenance of Everything'
Reason Sent
“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
The Guardian Sent
“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
Card Catalog Sent
“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
Dadalogue Sent
“I advocate for a narrative that does not discard people like a horse trying to rid itself of an annoying fly.”
Beware software brain
The Verge Sent
“You can't advertise people out of reacting to their own experiences”
Tech’s new generation and the end of thinking
Harper's Sent
“The future will belong to people with a very specific combination of personality traits and psychosexual neuroses.”
BONFIRE OF THE INANITIES: enshallowfication
Beth Bentley Sent
“I think my problem - perhaps yours too - isn’t just unfinished projects. It’s unfinished thinking.”
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No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious
The Atlantic Sent
Mathematical algorithms on graphics cards cannot become conscious because they lack a complex biological substrate
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Aboard Newsletter
Paul Ford Sent
The good loop is actually kind of anti-AI in some ways, in that it doesn’t see AI as the solution; it sees it more as a useful provocation.
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Americans Are Speaking Less. Here's Why That's Worrying
The Wall Street Journal Sent
“We've lost a lot of small, incidental conversations: asking a cashier for help, getting directions from a stranger, chatting with a neighbor”
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"if you hate AI you're probably white"
Instagram Sent
“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.”
Future of work
27 RECORDSThe Dot and the Swarm
One Useful Thing Filed
“I assumed companies would need to rebuild management for machines, constructing elaborate alternate structures populated solely by agents, often at the expense of human roles in organizations. But much of management exists to solve problems agents don’t have, and agents increasingly work through the same messy systems people do, even on ambiguous tasks. That suggests they may be easier to integrate into firms than I expected.”
PREVIOUSLY FILED
Why corporations are getting their AI policy all wrong
Only Dead Fish Sent
“Most AI transformation programmes are being designed as a response to a technical problem. Licences, Copilot rollouts, training on features, adoption metrics. These things matter of course, but the real challenge is an adaptive one - behaviour change.”
The Golden Age of Marketing
BRXND Dispatch Sent
“The best hedge against the uncertainty of agentic commerce is a brand that shoppers actively seek out or tell their agents to seek out.”
Scenarios for our Economic Future
Anthropic Sent
Set your own assumptions about how capable AI becomes and how widely it is adopted — the model returns a picture of the American economy in 2030.
AI isn't taking your job
X (Twitter) Sent
Workers are deeply worried that AI will take their jobs. So far, the labor market data tell a different story.
AI Has Caused No Material Increase in Unemployment (Yet)
X (formerly Twitter) Filed
AI has caused no material increase in the unemployment rate to date — even among workers most at risk of automation.
AI-Native Firms are 25% Smaller
Marginal Revolution Sent
The shares of entry-level workers and managers are each roughly 15% lower.
He Quit Baidu. But First He Had to Build an AI Version of Himself
Sixth Tone Sent
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
Platformer Sent
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
Seth's Blog Sent
“Figure out who is seeking value and create it for them.”
You can't beat AI.
How to AI Sent
“What happens when the thing you used to sell becomes almost free?”
When Magic Becomes Mundane
BRXND Dispatch Sent
A reflection on how AI tools transition from feeling revolutionary to becoming part of our everyday workflow
Marketing engineers are the hire of 2026
Marvin Chow Sent
“Marketing engineers are the hire of 2026. period.”
AI will make your marketing team faster and worse
The Tenon Sent
A sharp take on how AI acceleration might compromise marketing quality and strategic thinking
Are You Coal or a Horse? The AI Job Paradox
The Atlantic Sent
“When technology leads to huge numbers of jobs disappearing quickly, bad things happen”
AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It
The Harvard Business Review Sent
“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
David Oks Sent
“The true force of a technology is felt not with the substitution of tasks, but the invention of new paradigms.”
Sloperators
Adam Delehanty Sent
“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
Matt Shumer Sent
“I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job.”
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A.I. Slopware Is Everywhere Now. Nobody Is Using It.
The New York Times Sent
Now that everyone can code, it’s become clearer why many shouldn’t.
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Google's AI & Economy ATLAS v1.0: Mapping Gemini Usage in the Economy
Google AI Filed
If these household time-savings would average out to just 30 minutes per week, the unpaid productivity gains in the US alone could be worth approximately $100 billion.
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People insist on having free will, and that's terribly inconvenient for billionaires
Cory Doctorow Sent
“The fact that an AI can't do your job doesn't stop an AI salesman from convincing your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job.”
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Thinking Ahead, Building Ahead
Alephic Sent
“A winning strategy is emerging amongst builders: Engage with what AI can do partially and build for when the partial becomes complete.”
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Tech Has Never Caused a Job Apocalypse. Don't Bet on It Now.
