🔗 The Bitter Lesson versus The Garbage Can

The Bitter Lesson versus The Garbage Can by Ethan Mollick A thought-provoking article that, on the surface, explores which modality of AI agent deployment is more likely to succeed in a large organisation — agents carefully designed around organisational processes, or general-purpose agents trained to seek successful outcomes (RL, for example). But dig a little deeper, and it raises a more fundamental question: what shape will successful AI-powered products take?
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Book: Apple in China by Patrick McGee

Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ I finished this book a couple of weeks ago. It was the first book I completed in 2025 (not the first one I read or started in 2025, just the only one I have finished so far). There was a good reason I stuck with it: it would have been difficult not to. Great writing. Captivating narrative. One of the most significant business and geopolitical stories of our time. Of course I read it at record speed.
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💬 Andrew Ng on why learning programming shouldn’t be discouraged

Andrew Ng: Some people today are discouraging others from learning programming on the grounds AI will automate it. This advice will be seen as some of the worst career advice ever given. I disagree with the Turing Award and Nobel prize winner who wrote, “It is far more likely that the programming occupation will become extinct … than that it will become all-powerful. More and more, computers will program themselves.” Statements discouraging people from learning to code are harmful! In the 1960s, when programming moved from punchcards (where a programmer had to laboriously make holes in physical cards to write...
AI Codingquote

🔗 APOSD vs Clean Code

APOSD vs Clean Code This document is the result of a series of discussions, some online and some in person, held between Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin and John Ousterhout between September 2024 and February 2025. John is the author of the book A Philosophy of Software Design (APOSD), a book that was first published in 2018. This book has been on my “to read” list for a while now—I’ve heard very good reviews for it from a lot of people. “Uncle Bob” Martin and his 2008 book Clean Code of course need no introduction. Clean Code is one of the...
booklink-logprogramming

💬 Barrels & Ammunition

Keith Rabois: If you think about people, there are two categories of high-quality people: there is the ammunition, and then there are the barrels. You can add all the ammunition you want, but if you have only five barrels in your company, you can literally do only five things simultaneously. If you add one more barrel, you can now do six things simultaneously. If you add another one, you can do seven, and so on. Finding those barrels that you can shoot through — someone who can take an idea from conception to live and it’s almost perfect — are...
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