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AI’s illusion of personhood, how to wait well, and the Arc Browser’s future
Sep, 2025
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👋 This is The Pipette – a monthly newsletter for product builders with links so good their ideas warrant a reply, a forward, or even a discussion in real life.
- Psychology (Video 📽️) – Learning how to wait well can pay dividends. Technology has raised our expectations of instant replies and gratification, creating a gap between what’s realistic and the speed at which we want to operate. Patience bridges that gap. A neuroscientist found that people who were able to cultivate patience when pursuing goals put in more effort and were more satisfied in their pursuit than the rest. Read more on how to curb impatience mindfully.
- Artificial Intelligence – We tend to mistakenly attribute personhood to LLM models while interacting with them. This tendency to anthropomorphize programs isn’t anything new (the ELIZA effect dates back to the 1960s). It serves AI companies well, too – by moving us away from viewing these chatbots as tools to wield, any blame for their actions & responses seems to lie with the chat “persona” itself, rather than its creator.
- Design – Google’s new image model, Nano Banana, has some interesting UX applications. One of its strengths is to keep a consistent representation of a character or base image over time, which is especially helpful with UX storytelling. Using it in combination with an LLM to get a quick prototyping setup that gets your team talking about the right problems earlier on.
- Artificial Intelligence – Wikipedia has released guidelines to detect signs of AI usage. While some of them are specific to Wikipedia and its communal editing workflow, others apply to all LLM-generated text and are worth considering to identify this content in the wild or to improve first drafts you may be collaborating with AI on.
- Music – Covering music from the 1960s to 2018, this interactive guide to music shows when each electronic genre came to be and how they relate to one another. Within a genre, you can play songs from a specific period. It also works surprisingly well on mobile, despite the map-like visual interface.
- Product – The CEO of the company behind Arc (a new-ish browser and Vertico Labs favorite) discusses why they pivoted to another AI-first browser and stopped active development on Arc. It’s full of interesting takes, like “webpages won’t be the primary interface anymore”, and has some early-stage SaaS wisdom baked in. Atlassian has since acquired them, and some don’t foresee a bright future for their team. RIP.
- Engineering – AI engineers are some of the most sought-after roles in tech right now. This guide outlines how to transition into an AI engineer from a traditional software developer background. AI engineers straddle the line between machine learning and typical software roles, leveraging both domains. Another unique aspect is the continued maintenance required to retrain models as they degrade with use – AI systems are much more dynamic and sensitive compared to the predictable systems that preceded them.