The Wall Street Journal Sent
“Neither theory, history or the latest data suggests a recession driven by AI job dislocation is likely”
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Young People Are Switching Careers to Avoid Being Replaced by AI
The Wall Street Journal Sent
“From electricians to firefighters to açai bowl entrepreneurs, young Americans are pivoting careers based on one fear: AI taking their jobs”
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Don’t Mix Up Artifacts With Processes
Paul Ford Sent
“Work on your own? The bots are coming to ruin your life. Manage employee and constituent safety at a large group of harm-reduction-focused, state-funded addiction recovery clinics? “I use it for everything.”
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Agentic AI is nothing without understanding your org
Ethan Mollick Sent
“I think agentic AI would work much better if people took lessons from organizational theory”
AI & writing
12 RECORDSSlopShape: Identifying AI-Generated Commercial Web Content
arXiv Sent
AI posts share a tidy, self-announcing shape — detectable from structural signatures alone, even after rewording.
PREVIOUSLY FILED
The Thinking is All That's Left
BRXND Dispatch Sent
“I believe we’ll see a style emerge that looks less like traditional essays and more like “jagged collections of bangers” thrown together without the usual transition paragraphs.”
On AI and Writing
BRXND Dispatch Sent
The problem, I think, is that good writing is fundamentally anti-consensus. For writing to be above average, it shouldn’t sound like everything else.
If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you
Numb at the Lodge Sent
“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
Fortune Sent
“What can the future look like for me?”
Using AI makes writing more bland, study finds
NBC News Sent
“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
Every Sent
“Most people are wildly inconsistent writers.”
AI Style Guides: How to Help AI Write Like You
Every Sent
“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
Every Sent
“Most people are wildly inconsistent writers.”
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Don't be a meat proxy
gruhn.me Filed
“By all means, prompt AI. But don't just relay the output.”
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AI Students Cheating Homework Classrooms
The New York Times Sent
I want you to write out a really rough, terrible draft in your writers’ notebooks,” Ms. Binney told them. “And then I want you to scratch it out and rewrite it.
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We'll soon find out what is truly special about human writing
Psyche Sent
“a willingness to stand behind words, to mean them, and to accept the consequences of having claimed to have written them.”
Educate thyself
7 RECORDSOpinion: AI and Silicon Valley
The New York Times Sent
This reality, that Rationalism deeply influenced many of today’s major A.I. companies, helps us calibrate the unnerving language we’ve been hearing from their leaders.
PREVIOUSLY FILED
The OpenAI and Hugging Face attack, clearly explained
Dwarkesh Podcast Sent
The whole OpenAI/Hugging Face story in plain English.
Learn AI Layer by Layer
learnai.robennals.org Sent
An interactive guide to understanding AI from first principles.
An Operational Framework for Precision in AI Discourse
dropleaf.app Sent
“This taxonomy provides a functional framework based on what the AI actually does, not what technique it uses.”
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Aboard Newsletter
Aboard Sent
Weekly insights, emerging trends, and tips on how to navigate the world of AI, software, and your career from Paul Ford and Rich Ziade
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Agentic Web Playbook
Delightful Archive Sent
A playbook exploring strategies and frameworks for building agentic web experiences
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The A.I. Disruption We’ve Been Waiting for Has Arrived
The New York Times Sent
“When you watch a large language model slice through some horrible, expensive problem — like migrating data from an old platform to a modern one — you feel the earth shifting.”
AI & research
8 RECORDSAboard Newsletter
Aboard Sent
It’s wild to me that every single giant web and/or AI company could offer experiences like the tools I built and drive links back to publishers, who could then use that traffic to drive subscriptions and advertising revenue. But they do not want to, and at this point, I do not think we are going back.
PREVIOUSLY FILED
On AI Search with Tom Critchlow
BRXND Dispatch Sent
“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
LinkedIn Sent
Are we going to define how they should be used or let someone else define it for us?
Synthetic Customers Earn Their Stripes
Bain & Company Sent
“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
ZINE | Matt Klein Sent
“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
Surfaced Sent
“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
OMG Transform Sent
“Some AI environments can drive positive brand outcomes, while others introduce real brand risk”
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We Are Losing the Ability to Discover What We Didn’t Know to Ask
The New York Times Sent
The space between a question and an answer has value, and that value should not be engineered away.
AI & creativity
20 RECORDS
What's Coming After Social Media
Informational Democracy Sent
“A television that programmes each viewer separately.”
PREVIOUSLY FILED
China debuts first AI-generated longform TV series
ChinAI Newsletter Sent
The first-ever fully AI-generated entertainment to hit mainstream provincial satellite prime time.
Going Down the AI Music Slop Chute with Camilo Landau
KQED Sent
The point of music is not to play a music good. The point a music is to have a human expression and connect with other people through human communication.
No shortcuts: why AI threatens creative instinct
It's Nice That Sent
“Eliminating this rote work isn’t inherently bad, so long as you compensate for the muscle it built.”
