Your Short(er) Weekend Briefing
Blame father/son adventures and our newest family member...
Dear Friend,
This week’s edition of your Friday Briefing is quite a bit shorter than usual—I (Pascal) am out spending a week with my 82-year-old dad on a trip in Turkey, and our very own Mafe just gave birth to her first baby girl… 🥰 And since this is a truly artisanal newsletter, it had to take a backseat.
We’ll be back with our normal dose of headlines from the future next week. In the meantime, enjoy our reading list and some fun links from around the web.
What We Are Reading
🧑🏼💼 What’s the Future of Middle Management? Middle managers aren't dead yet! As AI reshapes the workplace, these corporate interpreters remain crucial during tech upheavals—just expect fewer of them to survive the great organizational flattening!RetryClaude can make mistakes. Please double-check responses. @Jane
🤝 Empathy Is a Non-Negotiable Leadership Skill. Here’s How to Practice It. Leadership is about achieving results through other people, and empathy is a requisite to mobilize, connect with, and engage others. @Mafe
❓ AI for What? AI innovation will evolve in a direction shaped by the conditions from which it emerges, and those can be tilted toward public value creation or extractive rent-seeking that benefits only the few. @Jeffrey
🍎 Apple Is Looking at Adding Perplexity and Other AI Search Engines to Safari Search is shifting: AI-powered engines are gaining traction as traditional Google queries decline for the first time in over two decades. @Kacee
🤖 Bryan Johnson Wants to Start a New Religion in Which “The Body Is God” That AI challenges us to reconsider what makes us human is no secret. While the depths and complexity of that question are much too extensive for a short paragraph, it can be agreed upon that making what makes us human more exciting again is a worthwhile effort. Starting a new religion focused not so much on understanding what makes us human but on keeping it alive is an unexpected approach. @Julian
🤝 The Friendship Recession: The Lost Art of Connecting That social media, and more broadly speaking, the Internet makes us lonely is well studied, but what is the antidote (short of the futile attempt to be "less online")? Turns out, there are some well-researched remedies. @Pascal
Rabbit Hole Recommendations
People are losing loved ones to AI-fueled spiritual fantasies
AI chatbots are ‘juicing engagement’ instead of being useful, Instagram co-founder warns
Happy Distractions
👨🏼💻 Because why not? Someone built a mechanical computer. It’s bonkers—and looks like a ton of fun!
🌋 Yellowstone makes earthquakes with 53,000-pound vibrator truck to study volcano.
🦹🏼 This is a wild story: Inside the Scam Network.
🖱️ As an old Apple geek, this makes me happy: Project Handy M0100 – I turned a 40 year old Apple Mouse into a speech to text button for my computer.
⚰️ A 1903 proposal to preserve the dead in glass cubes.
🎮 This is delightful: LLM-generated real-time commentary for Pong.