Business
The Latest Casualty of the Tariff War: Free Shipping. The bond market is still hot. The 10-year yield is still high. Everything is about to be more expensive, if they aren’t already. We have experienced none of the alleged benefits of tariffs, yet some of the consequences.
Tim Cook Reveals Apple’s Vision for Movies and TV: Why Spending Millions on Blockbusters Like ‘F1’ Is About More Than Selling iPhones. I think Apple TV+ is underrated for the quality it brings. So many good movies and shows. I look forward to watching F1 the movie.
Waymo rides cost more than Uber or Lyft — and people are paying anyway. People are excited about the novelty of autonomous vehicles and willing to pay more. That’s fair. But it won’t last long in business. In business, it’s about scale and supply vs demand dynamics. Uber and Lyft have scale and years of experience in optimizing pricing. AVs are expensive to operate. Can the AV operators reach the tipping point in scale?
How grocers can level the playing field against Walmart in e-commerce. Exclusive quality and affordable merchandise with great customer service will be key to grocers’ competition against Walmart. They can’t compete with the biggest retailer in the US in terms of pricing, scale and delivery. Hence, grocers have to come up with unique propositions to lure shoppers to their stores.
Large Language Models, Small Labor Market Effects. “Yet, despite substantial investments, economic impacts remain minimal. Using difference-in-differences and employer policies as quasi-experimental variation, we estimate precise zeros: AI chatbots have had no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation, with confidence intervals ruling out effects larger than 1%. Modest productivity gains (average time savings of 2.8%), combined with weak wage pass-through, help explain these limited labor market effects. Our findings challenge narratives of imminent labor market transformation due to Generative AI“
Instagram Wants Gen Z. What Does Gen Z Want From Instagram? Instagram has a huge problem in that younger users are not using the platform the way Meta wants them to. I can relate to that. I have not posted on the platform for months, even after important milestones like the death of my cat who is like a son to me and the birth of my first born son. I don’t feel like sharing personal news to a lot of people. I only have a circle of close friends that I want to share news with. Hence, exchanges usually happen in private messages or off Instagram. Meta sells ads. They need eyeballs, they need content. If young users don’t post, they won’t scroll through feeds and look at ads. Of course, Meta is still doing very well, but if they implemented a major marketing campaign, they must consider this a significant problem.
Other Stuff I Find Interesting
The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity. Somewhat unsurprisingly, Apple’s machine learning team found that even the best Large Reasoning Models collapsed in questions with a high degree of complexity.
Stay hungry, stay foolish. Marking the 20th anniversary of Steve’s Stanford address. I listened to that speech many times and surely will continue to in the future. Crazy how much he still impacts our society long after he is gone.
AI is making health care safer in the remote Amazon. It is important to note that while AI is helpful, it is designed to support decisions, not make them.
‘There’s a huge amount that we don’t understand’: Why sperm is still so mysterious. Fascinating!
Liquid Glasslighting. “The underlying message that they’re trying to convey in all these interviews is clear: calm down, this isn’t a big deal, you guys are being a little crazy. And that, in turn, aims to undercut all the reporting about the turmoil within Apple – for years at this point – that has led to the situation with Siri. Sorry, the situation which they’re implying is not a situation. Though, I don’t know, normally when a company shakes up an entire team, that tends to suggest some sort of situation. That, of course, is never mentioned. Nor would you expect Apple – of all companies – to talk openly and candidly about internal challenges. But that just adds to this general wafting smell in the air. The smell of bullshit.” Nicely put.
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Minh Quang Duong 
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