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S1S2Unexpected Anti-Patterns for Engineering Leaders  Whenever Will Larson meets up with fellow CTOs or heads of engineering at other startups, he often finds himself having the same conversation over and over again — an engineering leader’s version of Groundhog Day. The biggest challenge these leaders are facing is pressure from their CEOs to drive engineering velocity. The message is usually: ship more value, more quickly. “The problem is that no one has a whole lot of conviction that there is a simple way to do this,” says Larson.
“There's no lever like there is in sales. I think this is not totally true in sales either, by the way, but if you talk to people, there's the theory that in sales, you could just add more people and more sales will happen,” he says. “People look at recruiting the same way. ‘If we do five hires per quarter per recruiter, we just need to add two more recruiters and we’ll be hitting our targets.’”
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Editor's Note: "Anytime you apply a rule too universally, it turns into an anti-pattern," Larson says. In other words, once a practice is labeled as generally helpful or unhelpful, it blinds leaders to how that practice would work in the context of their organization. The key to effective engineering leadership, Larson argues, lies in figuring out which scenarios are worth deliberately defying conventional logic, and when to simply follow the rules.
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S5How Actors Remember Their Lines After a recent theater performance, I remained in the audience as the actors assembled on stage to discuss the current play and the upcoming production that they were rehearsing. Because each actor had many lines to remember, my curiosity led me to ask a question they frequently hear: “How do you learn all of those lines?”
Actors face the demanding task of learning their lines with great precision, but they rarely do so by rote repetition. They did not, they said, sit down with a script and recite their lines until they knew them by heart. Repeating items over and over, called maintenance rehearsal, is not the most effective strategy for remembering. Instead, actors engage in elaborative rehearsal, focusing their attention on the meaning of the material and associating it with information they already know. Actors study the script, trying to understand their character and seeing how their lines relate to that character. In describing these elaborative processes, the actors assembled that evening offered sound advice for effective remembering.
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S15S16To understand cognition -- and its dysfunction -- neuroscientists must learn its rhythms It could be very informative to observe the pixels on your phone under a microscope, but not if your goal is to understand what a whole video on the screen shows. Cognition is much the same kind of emergent property in the brain. It can only be understood by observing how millions of cells act in coordination, argues a trio of MIT neuroscientists. In a new article, they lay out a framework for understanding how thought arises from the coordination of neural activity driven by oscillating electric fields — also known as brain “waves” or “rhythms.”
Historically dismissed solely as byproducts of neural activity, brain rhythms are actually critical for organizing it, write Picower Professor Earl Miller and research scientists Scott Brincat and Jefferson Roy in Current Opinion in Behavioral Science. And while neuroscientists have gained tremendous knowledge from studying how individual brain cells connect and how and when they emit “spikes” to send impulses through specific circuits, there is also a need to appreciate and apply new concepts at the brain rhythm scale, which can span individual, or even multiple, brain regions.
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S17Can Melinda French Gates Improve Philanthropy's Focus to Benefit Women More? Melinda French Gates has a long history of supporting the women's movement, but it's her new eye-popping funding commitments that could finally change women's groups' long-running lament that less than 2 percent of philanthropic giving in the United States directly benefits women and girls.
That 2 percent ceiling could be broken thanks to French Gates' $1 billion commitment announced Tuesday and the momentum generated if others join her, said Jacqueline Ackerman, interim director of the Women's Philanthropy Institute at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. The institute has researched giving to women and girls since 2019 and found that while the overall amount has increased over the years, it's never exceeded 2 percent of overall charitable dollars. In 2020, the most recent year of WPI's analysis, women and girls received $8.8 billion out of a total $471.4 billion given to charities overall.
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S18McDonald's Pushes Back, Calls $18 Big Mac Meal an 'Exception' In a post on the company's website Wednesday, McDonald's U.S. President Joe Erlinger said reports suggesting the price of the average Big Mac has doubled since 2019 were false. McDonald's said the average U.S. Big Mac was $4.39 in 2019 and now costs $5.29, a 20.5 percent increase.
Erlinger acknowledged that he and many franchisees were frustrated by a post on X last summer about a Big Mac meal in Connecticut that cost $18, calling the price "an exception." He noted that franchisees own and operate 95 percent of U.S. McDonald's locations and set their own pricing but "work hard to minimize the impact of price increases."
