Industry News

Cassettes Are Making a Comeback, But Can Production Keep Up? “After music cassettes died in the late ’90s, National Audio kept busy with cassettes for instructional materials, spoken-word bibles and Library of Congress work until indie bands and labels came calling as early as 2006. ‘Suddenly, we were back in business,’ Stepp says.” I love that story. [billboard.com]

Things I Do Not Like Hearing. I appreciate a well-written personal grievances post. This one—about phrases the author...

I am seeing signs of another Google search ranking algorithm update just a few days after the February 4th Google search ranking update - both of these have not been confirmed by Google. This February 8th and 9th Google update may be even stronger than the previous update.

Old technologies that have stuck around are sharks, not dinosaurs. They solve problems so well that they have survived the rapid changes that occur constantly in the technology world. Don’t bet against these technologies, and replace them only if you have a very good reason. These tools won’t be flashy, and they won’t be exciting, but they will get the job done without a lot of sleepless nights.

—Justin Etheredge, 20 Things I’ve Learned in my 20 Years as a Software Engineer.

Lego reveals massively detailed Lord of the Rings Rivendell set. Take my money! [polygon.com]

The Window Trick of Las Vegas Hotels. “In order to make the buildings look smaller, less intimidating and messy, architects have come up with a ‘four or six windows in one’ solution. This means they grouped several windows (usually four or six) together and made them look like one window. This creates the visual effect of ‘shrinking’ the building, of making it more orderly and symmetrical.”...

Google's Danny Sullivan reiterated that when it comes to AI content, Google is fine with it, as long as the content is useful and written for people. If you are using AI to write spam, then that is against Google's guidelines. But Google also added a new section to the people-first content section on "who, how and why" with your content.

I love this post on the personal brand paradox by Debbie Millman:

But rather than manufacturing a personal brand, why not build a reputation? Why not develop our character? Imagine what we could learn from each other if we felt worthy as we are instead of who we project ourselves to be. Imagine if we could design a way to share who we are without shame or hubris.

Tracy Durnell builds on this:

I’m more interested in following people as people — while I might have been drawn...

Yesterday I was at the Microsoft office with dozens of other media folks (lots of famous YouTubers also) for Microsoft to showcase its next evolution of Bing, the co-pilot for the web powered by the upgraded ChatGPT.

My first online purchase ever happened on September 5, 1999. I was in college at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, I really wanted to read Lord of the Rings, and after doing the math I realized that buying the book from this online bookseller in America called Amazon.com would be cheaper than buying it from a local bookstore—even when I took international shipping costs into account.

The book arrived a few weeks later, just in time for the summer holidays to start. I did...

Well, we knew it was coming and here it is, Bard - Google's answer to ChatGPT. Google is now having its trusted testers test out Bard and will soon roll it out more widely to users in Google Search and others products in the coming weeks.

There’s a sentiment I started to see in the agile development world that advocates for deleting old/stale items off a backlog completely. A good recent example is Jason Knight’s latest newsletter:

The backlog becomes a dumping ground for every single customer support query. Every account manager and every salesperson has something in there from conversations with customers and prospects. […]

It’s tempting to see “length of time in backlog” as some kind of vector for...