Fable, Meta AI, Cybertrucks, Fulfilling Jobs, and Office Slang
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:
🖼️ Scaling Authorization
📚 Fable
📱 Meta AI
🗑️ Cybertrucks
🫥 Invisible Habits
💼 Fulfilling Jobs
🏢 Office Slang
Podcast
Scaling Authorization with Jake Moshenko: Lessons for Product Leaders
In this episode, I sit down with Jake Moshenko, co-founder and CEO of AuthZed, to discuss his journey from working at major tech companies to becoming a two-time founder. After his first company Quay (a Docker registry service) was acquired, he founded AuthZed to solve application permission challenges. Jake shares the contrasts between his two founding experiences, transitioning from a bootstrapped two-person company to a venture-backed enterprise-focused business. He emphasizes the importance of choosing the right problem space and being prepared for the long journey of entrepreneurship. We also discuss the significance of open-source in modern software development and his perspectives on AI technology.
News and Useful Reads
A Book App Used AI to ‘Roast’ Its Users. It Went Anti-Woke Instead
This is why testing and guardrails for AI is so important. Even well-intentioned products using AI can go off the rails.
Fable, a popular social media app that describes itself as a haven for “bookworms and bingewatchers,” created an AI-powered end-of-year summary feature recapping what books users read in 2024. It was meant to be playful and fun, but some of the recaps took on an oddly combative tone.
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Meta sends its AI-generated profiles to hell where they belong
Meta seems to have ended a widely ridiculed experiment. It did away with the celebrity versions a while ago, and now had removed the non-celebrity versions.
Meta has nuked a bunch of its AI-generated profiles from Facebook Instagram, the company confirmed, after the AI characters prompted widespread outrage and ridicule from users on social media.
The Tesla Cybertruck isn’t all it’s cracked up to be
I’m no fan of Elon or the Cybertruck. Both are awful. And it seems like more and more people are coming to the same realization if we look at the demand (and the comments on X).
And yet, the Cybertruck did not meaningfully contribute to Tesla’s growth in 2024, as evidenced by the fact that the company reported its first year-over-year sales decline in over a decade.
Invisible Habits Are Driving Your Life
Like most people, I rely on habits and routines so I don’t have to think about everything. But when we stop to examine our habits, it becomes more complicated.
Habits, according to James’s worldview, are a bargain with the devil. They make life easier by automating behaviors you perform regularly. (I would rather attend to what I read in the news on a given morning, for example, than to the minutiae of how I steep my daily tea.) But once an action becomes a habit, you can lose sight of what prompts it, or if you even like it very much. (Maybe the tea would taste better if I steeped it longer.)
Other Interesting Finds
These Are the Most Fulfilling Jobs in America
Our jobs take up a significant amount of our time and energy. But I’d venture to say that many of us, if not most of us, aren’t really fulfilled by our work. So who is?
As you probably guessed, much of our job satisfaction depends not on who we are, but on what job we’re doing. In that, we see a separation in the questions about personal satisfaction and the questions about contributing to the community.
The Top 5 Office Slang Terms From the UK and U.S.
Ping me when you get some bandwidth and we can circle back to the low-hanging fruit and get everything locked in.