Functional fixedness is a cognitive bias that limits a person to use an object only in the way it is traditionally used.

Functional fixedness is this inability to see a hammer’s use as anything other than for pounding nails

How can you defy functional fixedness in your positioning, strategy, and marketing?

Or, how can you zig where others zag?

via Wikipedia (via The Ringer)


From The Guardian

fraudsters impersonated WPP’s CEO using a fake WhatsApp account, a voice clone and YouTube footage used in a virtual meet

Will AI make smaller better?

Scale is really only needed for data when it comes to model training. Larger headcount doesn’t equal better performance.

It’s hard to imagine this happening at a smaller company, especially one without a public-facing leader.

But, as always, humans are the weak link in the technological chain.


Benedict Evans’ prediction for WWDC:

More will probably be about how it uses LLMs to deliver new features, how much those can be run on the device (Apple is an edge computing company and its chips have had dedicated ML accelerators for years), and hence how much developers can do things on Apple silicon for no marginal cost instead of paying a cloud provider per token.

This could get minimal press but be the most interesting / impactful in terms of the average user.

This is what makes Apple different from the field and could turn its catchup attempts into a catapult.


About that ad-supported plan

Netflix’s cheaper, ad-supported tier now has 40 million global monthly active users, nearly double the 23 million the company reported in January.

via CNBC


It’s happening

Netflix will launch an in-house advertising technology platform, by the end of 2025

This summer, Netflix will also expand its buying capabilities to include The Trade Desk, Google’s Display & Video 360, and Magnite who will join Microsoft as the main programmatic partners for advertisers.

The streaming platform removed the Basic plan for new subscribers last July, not it’ll get rid of it for good.

I wrote this last March:

If Netflix goes the roll-your-own route to replace the Microsoft stack, I wonder how long the ad-free basic tier will last.

A mystery no more.