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We’re not amped about AI search. We miss surfing the web.
Jun, 2024
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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.
- AI – Google’s AI Overview for search results is now enabled by default. A lot of people are pretty peeved, us included :D. There are some major concerns with it – between misleading or false results, taking traffic away from publishers, and the environmental impacts of generative AI, we feel pretty validated.
- Leadership – What makes a good boss? How do they affect productivity & retention? Why are high-performers automatically ushered towards management positions? Listen to the Freakonomics episode (or read the transcript).
- Leadership – Employees often circumvent IT to accelerate access to tools, creating a “Shadow IT”. This article from Forbes covers the phenomenon and the tension it can create between progress and security.
- SEO – If you’re involved in publishing content in any way, this one’s for you. Google leaked a treasure trove of technical documentation related to their coveted search algorithm last week, some of which directly contradicts public statements made in the past. Some takeaways: brand authority, ratings/reviews from other sites, and on-site behavior all contribute to your site’s rank.
- Workforce – We’ve all heard of offshoring, but how about digital offshoring? Vox covers what happens when employers use technology to move jobs elsewhere like having a cashier in the Philippines take orders for an NYC chicken joint.
- Internet – Undersea cables are a critical but relatively unknown component of the World Wide Web, thanklessly maintained by a whole industry. Learn more in an outstanding visual essay by The Verge about the ship crew that saved Japan’s Internet connection.
- Productivity – We all consume a lot of content, but how much do we produce? Manuel Moreale explores the ratio of consumption/creation and how tweaking it can make a big difference.
- Productivity – Doing less seems like a counterintuitive way towards progress. An episode of Hidden Brain makes the case for subtraction and discusses some mental and societal barriers that prevent us from considering it. Listen or read the transcript.
- AI – A Japanese company is using robotics and machine learning to automate ikejime, a technique to dispatch fish humanely (via a spike to the brain). It sounds scary, but this promises to be more humane and less wasteful than the way it’s done currently.