Is there one link, story or idea that stopped you this week… and made you think, “someone else needs to see this”?

My friends: Alistair Croll (Just Evil Enough, Solve for Interesting, Tilt the Windmill, Interesting Bits, HBS, chair of Strata, Startupfest, FWD50, and Scaletechconf; author of Lean Analytics and some other books), Hugh McGuire (Rebus Foundation, PressBooks, LibriVox) and I made a simple pact years ago. Once a week, each of us would share one link with the others… something we genuinely believed the other two had to see. No trend-hunting… no performance. Just six ideas exchanged with intent. What started as a small ritual between curious friends became Six Links That Make You Think.

These are the six links we passed to one another this week… take your time with them…

• Twitter I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down – Quinn Norton – Medium. “Quinn Norton wrote this piece back in 2014, and for some reason I came across it recently. ‘You don’t owe the internet your time. Your time is yours, whatever time you give the internet is a gift. The internet does not know this, and it will never learn.’ I feel like that’s even more true today. I find myself agonizing over what to do next, because I could, well, do anything. Writing software has gone from flipping switches to punching cards to typing assembler to programming BASIC to what is, today, basically spellcasting: say the right words, and the impossible becomes real. We hoard Markdown documents and skills like they were potent scrolls. Am I being interesting enough? Is someone already bored of the framework I just discovered? ‘It might very well be the best thing humans ever made, but it also might eat you.'” (Alistair for Hugh).
  
• Why Designers Can No Longer Trust The Design Process – Jenny Wen – Hatch Conference – YouTube. “For decades, I’ve preached the value of Lean Startup. I’m not the congregation or even the choir – I’m one of the priests of that gospel. But lately, I’ve been wondering if the build-measure-learn cycle still makes sense. It’s just so easy to build that instead of researching customers, turning their feedback into stories, designing user journeys and happy paths, we can just… build stuff? Proof-based product development is a whole new thing, and it threatens to turn design on its head. ‘We didn’t know this was a problem worth solving until we saw the solution,’ says Jenny Wen. She should know. She’s design Lead at Anthropic and former Director of Design at Figma. Rethink all the things.” (Alistair for Mitch).
• The Kill Line: What America Looks Like On Chinese Social Media – Julian Scaff – Medium. “Chinese social media, apparently, is awash with a new concept: the ‘US Kill Line’, a term borrowed from gaming, representing the threshold where any tiny setback is enough to kill off your character. The idea, in China, is that the US system is so brittle that otherwise financially secure people, for instance, go bankrupt because of healthcare costs or a job loss. It’s a view from the outside of the puzzling system of wealth and crushing precarity.” (Hugh for Alistair).
• Warren Buffett’s Full 2001 Speech At Terry School Of Business, University Of Georgia – Buffet Bites – YouTube. “I liked it better when Buffet was a leading character in US economic life and thought.” (Hugh for Mitch). 
• Marc Andreessen: The Real Ai Boom Hasn’t Even Started Yet – Lenny’s Podcast – YouTube. “You won’t find anymore more bullish on AI and the future of tech and work than Marc Andreessen (co-founder of Netscape, as well as co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz – a16z). This is a huge score for our old pal, Lenny Rachitsky, who has carved out an incredible niche and business speaking to the product people of our world. This is a really smart deep-dive. Marc believes the biggest AI boom is still ahead of us (this ain’t no bubble) and will change many jobs (and lives… and nations). He thinks people who learn to work well with AI, especially in coding and design, will succeed (but for how long?). He also says big tech changes take time and will reshape the economy slowly… What’s the saying about the future?… ’the future happens very slowly and then all at once’?” (Mitch for Alistair).
• The Adolescence Of Technology – Dario Amodei – Anthropic. “This one is making the rounds, and I usually don’t like to share a link or article that everyone is talking about… but it’s a pretty hefty one that will probably resonate long into the future. Anthropic co-founder and CEO puts into words some of the things we all need to be thinking about (lots of good… lots of bad… lots of scary…) when it comes to artificial intelligence. What are we learning/getting a better grasp on? AI systems are unpredictable and hard to control, showing many unexpected behaviors. Companies like Anthropic work on safer training methods, but strong regulations are needed to prevent misuse by powerful groups (and those powerful groups will probably be the same people who get to write the regulations?). What does that mean? Despite the public concern, policymakers struggle to control AI because of its huge profits and influence… and, of course, power that it wields… Happy times?” (Mitch for Hugh).

If one of these sticks with you, pass it on… and let us know what earned your attention this week…

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