The result is a product that better resembles a bowling pin than a traditional bat, redistributing the weight to the area where players most often make contact with the ball. … The goal was to use as much of that [wood] budget as possible in the ideal spot—six or 7 inches below the tip—without sacrificing swing speed.

Filed under ideas that seem obvious when done in real life. 100 years of baseball and gloves have evolved every decade, bats not so much. Or as George says ‘its simple physics’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTwE7xDZkPk

OpenAI argues that copying the style of a movie studio, rather than of a living artist, is allowed. (I imagine Disney would not support this argument.) Yet other artists in the United States are already suing OpenAI, and other A.I. companies, for training its tools on their artwork and infringing on their styles

Understanding that AI can only generate what its been trained on, I think its quite obvious that all AI have a Copyright problem.

I’m 4 days into an afternoon project … Like Icarus, my codebase is irrecoverable. A tangled heap of wing fragments and melted wax, dripping with half-baked ideas and unsupervised AI chaos. My grand vision of outsourcing grunt work to AI had sent me soaring, but the sun of reality burned away any hope of landing gracefully.

I feel you nemo. This silly little micro blog I thought I could whip up with AI (the api gateway portion). But alas it took me fragmented hours over several weeks before I finally understood enough to accomplish what I want.

I am increasingly distressed by the race to replace human developers, particularly the more junior ones, with AI assistants. … Companies are jumping on AI as a way of removing those messy (and expensive) humans from the process of developing software.

I think the best observation is that “people don’t know what they want”. If AI Coding is the proverbial horse, then everyone wants a faster horse; no one will ask for the car. Most research I find and post here indicates a 10-20% overall productivity improvement, but really as Dave points out that efficiency will be filled with more ambitious work.

When I got stuck with a problem, I had two options: PRINT commands and a lot of dedication, or back to the library. Debugging at that time meant: running, hitting an error, searching, adjusting, and running again with fingers crossed. But in my view, this is just the next step in a long evolution of developer tools.

Eclipse, Firebase, and Stack Overflow haven’t replaced developers, and AI won’t make us obsolete either. Instead, it creates some space for what really matters in software development: creativity, innovation, understanding what the customer wants, and solving complex problems. You could even say that productivity doesn’t increase, but expectations do. … AI functioned as a private tutor who could communicate exactly at my level.

Nadella had spent 22 years pulling himself up the ranks with his smarts and drive. And his likability. The latter trait was a rarity at the company. Nadella knew its culture intimately, and he knew he had to change it. … But Nadella wrote a 10-page memo arguing that Microsoft’s revival would come from a growth mentality. As he later put it, he wanted to change the corporate personality from “know-it-all” to “learn-it-all”.

Microsoft was the leading applications provider internationally; in the U.S. its products were behind word processors and spreadsheets lost to history, like Wordstar and Lotus 1-2-3.

I didn’t realize MSFT found success internationally before taking over the States. My earliest computer memories are of a Windows 3.1 beige box, I went through all the 95, 98, ME, XP upgrades along the way before switching to Apple in college.

Here I am 30 years later still tinkering. There’s a WIRED article that’s a much deeper dive on the history of MSFT https://www.wired.com/story/at-age-50-microsoft-is-an-ai-giant-an-open-source-lover-and-bad-as-it-ever-was/

the percentage of employed individuals with more than one job has decreased since 1996, falling from a peak of nearly 7% in November 1996 to 5.5% in December 2024. During the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, this rate dropped to approximately 4%, but it has since rebounded to prepandemic levels. … First, the average age of multiple jobholders has consistently increased over the last three decades, aligning with population aging. As shown in the third figure, the most substantial increase occurred between 1994 and 2012, when the average age of multiple jobholders rose from approximately 37 to 42.

35% of apps now mix subscriptions with consumables or lifetime purchases, and the trend is growing. Gaming (61.7%) and Social & Lifestyle (39.4%) are leading the way, showing that hybrid monetization models are a strong way to capture more revenue without losing the benefits of subscriptions.

Deep dive (in pdf https://www.revenuecat.com/pdf/state-of-subscription-apps-2025.pdf) of various app metrics if you’re into that sort of thing. Product differentiation is still key in market adoption.

googling [has] became an Olympic sport of dodging SEO sludge, sponsored links and clickbait… Here’s an easier list to draw up: what Google Search is still good for. For starters, links to any webpage you already know exists.

I agree totally with the former, the latter seems harder and harder to find items I’ve read. Nothing beats clipping it out myself, hence this site.

_{Quote Citation: Joanna Stern, “I Quit Google Search for AI—and I’m Not Going Back Ads and search-optimized junk made a mess of the go-to engine. Now ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude—and even Google’s own AI—do it better.”, March 26, 2025 at 5:30 am ET, https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/google-search-chatgpt-perplexity-gemini-6ac749d9?mod=djem10point}