May 2025 wrap up & news
I’ll be mixing up the monthly wrap-up emails, including more new and recent stuff I’m still reading, digesting, and doing…
Big new things
I got a bit more to write about lately, so I’m mixing up my publishing schedule to four full editions a month and an additional recap.
What happened here?
URGENT: Public Health Advisory from the Center for Data Decision Hygiene
Langfuse: how boring tracing became my prompt management lifeline
The Amplitude death spiral: why 90% of YC startups die by dashboard
Build for GPT-5, ship with GPT-4: why shipping worse products today creates AI winners tomorrow
What am I still contemplating?
This month I started to think about one old topic yet again. After all, all this machine learning is just plain old data and math. Which brings it back to data, and an article I did write a while back: The (Not So Subtle) Art of Not Giving A Fuck About Data. I still do believe the essence of that article - by trying to care about data, most companies mess everything up and destroy their chance of making data (and thus AI) work.
Another topic I’ve been thinking about heavily is simply that of building AI products and why it is so different from other products (it is). I already am pretty certain it is because AI is a general purpose technology, but what that means in detail I am still researching. Be my guest.
Books I have open right now
I'm not saying I recommend any of those; I’m sampling, reading, and discarding a lot of books nowadays.
“All or Nothing” a book on president trump. The more politics become entangled with tech, the more I think it matters to understand what happens and why.
“The Contrarian” is a book about Peter Thiel and the shift of Silicon from a-political to super-political.
“Lean In” is of course the famous book by Sheryl Sandberg. Odly I hadn’t heard of it before, but after reading the rather critical ideas from “Careless People” (a book from last month) I had to take a look into that perspective too.