Is Big Tech Lame? Unhinged Rants and More w/ Carly Taylor
Joe's Nerdy Rants #63 - Weekend reads, podcasts, and other stuff
I’m not in an article writing mood this week, as I’m slammed with a LOT of Nerd Herd Education projects, creating a workshop over the weekend, book writing (a week or 2 behind - sorry!), and much more. Lots in the pipeline. Will have more to say soon.
For now, I’ll just let you read Carly Taylor’s great article on why Big Tech is so 2015. This is the basis of our video chat above. There’s a ton of nuggets in our discussion, and you’ll learn definitely learn something new. Carly and I often joke that we are basically the same persona, so enjoy!
Also, this video is available as a podcast on every major platform. Listen to it on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Have a wonderful weekend,
Joe
Cool Weekend Reads & Listens
Tech, Data, and AI
DeepSeek FAQ – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
Is engineering strategy useful?
DeepSeek’s AI is bad for OpenAI and NVIDIA. But it might be great for you. | Vox
Alibaba releases AI model it says surpasses DeepSeek | Reuters
Agents by P&L (Part I) - by Vivek Ramaswami and Sabrina Wu
Biz & Culture
Working fast and slow | sean goedecke
How China’s DeepSeek Outsmarted America - WSJ
The Darkening Skies Over Europe’s Economy - WSJ
Product Market Fit Collapse: The AI Tipping Point
The Four Pillars of Venture Investing (Kyle Harrison)
Podcast
Freestyle Fridays - Unhinged Rants w/ Carly Taylor (Spotify)
Remco Broekmans - Data Modeling, Data Vault, and More (Spotify)
Freestyle Fridays - Bridge Skills w/ Eevamaija Virtanen (Spotify)
Chip Huyen - AI Engineering, Agents, and More (Spotify)
Jamie Davidson - Modern Data Modeling (Spotify)
Carly Taylor & Ghalib Suleiman - Dealing with Burnout (Spotify)
Sarah Levy - Modern Data Governance for Analytics (Spotify)
Carsten Bange - Trends in Data, Analytics, and AI (Spotify)
Freestyle Fridays - Old School BI vs AI BI (Spotify)
Dave Colls and David Tan - Effective Machine Learning/AI Teams (Spotify)
Freestyle Fridays - The Year Ahead (Why Data Modeling Matters, AI, Being Human, etc) (Spotify)
Simba Khadder - Feature Stores, Reinforcement Learning, and More (Spotify)
Way more episodes over at the Joe Reis Show, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It will soon be available on YouTube.
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Carly nailed it at the end though- the value in education is learning how to problem solve. I had a math prof who went on a great rant about that one time, the point of college is to make you smart and capable of learning. I’ve been doing this over 30 years, I learned k&r C and pascal in college, got out and had to learn C++ and Win32 programming, none of that has anything to do with what I do today
One and a half MBPs is the modern equivalent of the carrying capacity of a unladen swallow. So the follow-up question should be 14” or 16”?