Bytes: Ouija or LLM? How to rebuild your company in the AI age

The End of the Internet

“I was thinking back to those days last week when news broke that every version of PHP had a critical bug that allowed for remote code execution on the host machine; Stratechery today still runs on WordPress, but that WordPress is managed by Pressable, an Automattic company. That meant that my site was patched before the vulnerability was disclosed, and it would be crazy for me — or anyone else — to do it any other way. It’s kind of insane to think that twenty-some years ago I was doing everything by hand without having any idea what I was doing, and that it was totally fine. That’s the Internet, though: an insane invention from a time that is, sadly, gone forever.”

Ben Thompson • Stratechery

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I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down.

Chris Marquis • The New York Times

“I frequently proclaim (together with other people working on AI) that we ought to be more ambitious when using it. It’s become a rallying cry. Whenever we see something impressive, we repost and write “we’re not ambitious enough”. I understand how tricky it is to follow that advice, so here’s a tutorial on being more ambitious.”

Communion of Saints

“These curious souls understand chatbots not as a tool for drafting easy ad copy and smoother emails, but as offering a new path to an old thing, a new way to lift the veil to the realm beyond, to succeed where Ouija boards and spirit boxes and pyramid hats have failed. At this year’s expo, there are three panels on AI-fueled theophanies, psychic readings from an LLM in the lobby, and invitations, strewn about, to download an AI model to ‘uncover the gold hiding in your shadows.’”

Sam Kestenbaum • Harper’s

The Contagious Delusion of ‘You Can See Everything’

“No podcast, no documentary, no fictionalized version of Holmes has ever been able to convince me that she is charming. That it was her delightful nature and attractive, not-at-all off-putting aura that raised $1.3 billion in equity funding for a blood-testing device that not only couldn’t run hundreds of medical tests from a single drop of blood, as promised to its investors and patients, but also sometimes simply exploded. Did she appear confident? Sure, if that’s what you’re seeing there. Compelling? Yes, she certainly knew—and still knows—how to weave an arresting narrative.”

Jodi Walker • The Ringer