Reading List
The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.
[Sponsor] WorkOS: Agents Need Context. Ship the Integrations That Give It to Them.
The context that actually matters isn’t in your database. It’s in the tools your users live in every day. Multi-stage agents stall the moment they hit a step they can’t see. And every missing integration is a different OAuth flow, a different token lifecycle, weeks of plumbing before the agent reads a single record.
WorkOS Pipes connects your agent to the tools your users live in. Pre-built connectors for GitHub, Slack, Salesforce, Google Drive, and more. Pipes handles OAuth, token refresh, and credential storage. You call the real provider API with a fresh token, every time. Your agent pulls context at every step, for as long as the task runs.
Jury Rejects Elon Musk’s Claim Against Sam Altman in Unanimous Verdict
Cade Metz and Mike Isaac, reporting for The New York Times (gift link):
A nine-person jury found that Elon Musk did not bring his lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman until after the expiration of the three-year statute of limitations.
Mr. Musk filed his suit against the $730 billion artificial intelligence start-up in the summer of 2024, but the jury found that he was aware of the behavior discussed in his complaint against OpenAI as far back as 2021.
This update quoting Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’s “poetic” jury instructions is just lovely:
“A jury reflects the attitudes and mores of the community from which it is drawn,” she said, paraphrasing another judge. “It lives only for the day and does justice according to its limits. The group of jurors who are drawn to hear a case make a decision and then melt away. It is not present the next day to be criticized. It is the one governmental agency that has no ambition. It is as human as the people who make it up.”
‘John Appleseed’
Here’s a great take from last month re: the Cook/Ternus transition, from Om Malik:
When he took over from Steve Jobs in August 2011, Apple’s market capitalization was around $350 billion. As of this morning, it sits near $4 trillion. That is more than a 1,000 percent increase. Revenue went from $108 billion in fiscal 2011 to over $416 billion in fiscal 2025, almost four times bigger. Apple under Cook became the most valuable company in human history, multiple times over. It built Services into a $100-billion-a-year business.
Sure, Cook inherited the greatest product portfolio and the greatest brand in modern business. How many times have we seen people screw it up? He ran it with operational ruthlessness. He is no product visionary, and neither is Ternus. They are not Steve. Tim has run Apple for fifteen years, through a pandemic, two trade wars, a supply chain reordering, and the slow grinding shift from hardware-only to hardware-plus-services-plus-silicon. Most importantly, he didn’t mess it up.
Services, as a whole, is now as big a business for Apple as the entirety of the company was when Cook took the helm. And “not screwing it up” is an enormous accomplishment. Success is always precarious. Keeping a good thing going is inordinately difficult. It only looks easy compared to getting the good thing off the ground in the first place.
Define ‘Boom’ Please
While I’m linking to pieces on Apple’s CEO transition, here’s an annoying tidbit from Tripp Mickle and Karl Russell’s piece for The New York Times, under the headline “Tim Cook Was Very, Very Good at Making Money” (gift link):
Even though it has largely missed out on the artificial intelligence boom now lifting the sales of its technology peers, the company’s profits and stock value continue to grow.
Which peers have had their “sales lifted” by AI? There’s Nvidia (now the most valuable company in the world). But Apple doesn’t compete directly with Nvidia. What makes Apple different from its peer companies isn’t that the others are profiting from AI while Apple is not, but rather that Apple, seemingly alone, is not funnelling its free cash flow to Nvidia to build out massive AI datacenters.
Apple might wind up missing out on something huge as a result of its decision to stay out of this race. But it’s nonsense to say they’ve already missed out on a boom. To date it’s a money pit.
Ted Turner’s Small Apartment Above the Former CNN Center
Simultaneously audacious and humble, a combination that epitomizes Ted Turner’s entire life. (Shades, too, of Walt Disney’s apartment above the fire department at Disneyland.)