Glasses Visual Humor

© 2024 Praveen Puri

Worldwide Windows / CrowdStrike Outage

Systems have been down all over the world, including airports because of Microsoft Windows systems being shut down.  A lot of businesses use Windows with CrowdStrike for cybersecurity, and CrowdStrike pushed out an automatic update that crashed Windows machines.

My nephew was supposed to fly in from CA today, but it looks like his flight was cancelled.

This shows the danger and fragility when companies rely on a small handful of providers.

It also shows the downside of frequent, automatic software releases.

© 2024 Praveen Puri

Gen Z's Wikipedia

The Economist recently had an interesting article about a site called Famous Birthdays. They called it "Gen Z's Wikipedia." The founder found a niche in that, besides just listing conventional celebrities, the site lists influencers.

It's success shows how the nature of fame is no splintered. In fact, marketers are now using this site as a tool to identify influencers for ad campaigns.

© 2024 Praveen Puri

Scary News About China and AI

This is one of the scariest things I've read recently (June 15, 2024 Economist):


"At the start of 2023 experts reckoned that the Chinese LLMs that did exist were a decade behind the American cutting edge. Now the same experts reckon that the transpacific model gap has shrunk to a year or less."

© 2024 Praveen Puri

Strategic Simplicity® is the Key to Business Success

As I've said before, we are in the Attention Scarcity Age and the key to business success today is streamlining the customer experience, and making it very quick and easy for people to accomplish tasks.

It's the secret to Uber, AirBNB, take out services, and AI.

The Lefsetz Letter touches on this while talking about how the best non-blockbuster/superhero  movies are 

now appearing on Netflix (https://lefsetz.com/wordpress/2024/06/11/hit-man/), bolding is mine:

"On Netflix, to paraphrase Mick Jagger, it’s just a click away.

There’s too much friction in going to the movies. You’ve got to look up the time, get in your car, park, pay, sit through a zillion trailers, and maybe commercials, and endure the great unwashed populace.

But on Netflix… It’s on demand, ready when you are. To watch straight through, to pause, to see again and again.

This is the modern paradigm. He with the most friction loses. Didn’t the music business prove this?"

© 2024 Praveen Puri

Interesting Connection 2

Elon Musk launched a new AI company (xAI - he's fascinated by the letter X), and it raised a lot of money in a short time.  Why?

Because he also owns Tesla and X (nee Twitter), which gives his AI models a big advantage in training data (tweets, file from Tesla cameras, etc).
© 2024 Praveen Puri

Interesting Connection 1

Did you now that, outside the main bull fighting stadium in Madrid, there is a statue dedicated to Alexander Fleming?

Why?  His invention of penicillin saved countless bullfighters.

© 2024 Praveen Puri