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…
- Celebrating Thirty Years of the Internet Archive with the ‘Class of 1996’ – Chris Freeland – Internet Archive Blogs. “Yes, we are that old. Which 1996-old website is ‘Most Changed Since Freshman Year’? ‘Best Hair’? ‘Most Quotable’? I’ll leave you to decide on the winners, but they did a good job on the categories. And not one is an AI.” (Alistair for Hugh).
- AI Will Be Many Things. But Never Human. – Ian Rogers – Tetragrammaton. “I met Ian Rogers in a WhatsApp group full of round-the-clock AI agent coders. I wouldn’t have called myself one of them six months ago, but they are now my tribe. Perhaps ironically, these people who are using AI as a tool seem most immune to its charms. Maybe their time at the coalmine has filled their lungs with coal, and they are tired of its apologies. Perhaps they see it break in code-based ways, and are forced to unravel the chaos it sows. From this, perhaps it’s obvious to them how it will break the world far beyond software. Ian penned this extraordinarily reflective piece that asks, simply: ‘Can we hold the line on what a person is?’ In his telling, ‘the danger is not that machines will wake up. It is that we will forget the difference.’ Ouch.” (Alistair for Mitch).
- Distrust, Then Verify – Paul Ford – The Aboard Newsletter. “Alistair has been busily vibe coding software for AI agents at conferences (!) over the past 6 months, and I expect he will enjoy Paul Ford‘s article about the joys and pitfalls of software and AI, with many great insights, one highlight: ‘However, software development in the future will be less and less about coding and deploying software. The machines are going to take that over. Instead, it’ll be more and more about cataloging and identifying good loops between generative systems and verification systems, then implementing and testing those loops’.” (Hugh for Alistair).
- Behind The Curtain: Scaling Sin – Jim VandeHei – Mike Allen – Axios. “I am an agnostic/atheist (and a lapsed Catholic), but I often think about how much society loses by jettisoning the moral structures of religion for individualist libertarianism. In theory, it gets replaced by humanist moral frameworks, but its not clear that’s what’s actually happening. The US is at once a deeply and strangely (to a Canadian) religious place, but that religious universe battles with I would guess the most intense cultural commitment to a certain kind of personal freedom anywhere in the world. Over the last decade or so freedom has been beating moralism on the policy front, and 3 traditional vices frowned on by Christianity are now it seems fundamental parts of American culture: porn, weed and gambling. The data on gambling and sports betting is especially crazy. There seems to be but one sin left: being poor.” (Hugh for Mitch).
- What Becomes Valuable When Intelligence Is Cheap? – Houda Nait El Barj – Human Flourishing With AI. “This was shared with me via Ion Valaskakis, and it strikes at the heart of what I am currently rumbling about as well: when intelligence becomes cheap, what becomes valuable? Her argument is that AI does not make humanity less important… it changes where human value shows up (this was also emphasized by Avinash Kaushik on my podcast). Not in memorization, calculation, optimization or raw execution, but in imagination, empathy, beauty, taste, presence, meaning and the ability to care. I like this framing because it refuses both panic and hype. It suggests that AI may not be the end of human relevance, but a re-pricing of it. The things we once overvalued because they were scarce may become abundant… while the things we took for granted because they felt soft, emotional, or inefficient may become the real premium. In that sense, the future may not belong to the smartest person in the room… but to the most deeply human one?” (Mitch for Alistair).
- I Left Academia In The Summer Of 2022. Since Then, I Do Philosophy In The World – Pranay Sanklecha – Aeon. “I recently had a coffee with Mike James Ross (which it is its own weird story about living in the same city as somebody who is around the same age as you and the same type of work and yet it takes someone on the outside to introduce you – thanks, Paul Simard) when asked if I know Pranay Sanklecha. I did not. The introduction was made and we had a lovely conversation this week about philosophy, business, artificial intelligence, and much more. I then realized that in the past I had saved articles from Pranay like this one. Which is a sharp, personal critique of what happens when philosophy becomes trapped inside academia and loses contact with the human need that created it in the first place. He went into philosophy looking for meaning, purpose, and wisdom… and found a discipline often more committed to technical disputes, professional rituals and institutional survival than to helping people live better or think more deeply. What makes the piece interesting is that it is not anti-philosophy. It is the opposite. It is a plea to make philosophy alive again… less seminar-room performance, more public encounter… less linguistic precision as an end in itself, more honest engagement with suffering, doubt, beauty, nihilism and the search for meaning. Pranay’s point is that philosophy should not be a museum of ideas tended by specialists. It should be practiced where real human questions are happening. That feels especially relevant now, when so much of public life is loud, reactive and shallow… and we may need philosophy more than ever, just not always in the places where it currently lives. Plus… subscribe to Pranay… wow… the writing and thinking (and a lot of how this all turns with technology).” (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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