Five Ideas That Made Us Think

1.  Software Is Not Going Away

Steve Sinofsky, long-time Silicon Valley wise man, pours cold water on the notion that AI will soon replace software and SaaS companies. Writing on the Andreessen Horowitz blog, he argues “we’ll need vastly more software, not less”:

This is not just because of AI coding or agents building products or whatever. It is because we are nowhere near meeting the demand for what software can do. This holds for software I use on my own, software a business needs, software an organization needs, or software to control the explosion of devices that replace every analog device with an automated one.

2. Waymo Economics

Don’t sell those taxi medallions just yet. Om Malik runs the numbers on Waymo to assess whether its driverless taxis are headed to every city in America. His conclusion pumps the brakes:   

Published data shows that each vehicle currently does about twenty-five trips per day. The average trip lasts about fifteen minutes. Waymo reported 15 million trips and 3.8 million hours of rider time in 2025. According to California Public Utilities Commission filings, there is about eighteen minutes of idle or repositioning time between trips. Each car is already running roughly sixteen hours a day. Since these are electric vehicles, they need time to charge. To hit one million weekly rides with the current 2,500 vehicles, each car would need to complete fifty-seven trips per day. That is over fourteen hours of active ride time alone. That does not include charging, maintenance, or repositioning. Physically impossible.

3. Basketball vs. AI

Andrew Sharp’s sprawling essay about the NBA’s many problems is full of smart observations that could be applied to most professional sports. He describes the NBA as caught in “an era of self-interested decisions, increasingly exhausting melodrama, and superstars talking and behaving more like corporations than people.” His take on Commissioner Adam Silver is devastating:

Silver said that he’s excited about the future of hyper-personalized telecasts with artificial intelligence. This came during the commissioner’s opening statement, and was kind of a wonderful microcosm of his whole deal. Silver is missing the big things, while not necessarily nailing the little things, either. His enthusiastic AI digression misunderstood the implications of the technology at issue—live, un-personalized, shared experiences will be what could be an invaluable point of differentiation for the NBA in an era of hyper-personalized AI content.

4. Close to Home

Chris Arnade explores Duluth, Minnesota – in the middle of winter. He loves it. And so do the people who live there. Deep in the snow, he rediscovers an important truth about American mobility:

During my aborted first attempt at flying to Duluth, when I was stuck for four hours on the tarmac with a planeload of Duluthians, I was reminded of another American fallacy—the idea that we are transient people, with no sense of place. That is certainly true of me, and most readers of this, and of the Northerners who filled my Florida in the ‘70s, but we are a minority. The majority of Americans still live within thirty miles of where they were born.

5. So Average

Sam Kriss goes deep in the weird subculture of “maxxing.” He describes it as a phenomenon where people – predominantly young men – “willingly sacrifice every aspect of their lives except one.” It's a comic but frightening window into a world of people who see the rest of us as mere average strivers:

Most people, being average, do not understand what maxxing really means. Look at me! they squeal. I’m sleepmaxxing! They mean that they’re trying to get eight hours a night. Or they’re proteinmaxxing, which means they’ve bought a big tub of whey powder. I’m such a houseplantmaxxer, they tell the fiddle-leaf fig they ordered online. It’s fun to play around with a new word. But sleepmaxxing does not mean getting a red light and taping your mouth shut; it means putting yourself in a medically induced coma.

Websites Worth Reading

Great NCAA Final Four Photos: Just in time for March Madness

Golden Age of Hollywood Portraits: Collection by the National Portrait Gallery

Data Underload: Population gains and drops by State 

Feeds We Follow

@vernon3austin: Essay on American manufacturing

@openclaw: An AI to run your life

@skdh:Popular, exasperated German physicist