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S19AI Startup Anthropic Just Released New Tools for Businesses Anthropic announced today that a feature called tool use is now generally available to all businesses and individuals. Tool use is a process through which Claude is able to interact with a user's external tools and databases. Companies with early access have used the feature to personalize customer recommendations, automate data entry, and analyze complex data.Â
For example, Intuned, a Y-Combinator backed platform for developing web scrappers -- programs that mine a web page's HTML code for data -- says tool use has enabled the company to use Claude 3 Haiku, Anthropic's fastest and most affordable model, to help developers extract and organize data from web pages.
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S20Airbnb Just Entered the EV Charging Game. Should Your Company? The San Francisco-based short-term rental marketplace teamed up with Campbell, California-based EV charging company ChargePoint to offer EV chargers and installations for Airbnb hosts at discounted prices. The partnership came in response to increased use of Airbnb's EV charger search filter, which has surged more than 80 percent from 2022 to 2023. The rental company is betting that hosts who install a ChargePoint charger will see more business down the line.Â
Through the partnership, announced May 22, Airbnb hosts receive up to a 36 percent discount off of various ChargePoint chargers, which currently sell for about $550, plus $100 off installation services. Airbnb is also covering $200 worth of expenses for the first 1,000 hosts who choose to buy and install a ChargePoint charger. Typically when someone purchases ChargePoint hardware, they will have to search out the services of an electrician on their own, but ChargePoint built out a platform for Airbnb that allows hosts to book local contractors, see pricing, and receive updates.
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S21Ecuador Is Literally Powerless in the Face of Drought Ecuador is in trouble: Drought has shrunk its reservoirs, and its hydroelectric dams have had to power down. The government has been forced to cut electricity to homes for hours at a stretch, and in mid-April, President Daniel Noboa declared a 60-day state of emergency. Since then, homeowners have been taking cold showers and struggling without internet access, while restaurants have been serving up meals by candlelight to avoid closing and losing perishable food. For businesses, that's the worst, says Etiel Solorzano, a Quito-based tour guide for Intrepid Travel. "Three hours of no power? You can go bankrupt for that."
Some days, the power outages have lasted up to eight hours or more, says Juan Sebastián Proaño Aviles, a sustainability coordinator and mechanical engineering professor at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito. Things have improved a littleâpower cuts are now no longer a daily occurrenceâbut Proaño Aviles expects sporadic energy shortages to continue for years. "It's going to be a problem," he says. "We have to do something pretty fast."
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S22You Can Buy a Used Tesla for Cheap. Just Be Careful If You Do The launch of a new electric vehicle these days is invariably met with a chorus of "this car is too expensive"âand rightfully so. But for used EVs, particularly used Teslas, it's quite another story, thanks to a glut of former fleet and rental cars that are now ready for their second owner.
"Due to a variety of reasons, Tesla resale values have plummeted, making many Tesla models very affordable now. Plus, for some consumers, an additional $4,000 federal tax credit on used EVs may apply, sweetening the deal even further. Buying a used Tesla can be a great deal for the savvy shopper, but there are significant things to look out for," says Ed Kim, president and chief analyst at AutoPacific.
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S23Foreign Influence Campaigns Don't Know How to Use AI Yet Either Today, OpenAI released its first threat report, detailing how actors from Russia, Iran, China, and Israel have attempted to use its technology for foreign influence operations across the globe. The report named five different networks that OpenAI identified and shut down between 2023 and 2024. In the report, OpenAI reveals that established networks like RussiaâÂÂs Doppleganger and ChinaâÂÂs Spamoflauge are experimenting with how to use generative AI to automate their operations. They're also not very good at it.
And while itâÂÂs a modest relief that these actors havenâÂÂt mastered generative AI to become unstoppable forces for disinformation, itâÂÂs clear that theyâÂÂre experimenting, and that alone should be worrying.
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S24Trump's Online MAGA Army Calls Guilty Verdict a Declaration of War The words âÂÂRIP Americaâ trended on X minutes after a jury in Manhattan found former president Donald Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts for falsifying business records in connection to a hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
Images of an upside-down American flagâÂÂa symbol of distress that became co-opted by the 2020 Stop the Steal movementâÂÂflooded social media, as Trump supporters, fringe extremists, right-wing pundits, and politicians voiced their anger.
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S25Google Admits Its AI Overviews Search Feature Screwed Up When bizarre and misleading answers to search queries generated by Google's new AI Overview feature went viral on social media last week, the company issued statements that generally downplayed the notion the technology had problems. Late Thursday, the company's head of search, Liz Reid, admitted that the flubs had highlighted areas that needed improvement, writing, "We wanted to explain what happened and the steps we've taken."Reid's post directly referenced two of the most viral, and wildly incorrect, AI Overview results. One saw Google's algorithms endorse eating rocks because doing so "can be good for you," and the other suggested using nontoxic glue to thicken pizza sauce.
