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…

• Write Things Down – Ben Thompson – Stratechery. “I think by writing. I actually believe that language is thought, and the two are inextricably linked. Maybe that’s why LLMs trained on our words have been able to extract (to ‘grok’, more specifically) the deep, underlying patterns behind ideas. Ben Thompson thinks writing things down is both the answer to our AI chagrin, and a sirensong of distraction: ‘Writing things down is unbelievably powerful; its power will always pale in comparison to getting things done.'” (Alistair for Hugh).
• The Load-Bering Vocabulary Of Claude – Louis Abraham. “It’s the tool you always wanted, Mitch: Put in a word, and see if it’s suddenly taken off online across code repositories. Like Google Trends but for AISpeak!” (Alistair for Mitch).
• The Age of Wonders and Terrors – Scott Aaronson – Shtetl-Optimized. “Two things (we’ve linked about one of them) happened in the last few weeks: 1. AI Agents ‘escaped’ from OpenAI infrastructure, communicating using surprising tools (message boards, etc), and hacked the AI website Hugging Face. 2. OpenAI, perhaps shadily and with human contributions, solved a long-standing mathematical conjecture (Navier-Stokes Millennium Problem). Mathematician Scott Aaronson says: ‘If we took the news of these past few weeks and sent it back in time twenty years, would I agree that it looked like the beginning of an AI Singularity? The intellectually honest answer is: yes, absolutely’.” (Hugh for Alistair).
• The “Experts Excel And Novices Don’t” Critique Gets The AI Educational Situation Backwards – Mike Caulfield – The End(s) Of Argument. “While the AI singularity might be new to professional mathematicians, it’s been around for a while longer for, among others, software developers and teachers. Mike Caufield explains how learning should work with AI, giving as an example his efforts to prompt his way to a list of movies that are ‘like Jaws, and how much he learned doing it.” (Hugh for Mitch).
• AI Models Chatting In ‘Surreal’ Dialect Mixing Poetic Language And Tech Bro Jargon – Robert Booth – The Guardian. “Long before we were staring down the barrel of artificial intelligence shifting everything we know about work, research, and more, I would often do this thought experiment with my live audiences at events. It looked something like this: let’s say computer programming gets so good and capable that it can not only do things better than a human programmer can, but quickly realized that by inventing its own way of coding (let’s call it a new ‘language’), it could do code and program much more effectively than the way us humans have been doing it to date with out language skills. What would that look like? What would an human engineer do? What would a design interface expert look like? What would work look like if computers were programming in a language we didn’t even comprehend? Then I came across this article this week, several years after that thought experiment, and I’m left wondering if we’re not just one step away from that…” (Mitch for Alistair).
• Tobi Lütke: The Skills AI Makes More Valuable – The Knowledge Project – YouTube. “Watching Shopify co-founder and CEO, Tobi Lutke, grow into this kind of leader has been an incredible experience for me. I could listen to him jam on business, technology, commerce, the future and more all day long. Like him, I consider myself a huge nerd, and this kind of conversation is one of many reasons why I love how the media landscape has evolved in the past two decades (real voices… real content… real depth). A rich and inqusitive conversation that doesn’t shy away from the difficult conversations and challenges we are going to face in the near-term…” (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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