Microsoft just dropped a COPILOT function for Excel so you can run Gen AI on spreadsheets.

They warn not to trust it for math or legal/compliance work since it hallucinates. Which of course means people will and the results will be both hilarious and catastrophic.

This is what happens when you believe the hype that vibe coding means you just need an “idea guy” to build a startup.

The technology may get there someday but today’s LLM-based AI coding agents ain’t it.

This week the Lancet published landmark research investigating the death toll of Elon Musk's dismantling of USAID.

14 million lives projected to be lost by 2030.

That's over 2.4 million dead men, women & children a year.

Thanks to one man's venality & cruelty.

www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Adobe launches a new ‘computational photography’ camera app for iPhones

Both of these people will accurately state that AI has made them more productive and saved them time.

NEW EPISODE OUT NOW!

For the 1st ep in our new series about how bad ideas take hold, David talks to economist Mark Blyth about austerity, the cost-cutting idea that refuses to die. Why is it an article of faith that states need purging to stop them getting too greedy?

Find us at...🎧 ppfideas.com

Amazon Prime Video is going from 3 minutes to 6 minutes of ads per hour.

While this is far less than the 15 minutes of ads per hour on TV, it shows the relentless march of enshitification of streaming video isn’t stopping even when you pay $8.99/month.

Family Feud (Series, 1976 - )

Deliberately doing this during Pride Month is because the cruelty is the point.

It’s not enough to bigots, they also have to be as vindictive and petty as possible.

As of today, Elon Musk is thought to be responsible for the death of 300,000 adults and kids due to the illegal closure of USAID (source: www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?vi...)

That's a 103 deaths per hour, each day. And it will get worse.

His legacy is one of death, destruction, and failure.

AGI is coming for all of us. It will write symphonies, direct movies, and author the best novels.

The only thing it won’t be able to do is VC investing, which must be reserved as a task only for the most-special people

Wow if this turns out to be an advanced inside tip from someone, it's going to really set back the years of progress the crypto community have made in carefully establishing a reputation for trust and trans-

Nah, I'm just kidding, this just tracks. See you at the next pump and dump everyone!

The Monopoly GO mobile game making $2.6 billion a year from in-app purchases is nuts. This is likely more than the board game ever made in single year sales.

Also wild that 30% of that goes straight to Google & Apple before taxes. For TikTok, that’s almost $2 billion in App Store fees. 😭

🤝

Asked this question two years ago.

The answer now (based on talking with recruiters) seems to be a definite "yes, there is a decline. Early-stage startups overwhelmingly choose cross-platform mobile. Specifically, VC-funded ones in the US bias strongly to React Native"

Execs at Amazon, Dell and JP Morgan welcoming everyone back to the office, five days a week

Another Pattern Maker no code creative coding pattern. Remix: patterns.amimetic.co.uk/share/?data=... Each rule explained: patterns.amimetic.co.uk/explain?data...

My web-based rebuild of the iPhone/iPad/Mac Pattern Maker app is starting to come together
(still a few bits to add but you can create interesting stuff, albeit with a limited set of rules, and save/share things) patterns.amimetic.co.uk/share/?data=...

Have so many LLM prototype ideas I keep trying to build and failing to. Not because of limited LM capabilities, but because rich text editing is a dark, thankless hole of complexity and edge cases 🥲

I vote we pause the AGI research until we figure out humane ways to build text interfaces…