behavioral-resilience
SoftBank’s Bond-Funded Bet Splits the Work of Building AI
A bond issuance priced at $11.1 billion moved SoftBank’s stock more than 7 percent this week, funding a position in OpenAI that still has no earnings behind it. That reaction is worth sitting with: a company took on new debt, more leverage against a bet with no revenue yet to show for it, and the…
The Fast Path Is Decided Before the Emergency Arrives
A town in Argentine Patagonia has spent years watching a glacial lake that could fail the same way one did in Nepal this month, sending a wall of water through a valley with almost no warning. The Guardian’s reporting on that Patagonian town makes one thing clear: nobody found a way to stop the lake…
The Room Bill Campbell Insisted On
A management book making the rounds in engineering circles has one blunt instruction buried in its chapter on one-on-ones: shut off your computer, use a notepad, and never take the meeting in a car. It reads like etiquette. It is actually a claim about signal and noise. Most of what a person needs to tell…
Every Medium Has Its Own Grammar
A botanic garden tour at Dodger Stadium sounds like a joke until you read that someone is being trusted to make it a draw. The botanic garden tour at Dodger Stadium is a small story about a big idea: a place built for one purpose can carry another, but only if the second purpose is…
What a Ten-Second Sampler Knew About Focus
The E-mu SP-1200, the drum machine behind a generation of hip-hop records, could hold roughly ten seconds of sound. That was the total. A producer had to decide which snare, which vocal stab, and which slice of a dusty soul record earned a place in memory, and everything else got thrown out. The records that…
Every Scored System Ends Up Training Its Opponent
A job candidate this week can read a guide on how to prepare for an interview with a bot. The guide exists because the bot exists. Once enough candidates read it, the bot will be scoring people on how well they prepared for the bot. That’s the whole problem in miniature, and it isn’t limited…