Tootfinder

AI companies are raising at valuations that require them to grow at rates that are only achievable by chasing the broadest possible market with the most generic possible product.
A company that raises at a $500M valuation needs to show a path to billions in revenue,
which means it can't afford to be a niche tool that does one thing brilliantly for a specific audience.
It has to be a platform, horizontal, aimed at enterprise, built for no one in particular.
Ever…

Everyone in AI is building the wrong thing for the same reason
Every AI founder I talk to is on an accelerating treadmill, burdened by a nagging suspicion that the entire industry is moving too fast in a direction that doesn't quite make sense, with no idea about how to get off. There is an overwhelming feeling that if everyone stopped and

I was feeling caffeine deprived but not foxy when this snow squall hit but I figured "other people will believe in me if even if I don't" (like my hero Peter Parker!) and sure enough I ran into these two between the Rhodes Hall loading dock and the 7-11; maybe the last time this year I went out in my winter phase
#photo

Looks like studies of hominins in East Asia are this week's goodies. Following on from the study of H. sapiens expansion routes into East Asia, we've now got this remarkable dating of H. erectus suggesting rapid expansion out of Africa 1.9 million years ago.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv

Why are we having fewer children?
(Interview with Berkay Ozcan, Professor at LSE)
- Couple formation happens at later age
- Women are choosing "careers" and not just "jobs"
- More people choose not to have kids at all
What else is going on? Short anser: we don't know yet
Even in countries providing a lot of support to parents, fertility rate has still declined
Immigration is no silver bullet. It's part of the solution, not th…

Berkay Ozcan: “Immigration is not a silver bullet for falling birth rates”
Berkay Ozcan discusses falling birth rates, whether immigration might provide the answer and what a smaller global population would mean for the environment.

Ad buyers say ad rates for ChatGPT are falling from $60 CPM to as low as $25 and the minimum spend to advertise is down to $50K from $250K at launch (Krystal Scanlon/Digiday)
https://digiday.com/marketing/everything-is-coming-down-chatgpt-ads-are-gett…

‘Everything is coming down’: ChatGPT ads are getting cheaper
While the pilot CPM started out at $60, advertisers are now seeing that price drop to as low as $25, just nine weeks into the test.

✈️ on board FI645, Fögrufjöll. Service between KEF ➼ IAD.

Ad buyers say ad rates for ChatGPT are falling from $60 CPM to as low as $25 and the minimum spend to advertise is down to $50K from $250K at launch (Krystal Scanlon/Digiday)
https://digiday.com/marketing/everything-is-coming-down-chatgpt-ads-are-gett…

‘Everything is coming down’: ChatGPT ads are getting cheaper
While the pilot CPM started out at $60, advertisers are now seeing that price drop to as low as $25, just nine weeks into the test.

Valve FM: Internet-Radio im Terminal hören https://blog.oliverswelt.de/blog/back-to-the-roots-warum-ich-radio-jetzt-im-terminal-höre-valve-fm

A citizen of Rome in 117 AD,
under Emperor Trajan,
would've found it difficult to imagine the empire not existing.
The roads, the aqueducts, the legal system, the trade networks stretching from Britain to Mesopotamia:
all of it seemed to be a near-fact of nature, like gravity
Edward Gibbon gave us six volumes explaining how that feeling turned out to be wrong,
and even he couldn't fully untangle all the causes.
But the overarching theme mig…

The empire always falls
A citizen of Rome in 117 AD, under Emperor Trajan, would've found it difficult to imagine the empire not existing. The roads, the aqueducts, the legal system, the trade networks stretching from Britain to Mesopotamia: all of it seemed to be a near-fact of nature, like gravity // the Mediterranean itself.

Following California implementing a law raising its minimum wage to $20 for more than 500,000 fast-food workers in the state in 2024,
Christopher Thornberg, founding partner of research firm Beacon Economics, offered a warning about the state raising its minimum wage.
“California’s well-intended push to reduce income inequality via wage floors is beginning to have a significant negative impact on some of our most vulnerable workers
—our youth, particularly those from lower-i…

Economists warned California not to raise the minimum wage to $20. They were wrong in almost every way so far, another economist says
“The results are nowhere as dire as predicted,” Berkeley’s Michael Reich told Fortune.