Rock eating is not a topic many people were ever writing or asking questions about online, so there aren't many sources for a search engine to draw on. According to Reid, the AI tool found an article from The Onion, a satirical website, that had been reposted by a software company, and it misinterpreted the information as factual.
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S26How to Lead Your First One-on-One Meeting As a new manager, a part of your role will now involve leading a different type of meeting: the one-on-one. Managers set aside time each week to meet individually with their direct reports to check in, align priorities, and ensure each person has the necessary resources to do their job. Here are a few principles to help you prepare for, conduct, and maximize the impact of your one-on-ones.
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S27An optimist's take on reskilling in the age of AI One in three workers globally will see their jobs disrupted by AI and tech advancements this decade — but there's a way to stay ahead of the curve. Skill-building strategist Sagar Goel shares practical examples from a partnership with the Singaporean government that helped thousands of workers transition into new careers, offering a lesson on the importance of reskilling and becoming a lifelong learner.Continued here
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S28My quest to cure prion disease -- before it's too late Biomedical researcher Sonia Vallabh's life was turned upside down when she learned she had the genetic mutation for a rare and fatal illness, prion disease, that could strike at any time. Thirteen years later, her search for a cure has led to new insights about how to catch and prevent disease — and how to honor our grandest, most mysterious inheritance: our brains.Continued here
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S29S30Key misinformation "superspreaders" on Twitter: Older women Misinformation is not a new problem, but there are plenty of indications that the advent of social media has made things worse. Academic researchers have responded by trying to understand the scope of the problem, identifying the most misinformation-filled social media networks, organized government efforts to spread false information, and even prominent individuals who are the sources of misinformation.
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S31Tech giants form AI group to counter Nvidia with new interconnect standard On Thursday, several major tech companies, including Google, Intel, Microsoft, Meta, AMD, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco, and Broadcom, announced the formation of the Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) Promoter Group to develop a new interconnect standard for AI accelerator chips in data centers. The group aims to create an alternative to Nvidia's proprietary NVLink interconnect technology, which links together multiple servers that power today's AI applications like ChatGPT.
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S32Americans Are Thinking About Immigration All Wrong BREAKING:Donald Trump is the first president in U.S. history to be convicted in a court of law.
What's the United States' most important problem? For the past three months, Americans have offered the same answer: immigration. More than inflation or political polarization, Americans are vexed by the influx of migrants. Republicans' concerns spiked after the most recent southern-border crisis. But they're not alone. In April, the number of independents who said immigration was the country's biggest problem reached a high in Gallup polling dating back to 2014.
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S33To Have or Not Have Children BREAKING:Donald Trump is the first president in U.S. history to be convicted in a court of law.
In December 1941, Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman living in Amsterdam, found herself unexpectedly pregnant. Hers was not a wanted pregnancy; we know from her diaries that she had never desired children, and had even considered a hysterectomy "in a rash and pleasure-loving moment." Hillesum wanted above all to be a writer. Like many women before (and after) her, Hillesum self-managed her abortion; she mentions swallowing "twenty quinine pills" and assaulting herself with "hot water and blood-curdling instruments." She left behind an account not just of her methods, but of her reasoning. "All I want is to keep someone out of this miserable world. I shall leave you in a state of unbornness, rudimentary being that you are, and you ought to be grateful to me. I almost feel a little tenderness for you," she wrote. Hillesum was aware of the dire political circumstances around her, but her rationale was entirely personal. As she explained to the entity growing within her, her "tainted family" was "riddled with hereditary disease." She swore that "no such unhappy human being would ever spring from my womb."
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S34Why was a laughing woman seen as lethal, not least to herself? | Psyche Ideas is professor of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, US. Her books include Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (2018) and Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema (2024).
Can you really die from laughing too hard? From 1870 to 1920, hundreds of women in the United States allegedly suffered such a fate. One woman ‘went to enjoy a comedy and furnished a tragedy’ when she laughed herself to death at a vaudeville show in Pittsburgh in 1897. Bertha Pruett was ‘Killed By a Joke’, Mrs Polly Ann Jackson ‘Had Not Laughed So Heartily In Months’, and a woman in Denver ‘may have been about the first to see anything in Colorado to laugh at’ – according to the Dallas Morning News. But were these eye-popping obituaries real? Often voiced in a mocking or glib tone, such as ‘Last Laugh Was Not Best Laugh’ or ‘Score One for the Pessimists’, slews of callous eulogies lampooned their victims for having given up the ghost to such a ludicrous killer.
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