Shipping Containers and Lizard Clicks
Hey friends,
I joked to my wife that AI was in EVERYTHING now!
She laughed, I laughed, the fridge laughed... 🤖
Thinking Too Hard 🤔
I've largely stayed out of the AI/LLM speculative dialogue, and have just been quietly testing it on the side. The disruption is real, but the broad, sweeping, and sensationalist predictions have felt... disconnected? Unrealistic? (We were also supposed to have hoverboards in 2015.) I think we in the tech industry tend to take ourselves way too seriously.
Jerry Neumann makes the observation that AI is more like the shipping container than the microchip— a late-wave innovation with rapid adoption and competition that drives a rate war. Ultimately, shipping containers only benefited a few, with the end users receiving the maximum benefit (higher margins, lower cost, faster shipping).
This feels like a more grounded prediction than most and more closely matches what I've seen so far, that the main benefit of AI is being passed through the knowledge-intensive companies and consumers. Neumann theorizes (and I'm tempted to agree) that the real wave will come from the opportunities these tools enable.
What opportunities have you seen through use of AI tools?
Interesting Web Bits 🍜
Web Bits
- Justin Jackson wonder if burnout is more from lack of hope than lack of energy.
- Key Le explores how children's board games can be great examples of Nielsen's 10 Usability Heuristics.
- "Teams don’t fail because they’re slow. They fail because they’re misaligned, burning energy in all directions, and mistaking motion for progress." A hard-won lesson for any team in any industry.
- A fascinating look of an issue I was only partially aware of: Why do browsers throttle JavaScript timers??
- Una Kravets shows us how we can use the upcoming anchor positioning features to create a follow-the-leader effect.
- Some big names have backed a new standard for licensing content on the web called RSL (or Really Simple Licensing). While mostly a big deal for those most impacted by AI training scrapes (Reddit, etc), it'll be nice to make the robots pay for their subscriptions too.
Other Bits
- Neal does it again with his new experience: Prove you're not a robot. ARE YOU SURE you're not a robot...?
- Click the lizard. Also... fellow Viget, David Eisinger, made a accompanying synth track. (Just copy the JS code and paste it in the console for lizard.click, then enjoy the vibes 😎)
- WATCH: A wildly overly detailed look into the problem of making the perfect spacebar.
- WATCH: This incredibly long Rube Goldberg Lemonade Machine 🍋!
- WATCH: An amusing progression of making a lego machine climb over walls.