The Internet blew up the publishing industry. Content used to be expensive to create, but now it’s trivial to create and distribute, which gutted publishers, etc. AI will do the same for software.
Vogue wasn’t replaced by another fashion media company, it was replaced by 10,000 influencers. Salesforce will not be replaced by another monolithic CRM. It will be replaced by a constellation of things that dynamically serve the same intent and pain points. Software companies will be replaced the same way media companies were, giving rise to a new set of platforms that control distribution.
I think the unknown author here may be oversimplifying. The Internet alone doesn’t disrupt industries like publishing. Financialization and regulatory capture play major roles as well.
The Congressional Progressive Caucus Proposition Agenda Executive Summary. — Four pages, a quick read. Seven major points, all of which are agreeable to nearly all Americans.
Homeowners want housing prices to go up. This is ultimately the biggest hurdle for affordable housing policy. By David Dayen at The American Prospect.
J.K. Lund has a modest proposal for reforming American zoning and encouraging the growth of cities, because cities are great. “Cities are idea factories, furnaces of innovation, where wealth and human capability are forged.”
I use Instagram the way other people use TikTok (or how I assume they use TikTok—I’ve barely ever used TikTok myself).
Very few people I know seem to use Instagram anymore, so instead of a personal feed of photos, I just see a lot of short videos. Mainly cute animal videos; Insta’s algorithm has sussed out that I like those.
I see that Insta is now introducing unskippable ads in its feed, and if does that to me I’ll just stop using Instagram. I won’t be angry about it or even give it much thought. I’ll just stop. Cute animal videos aren’t hard to find elsewhere on the Internet.
Cisco: We were unprepared for the cloud. But we’re ready for AI — Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins admitted the company was unprepared for the cloud revolution. But Cisco is ready for AI, with plans to address the challenges of distributed networking, such as observability and security. New buzzword dropped: “Digital resilience.”
This is the latest Fierce Network Research Bulletin, by yrs truly. Also contained therein, a teaser for our upcoming webinar about network automation and AI on Tuesday, as well as a meme.
A neighbor is loudly playing and singing along to the greatest hits of the 70s and 80s. “I Will Survive.” “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” It’s like a 1983 Bat Mitzvah here in my home office.
We don’t need to burn down the planet for AI — AI is increasing data center energy consumption, which already accounts for 1-2% of global energy use. Cisco and Equinix are implementing energy-efficient technologies. Leaders of the two companies talked about their green energy strategies at Cisco Live this week. Ironically, the discussion of green energy happened in Las Vegas, which seems to be a horribly climate-unfriendly city (but maybe isn’t really). My latest on Fierce Network.
People are wonderful. I love individuals. I hate groups of people. I hate a group of people with a “common purpose.” Because pretty soon they have little hats. And armbands. And fight songs. And a list of people they’re going to visit at 3am. So, I dislike and despise groups of people, but I love individuals. Every person you look at, you can see the universe in their eyes if you’re really looking.
When you’re born, you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front-row seat.
I increasingly agree with these two quotes by George Carlin.
Fredrik Flornes Ellertsen repairs a broken coffee mug using the Japanese art of kintsugi — I love that he’s gone to this extraordinary effort to repair what appears to be an ordinary, cheap coffee mug.
Dave Barry said he works hard 40 hours a week to make every column sound as if he tossed it off in 20 minutes after having four to six beers.
One of my favorite comments about writing.
Box CEO Aaron Levie: “The reason I’m insanely bullish on AI… “ AI provides the possibility of indexing and working with unstructured information, which is the vast majority of information in a business.
Not just in business. Everywhere, in everything.
Parable of the Sofa — Tim Bray praises lifestyle businesses.
In the 2000s and early 2010s I developed a 3- to 4-can a day Diet Dr Pepper habit. Our nurse-practitioner advised me to cut it out; she said she wasn’t satisfied with the studies of consuming that much artificial sweeteners at that level over a long period. So I stopped.
It wasn’t hard. Quitting smoking was hard.
Sometimes I still want a diet soda, and then I have one when I do. Not often. A few times a year. Diet soda isn’t meth, a little every now and then won’t harm you.
The moral of this story is that not every bad habit is hard to break. Sometimes it’s not a moral struggle and life-changing experience. Sometimes you get a habit of doing a thing on the regular, and then you get credible information it might not be good for you, and you stop doing that thing.
Dr Pepper is now the second-most popular carbonated soft drink in the US, beating Pepsi. Coke is still number one by far. M.G. Siegler has thoughts.
I liked Mr. Pibb, a Dr Pepper ripoff, when I was in college at SUNY Binghamton. Dr Pepper was unavailable there and then.
I’m glad to see M.G. Siegler is back to blogging regularly. He’s talented.
Where's a good place to post links, and just links?
I like the idea of having a public record of noteworthy and interesting things I’ve read, watched and listened to, but I’d rather reserve mitchw.blog for my own creations and thoughts. Other social media platforms (Reddit, Facebook, Tumblr, Masto, Threads, etc.) are siloed off from each other.
I’d like to find a place that’s centralized, that belongs to me and automatically propagates to other social media. Maybe just a separate category here on mitchw.blog? Or a separate blog entirely? Micro.blog, the platform I use to host mitchw.blog, will let me start another blog at no additional cost.
Is Altsore in the US stable and safe to run on a daily driver iPhone? I’m tempted but I don’t want to make my main iPhone unstable, buggy or unsafe. Do any American users here have experience with it?
Hamilton Nolan: The Left Is Not Joe Biden’s Problem. Joe Biden Is — Almost nobody on the left is refusing to vote for Biden over Gaza or anything else; it’s a false argument to scold the left and say they need to support him because Trump’s worse. Also: “Without a theory of change, nothing changes.”