Meta Trial, Truck Bloat, Perplexity, Measles, Breakfast, and Friends after 30
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:
📊 Unstructured Data
🤔 Meta Trial
🛻 Truck Bloat
🖥️ Perplexity
📄 Resumes
💉 Measles
🍩 Breakfast
👋 Friends
Podcast
Structured Thinking for Unstructured Data: A Conversation with Founder Kirk Marple
In this episode of Product by Design, Kyle is joined by Kirk Marple, founder and CEO of Graphlit, to explore the world of unstructured data and how it’s transforming with the rise of LLMs and AI-native tools. Kirk shares his journey from working at Microsoft and General Motors to building Graflit—a platform designed to make unstructured data as usable as structured data.
News and Useful Reads
The Meta Trial Shows the Dangers of Selling Out
It’s interesting to see the testimony in the Meta trial. I don’t feel bad for founders who take a massive payday and sell their company, but I do feel sorry for the employees who end up losing when startups sell out to larger companies and then end up killing the young company. And I feel sorry for all of us, who lose out on promising products and apps. I have no doubt that Instagram would be far better if it weren’t part of Meta/Facebook.
Is this the antidote to America’s truck bloat problem?
When I was a kid, we had a small Datsun truck. It was a great truck. It is exactly what most people need—a small truck that can easily drive around town and haul plants or groceries or bikes or whatever. Unfortunately, the US only has bigger and bigger trucks now, but maybe that will change?
a new company called Slate Auto unveiled its first product, a spartan two-seat electric truck with a mere 150 miles of range and a world of possibility. There’s no paint, no distracting infotainment screen, and no stereo or even radio. It doesn’t tower over your average 12-year-old, and it may sell for under $20,000 (including incentives) when it arrives in 2026.
Perplexity’s CEO on fighting Google and the coming AI browser war
Aravind Srinivas is battling Google to get his Perplexity AI assistant preinstalled on Android phones. At the same time, the CEO is refocusing his startup on what he predicts will be the next battleground in the AI race: your web browser.
AI overwhelmingly prefers white and male job candidates in new test of resume-screening bias
When AI is trained on data that favors one group of any other, it isn’t surprising that it learns to also favor that same group. We’ve seen this many times, and as AI becomes more prevalent in everything we do, we have to remember our human biases become inherent AI biases as well.
The UW researchers tested three open-source, large language models (LLMs) and found they favored resumes from white-associated names 85% of the time, and female-associated names 11% of the time. Over the 3 million job, race and gender combinations tested, Black men fared the worst with the models preferring other candidates nearly 100% of the time.
Other Interesting Finds
Scientists Find Measles Likely to Become Endemic in the US Over Next 20 Years
Though vaccines are literally a marvel of the modern world, nearly eradicating terrible diseases, we continue to see vaccination rates dropping. It’s easy to forget how bad diseases like polio and measles are if you’ve never lived through them or seen the ramifications. And with RFK Jr. leading the charge, we’ll likely see rates fall even further.
Using a computer model, the authors found that with current state-level vaccination rates, measles could reestablish itself and become consistently present in the United States in the next two decades. Their model predicted this outcome in 83 percent of simulations. If current vaccination rates stay the same, the model estimated that the US could see more than 850,000 cases, 170,000 hospitalizations, and 2,500 deaths over the next 25 years. The results appear in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The Best Time to Eat Breakfast? It’s Not Right When You Wake Up
Nutrition experts generally agree that you shouldn’t be scarfing down food as soon as you wake up—wait a couple of hours, at least, until mid-morning.
How to have friends past age 30
If you’re out of your 20s like me, you probably have a dwindling group of friends. Does that have to be inevitable though?
Anyway, in my experience, the best shared activity to base a friend group around is food. There are several reasons for this.