Search the archive

BLUESKY REACHES 40M USERS—SO SHOULD YOUR BRAND BE ON IT?

Brands should explore Bluesky if their audience aligns with its active niche communities, though it's not suited for broad reach or ads yet.

IS THE HEAD OF CEO CONTENT ROLE REAL OR BS?

“Head of CEO Content” roles usually fail as defined, but can succeed when focused on storytelling and ‘domain knowledge' to showcase the CEO's voice.

Download the guide

SCARY TIMES: HOW TO LEAD THROUGH LAYOFF FEAR

Product leaders are now expected to guide teams through not just layoffs, but the constant fear of them. Honest communication, focusing on controllable actions, and coaching teams toward meaningful impact - not survival - can preserve trust and resilience when stability disappears.

THE BROWSER BECOMES AN AGENT

Browsers are evolving from passive tools into intelligent agent platforms that understand, reason, and act for users. This shift transforms browsing into proactive collaboration, redefining how humans and AI interact online.

8 HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PRODUCT LEADERS

Effective product leadership centers on empowering teams, fostering clarity, and leading by example. Great leaders stay close to the work, coach over command, adapt their style, and prioritize people above process.

13 PRODUCT-BUILDING LESSONS FROM PALANTIR

High-impact products come from trusted product-engineering partnerships grounded in accountability, field immersion, and shared ownership. Prioritize strengths, build feedback-rich, empathetic cultures, and design for scalability and speed without sacrificing trust.

possible.

BEYOND FRAMEWORKS: SIX YEARS OF TESTING BUSINESS IDEAS WITH DAVID J. BLAND

AI has made experimentation faster, shifting success from process perfection to adaptability. Progress now depends on mindset, systems, and the courage to act on real learning, not endless testing.

TRAFFIC IS NO LONGER A RELIABLE GROWTH METRIC

AI search is changing how people find products, making traffic an unreliable success metric. Webflow proves that tuning content for large language models and focusing on visibility, comprehension, and conversion can yield faster, higher-quality growth than old SEO tactics.

PIVOTS, PATHS, AND PROTOTYPES

Embracing change can reveal truer paths than persistence ever could. Letting go of what no longer fits allows growth, experimentation, and authentic direction to emerge through courage and self-awareness.

AI PROTOTYPING IS REDEFINING THE SPEED AND QUALITY OF PRODUCT IDEATION

AI is transforming product management by enabling teams to prototype and share ideas up to 10x faster. It shortens feedback loops and enhances designs using insights from thousands of proven UX patterns.

LABOUR COSTS ARE A DISTRACTION IN PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

Speedy responses and efficient collaboration matter more than counting participants or expenses.

LETTING GO IS A LEADERSHIP SUPERPOWER

Letting go of past successes enables growth, resilience, and the creative capacity to navigate constant change.

NEW VERSION OF SIRI TO 'LEAN' ON GOOGLE GEMINI

Apple plans to roll out a revamped version of Siri around March next year. It will reportedly lean on Google Gemini and have an AI-powered web search feature. Apple is rumored to be paying Google to create a custom Gemini-based model that can run on its Private Cloud Compute servers to power Siri. The upgraded Siri will not include Google services or Gemini features.

ELON MUSK: FUTURE STARLINK SATELLITES WILL BECOME ORBITING DATA CENTERS

Elon Musk recently suggested that scaling up Starlink V3 satellites would enable the creation of a network of orbiting data centers. The V3 satellites will be able to transmit data at up to 200Gbps. SpaceX will need to complete Starship before it can launch its V3 satellites - each V3 could weigh up to 2,000 kilograms, almost four times the current mass of the V2 Mini Starlink satellites.

NASA TEST FLIGHT SEEKS TO HELP BRING COMMERCIAL SUPERSONIC TRAVEL BACK

NASA's newest experimental supersonic jet, the X-59 Quesst (Quiet SuperSonic Technology), made its first flight last Tuesday. The inaugural flight validated the jet's airworthiness and safety. The X-59 generates a lower 'sonic thump' compared to other supersonic jet designs thanks to its long, slender nose, which breaks up pressure waves that would otherwise merge on parts of the airplane. Its design limits shock waves and directs sound waves up to the sky rather than down toward the ground. The single-seat, single-engine jet can cruise at Mach 1.4 at an altitude of 55,000 feet, nearly twice as high and twice as fast as commercial airliners typically fly.

WHAT THE AIR YOU BREATHE MAY BE DOING TO YOUR BRAIN

There is increasing evidence that chronic exposure to PM2.5 is associated with dementia. These particles are among the smallest. They are easily inhaled and can travel directly from the nose to the brain. Increasing air pollution poses a big health risk for older adults.

incoming Jira requests. Read the guide by Appfire

IMMUTABLE RELEASES ARE NOW GENERALLY AVAILABLE

GitHub releases now support immutability. Immutable releases protect assets and tags from being tampered with after publication. This ensures that the software remains secure and trustworthy. Immutable releases can be enabled at the repository or organizational level. Once enabled, all new releases will be immutable - existing releases remain mutable unless they are republished. Disabling immutability doesn't affect releases created while it was enabled.

YOUR URL IS YOUR STATE

Good URLs describe a conversation between the user and the application. They capture intent, preserve context, and enable sharing in ways that no other state management solution can match. URLs can be state containers, user interfaces, and contracts all rolled into one. State management libraries still have their place, but the best solution is just to use the URL.

AI BROKE INTERVIEWS

AI caused the entire remote-interview infrastructure to collapse by breaking the basic assumption that the person answering was the person thinking. Companies should start testing for things only real engineers can do. They need high-signal, human-centric interviews that reflect how engineering actually works. Future interviews will feel like a conversation between people who want to build something together.

