AWS Outages, Claude, Agents, Smart Glasses, and American Bread

Weekly Review of News in Technology, UX and AI

Here’s the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology. Let’s go:

• 📊 AI Entrepreneurship

• 🧑‍🌾 AWS Outage

• 🧑‍🎤 Claude

• 👦 AI Agents

• 🎶 Smart Glasses

• ☑️ AI Slop

• 🍂 American Food

Podcast

Unlocking the Secrets of AI Entrepreneurship with Founder Andrew Amann

In this episode of Prodity: Product by Design, Kyle Evans interviews Andrew Amann, CEO and co-founder of NineTwoThree AI Studio. Andrew shares his extensive experience in entrepreneurship, product development, and the challenges of building AI products. We discuss the importance of understanding product-market fit, the patent process, and the journey of founding multiple companies. Andrew emphasizes the significance of focusing on a specific audience and the value of holistic entrepreneurship, where success is measured not just by financial gain but also by personal fulfillment and work-life balance. We also explore the future of AI, its applications across various industries, and the evolving landscape of technology.

News and Useful Reads

How a tiny bug spiraled into a massive outage that took down the internet

You may have noticed parts of the internet going down on Monday. AWS, the backbone of much of our online world, had an outage. And took many of us with it.

The bug – which occurred when two automated systems were trying to update the same data simultaneously – snowballed into something significantly more serious that Amazon’s engineers scrambled to fix, the company said Thursday in a postmortem assessment.

Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

We continue to see AI get smarter, or at least more useful. The introduction of Skills in Claude is a subtle change that I think will shift the way we use AI.

Skills are conceptually extremely simple: a skill is a Markdown file telling the model how to do something, optionally accompanied by extra documents and pre-written scripts that the model can run to help it accomplish the tasks described by the skill.

We Will Not Trust Autonomous AI Agents Anytime Soon

I remain skeptical of broad use AI agents. The idea of deploying agents to help me with my work or to do tasks for me is great. But I, too, pause with the potential downsides.

We can make an AI agent act autonomously. By the same token, we can tell people in an organization to do whatever the hell they want. However, if we do that in isolation, we shouldn’t expect any sensible outcome. In neither of the cases.

Amazon unveils AI smart glasses for its delivery drivers

When it comes to smart glasses, I don’t see an immediate use case for most of us. While we may get there eventually, they’re a novelty (or oddity) right now. But when it comes to specific jobs, like delivery drivers, smart glasses make perfect sense.

Amazon announced on Wednesday that it’s developing AI-powered smart glasses for its delivery drivers. The idea behind the glasses is to give delivery drivers a hands-free experience that reduces the need to keep looking between their phone, the package they’re delivering, and their surroundings.

The Man Who Makes AI Slop by Hand

Not the hero we need, but certainly the hero we deserve.

Mu is not the only comedian who has tried to imitate the style of AI-generated videos, but he really nails all of the elements: The clumsy bodily movements, the spaced-out facial expressions, and the unpredictable plot development.

Other Interesting Finds

Sorry, it’s true: The US really does have crappy bread

Is food abroad better than in the US? Yes, definitely. Better tasting, better made, fewer chemicals. Every time we travel, we notice it.

Yes, the fact that you’re in a new and exciting environment is a factor. But you also aren’t imagining things: other countries have different ways of preparing and producing food that factor into what you’re tasting as well.