Good marketing happens when the narrative a brand tells about itself aligns with the narrative customer is telling themselves.

Typically this occurs in the realm of identity, but local / locally rooted businesses cultivate a sense of ownership and pride amongst the locals. Meaning local conditions impact narrative overlap.

This is a perfect illustration.

Rodney Brooks predicts a potential future for genAI

LLMs that can explain which data led to what outputs will be key to non annoying/dangerous/stupid deployments. They will be surrounded by lots of mechanism to keep them boxed in, and those mechanisms, not yet invented for most applications, will be where the arms races occur.

This seems the sensible requirement for truly broad adoption and use across industries and situations.

The current ecosystem is more accelerator than substitute.

It’s not always our expectation of success that’s proven wrong, it’s our expectation of timeframe that’s usually the problem.

Deployment at scale takes so much longer than anyone ever imagines. If you see someone with a new technology that is a barely working lab demo with six PhD students baby-sitting it behind the scenes, and the they say it is going to change the world in two years, just laugh.

Promising results on a miraculous timeframe is setting yourself up for uncomfy convos later.

via Rodney Brooks

About that pull forward induced analysis trap…

From The Fed:

Import growth was strong relative to its fourth-quarter pace, consistent with reports that some U.S. importers were stocking up ahead of prospective tariff increases.

Some good news buried in all the tariff whiplash

The CPI dropped 0.1% in March (gas dropped 6.3%)

All items less food and energy is the lowest it’s been since 2021

The Fed’s not celebrating though

From the recent meeting:

participants remarked that uncertainty about the net effect of an array of government policies on the economic outlook was high, making it appropriate to take a cautious approach. Emphasizing that uncertainty, a majority of participants noted the potential for inflationary effects arising from various factors to be more persistent than they projected.