Too much of our technology is phony
A Working Library Sent
“The only way to achieve unending comfort is to wall ourselves in, close up the doors, lock them inside and out.”
Claude's Design Aesthetic Is Taking Over the Internet
The New Yorker Sent
“The preferences and tendencies and aesthetics are deeply baked into its machinery.”
AI in Design Report 2026
State of AI Design Sent
“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
Harvard Design Magazine Sent
“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?
Findings by MW.S Sent
What if data centers were less imposing? Less sensorially destructive? Less ugly?
“Working with agents feels much less like classic deep work, and much more like playing a game.”
Bill de hÓra Sent
“It feels more like a game loop: set direction, trigger action, watch what happens, evaluate, intervene, adjust, try again.”
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How Creative Workers are Impacted by AI
Strategic National Arts Alumni Project Sent
There's a line you don't want to cross where suddenly you're the tool, you're no longer the artist. You're the artist, don't be the tool.
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The Glitchy, Gloppy Look of Now
The New York Times Sent
“Viewers have grown suspicious of anything that looks too polished.”
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AI companies are using serifs to project humanity. Critics are calling it “tasteslop.”
Wired Sent
Real humans use (and made) our product! We swear!
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AI makes designers get closer to the work, actually
Christopher Butler Sent
The labor that AI takes off our plate is the labor of production — the manual rendering, the duplicating, the templating. What it leaves behind — and intensifies — is the labor of seeing. Of noticing what’s working. Of catching what isn’t.
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What AI Slop Means for Good Taste
GQ Sent
The use of AI among my peers is really seen as low-status behavior.
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Nazi pedophile heroin suicide
etymologynerd Sent
The tiktok algorithm doesn't work the way you think it does, or else I wouldn't be able to say this.
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The Veteran Podcasters Hanging Up Their Headphones
The Wall Street Journal Sent
“Podcasters who spent the best part of a decade honing their craft and growing audiences are in a curious position: Burnt out or cast aside by fresh demands of the now thriving industry.”
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Typography might be the last thing AI can't fake
Creative Boom Sent
“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.”
AI & strategy
7 RECORDSThe Best AEO Strategy is Not an AEO Strategy
Anthology Partners Filed
Optimize for getting humans to share and enjoy your work.
PREVIOUSLY FILED
The New Brand Folklore
BRXND Dispatch Sent
“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
Rob Salmon Sent
Familiarity is no longer a flex, it's the floor.
The Brand That Thinks
Substack Sent
“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.”
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The AI Search Manifesto: Why Every Company Needs to Become a Publisher or Disappear From the Conversation
State of Brand Sent
“The brands that publish will be found. The brands that do not will be described by someone else, or not described at all.”
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Building a Second Brain for Strategists
Phillip Lee Strategy Sent
How I combined Claude and Obsidian to build a personal knowledge system from scratch, in a single afternoon, with no coding background.
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LLMs for Strategy: a Scorecard
Delightful Sent
“Hahaha, says the reader. Hahaha … fuck.”
The AI economy
11 RECORDS
Time Isn't Money
The Mediator Sent
In media, the relationship between time spent and value has been weakening for a long time — and AI will make it worse.
PREVIOUSLY FILED
Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same
Lauren's Data Substack Sent
“The system doesn’t have to be right, it only has to be listened to. A recommender that’s a mediocre predictor of what you’d love in a rich, diverse world becomes an excellent predictor of what you’ll click in the impoverished one it creates.”
The Seven Deadly Sins of Tech
8Ball Sent
“If the public doesn’t trust your intentions, it will be hard for them to believe your claims.”
10 Brutally Honest Predictions on the Future of AI
The Honest Broker Sent
“In this anarchic world, humans will be collateral damage. Bots have been trained to achieve results, and woe to anyone or anything that stands in their way.”
A New Narrative Framework for Data
Product Lost by @hipcityreg Filed
While I don’t believe that “just make them beautiful” is enough of an answer, we also can’t ignore that these things currently are gross brown boxes.
What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all
Stephen Follows Filed
“In case you haven’t guessed it yet, it’s linked to prediction markets.”
Capital Must Seek Delight
Contraptions Sent
When investment ecosystems lose contact with delight, they lose sensitivity to fragile emerging futures.
Dead Internet Theory Is 17% of the Way to Becoming Reality, Study Finds
Gizmodo Sent
“35.3% of all newly published websites were created with the assistance of AI.”
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Meta’s Muse Is Better at Surveilling Than Helping Me
Wired Sent
Every suggested interaction with Muse started to feel like a guise for me to upload more data about myself for Meta to see.
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AI eats the world
Benedict Evans Sent
Strategic presentation analyzing AI as the next major platform shift in technology.
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AI Company Good Altruism
The New York Times Sent
“The entire culture of American technology is built around two terms: disruption and, of course, scale. But ethics are constraints on disruption and scale.”