PALANTIR THINKS COLLEGE MIGHT BE A WASTE. SO IT'S HIRING HIGH-SCHOOL GRADS

Palantir's 'Meritocracy Fellowship' is an experiment launched under the thesis that existing universities in the US are no longer reliable or necessary for training good workers. Palantir is a data analytics company known for its government contracts. The four-month fellowship program gives its 22 students a chance to work full-time at Palantir. This article gives readers a look inside the program to see what it is like.

NASA'S ORION SPACE CAPSULE IS FLAMING GARBAGE

The Orion Capsule, currently being developed by Lockheed Martin for the Artemis Program, is absurdly expensive, far too slow and heavy, unsafe, and unfit for its purpose.

BUILD SYSTEM TRADEOFFS

Writing build rules in a 'normal' but constrained programming language, then serializing them to a build graph, has surprisingly few tradeoffs.

THE END OF CLOUD INFERENCE

The cloud doesn't have to be the place where every single thought has to happen.

HOW I USE EVERY CLAUDE CODE FEATURE

The post covers useful Claude Code features, including the Claude.md file, custom slash commands, Subagents, Hooks, and GitHub Actions.

US DEFENSE COMPANY ANDURIL FLIES ITS UNCREWED JET DRONE FOR FIRST TIME

Anduril's drone, the YFQ-44A, can manage its own flight controls and throttle adjustment without human command.

CHINA'S BAIDU SAYS WEEKLY ROBOTAXI RIDES HIT 250,000 — SAME AS ALPHABET'S WAYMO THIS SPRING

Baidu's Apollo Go robotaxis have so far not been involved in any major accidents that involve human injury or death.

NOVEMBER 4, 11AM PT >> SAVE YOUR SEAT

NEW VERSION OF SIRI TO 'LEAN' ON GOOGLE GEMINI

A revamped version of Siri that uses a custom Gemini-based model is expected to roll out in March next year. Google is reportedly developing the model, which will run on Apple's Private Cloud Compute servers to power Siri. Apple is reportedly running into problems with the launch of Apple Intelligence in China. It is being mired by regulatory issues, so the launch is now a rolling target.

SAM ALTMAN SAYS 'ENOUGH' TO QUESTIONS ABOUT OPENAI'S REVENUE

Sam Altman grew testy when pressed about OpenAI's ability to fund $1.4 trillion in committed spending, snapping at interviewer Brad Gerstner with, "If you want to sell your shares, I'll find you a buyer". Altman said OpenAI is doing "well more" than the previously reported $13 billion in annual revenue and suggested the company could reach $100 billion by 2027, but denied rumors of an IPO in 2026.

FROM ILYA'S DEPOSITION

Ilya Sutskever plotted for over a year with Mira Murati to remove Sam Altman as OpenAI CEO. Dario Amondei wanted Greg Brockman fired and himself in charge of all research. Murati told Sutskever that Altman had pitted her against Daniela Amondei. Sutskever wrote a 52-page-long memo to get Altman fired and also a separate document on Brockman. OpenAI is paying Sutskever's legal bills.

WHY DO AI MODELS USE SO MANY EM-DASHES?

Language models use em-dashes so much that real humans who like using them have stopped out of fear of being confused with AI. It's surprisingly hard to prompt models to avoid using em-dashes. Researchers still don't really know why language models use them so much. This article looks at some possible explanations.

AGENTS RULE OF TWO FOR AI SECURITY

Meta has proposed the "Agents Rule of Two" to reduce prompt injection risks in AI agents by limiting them to no more than two of three capabilities in a session: handling untrusted inputs, accessing private data, or taking external actions.

OCR MODELS EXPLAINED

Recent advancements in OCR models, such as Chandra and Deepseek, eliminate traditional scripting by using vision transformers that convert raw pixels into semantic tokens. These models improve accuracy by understanding and compressing visual data into concise tokens before decoding them into text, allowing context-aware text recognition. Deepseek-ocr achieves this efficiently with ~10x compression, enabling flexible adaptation to different fonts and handwriting styles without retraining.

knowledge management. Get your copy of the guide.

GHOSTS IN THE CODEX MACHINE

After weeks of user reports claiming Codex had gotten worse, echoing a perennial concern that frontier labs secretly downgrade their models, OpenAI assembled a squad to investigate every possible culprit and publish their findings. The team found no smoking gun, but instead uncovered a catalog of small bugs: older hardware subtly dragging down performance, a constrained sampling bug that made the model switch to Korean mid-sentence, and context compaction that quietly degraded accuracy in long conversations.

TONGYI DEEPRESEARCH: A NEW ERA OF OPEN-SOURCE AI RESEARCHERS

Tongyi DeepResearch is a full open-source Web Agent that achieves performance on par with OpenAI's DeepResearch across a comprehensive suite of benchmarks. It is specifically designed for long-horizon, deep information-seeking tasks. This post shares a complete and battle-tested methodology for creating advanced agents like Tongyi DeepResearch.

LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS GET ALL THE HYPE, BUT SMALL MODELS DO THE REAL WORK

Small language models are helping companies get real work done and reduce headcount. They are more affordable than large language models and, in some cases, better suited to the tasks at hand. The impact that AI is having on corporate productivity gains is the result of human engineers getting better at stitching together smaller, simpler AIs. Many companies have built internal knowledge factories that daisy chain together small AIs.

BILLBOARD SAYS AI-POWERED 'ARTISTS' ARE INCREASINGLY HITTING THE CHARTS

AI-generated musicians have debuted on Billboard charts each week for the past month. One artist, Xania Monet, scored a No. 1 hit on the R&B sales chart and a multimillion-dollar record deal.

Subscribe now.