Raise your hand if you’ve ever been in a planning meeting, assigning estimates to tickets, and either found yourself multitasking, falling asleep, texting a friend, or otherwise being entirely unengaged in the activity.  If so, you’re not alone. There’s this thing about engineering estimates that is sometimes overlooked: they’re not useful in the way that people often think they are. Instead, estimates are often misused; it’s time for R&D leaders to consider a new framework that makes it so there’s one fewer meeting (or at least a shorter meeting) for you to zone out of.

Zenful Estimates: Ditching Task Estimates to Build a Faster Team

Not only does Musk owe a lot of money to his creditors, but he’s knee-deep in litigation that one might argue would never have been necessary had he abided by existing legal agreements, contracts, and labor law. Yes, it can save money in the short-term to stiff your landlord and cloud provider, or to forego state law-mandated severance payments. But it creates a lot of billable hours for lawyers and expensive potential settlements, along with the threat of regulatory enforcement. (As for reputational damage, Musk doesn’t seem to care.)

We Got a Judge to Unseal a List of X's Shareholders

The person whose public reputation was most damaged by his own Twitter activity was probably Elon Musk, which is why it makes sense that the product roadmap since he took over has mostly revolved around reducing the attack surface for rich and famous users like himself:

What's new in Dimension Apple? - by Max Read - Read Max

I don’t think it’s due to stiff competition, shifting markets, or even tight deadlines—those have always existed. But one significant change has occurred in my daily work routine: I’ve been forced to start working in sprints (usually 1-2 weeks) instead of spending larger chunks of time on larger projects. This shift has had some unfortunate consequences.

Why Scrum is Stressing You Out - by Adam Ard

That's the New York Times' in-house technology rube, Kevin Roose, for my money the most embarrassing journalist presently working in the English language, recapping a public demonstration of the OpenAI company's new talking version of its famous ChatGPT large language model. If anybody else with a byline at a major newspaper fits more boobery and dogshit critical reasoning into a pair of paragraphs before midnight on New Year's Eve, I will eat a goddamn iPhone live on Twitch. Or pull my head off and punt it into a swamp.

If Kevin Roose Was ChatGPT With A Spray-On Beard, Could Anyone Tell? | Defector

And with that, let’s talk Live Nation/Ticketmaster, the conglomerate that seems to have massively driven up ticket prices for concerts, yet argues it makes very little money doing so. I’m not saying this corporation is anything like Crédit Mobilier. But I do have questions about the firms’s financial reporting.

Is Ticketmaster Telling the Truth About Its Finances?

“Some suppliers will have a part in an aircraft they certified in like 1990 and they’re not going to touch it, because why would they? No one’s going to compete,” Mali said. “The aircraft is in service for 30 to 50 years, so they’re just bringing in money every year, making the same thing.”

Palmer Luckey tried to crush aeronautics startup Salient Motion. But Anduril backer a16z invested. | TechCrunch

Google’s search is not ‘best’, because it is operated by Google, a company run by McKinsey consultants and bloodless advertising executives whose sole focus is keeping shareholders happy by driving engagement. Emails in the DoJ’s case detailed Google executives pushing for more ‘query growth’, corporate-speak for forcing people to do more searches by making results less helpful. Google’s search product is worse than its been in years, because the company’s primary concern is increasing the metrics that improve its share price, which runs counter to helping people find things quickly and easily.

Search Party - Google, Hotels, Social Media, and Regulations • Buttondown

Well, have you ever used a piece of software at a company you work for that sucks? Was it sold by Microsoft, Salesforce, Google, Atlassian or another big SaaS company? Well, it was probably bought by somebody who doesn't use the software, and it'll cost far more to remove than your annoyance matters. The burdensome presence of software like Microsoft Teams or Salesforce Platform in your life is a result of these organizations using brand recognition to sell into your organization, and once they're in there, their sales teams exist to continually find ways to increase the revenue of each user. The people making the decisions about the software you use — usually C-level executives — are doing so based on a sales pitch tailored to them and their preconceptions of what your job is rather than any firm experience, and thus they will sign year(s) long contracts based on a great sales pitch and the financials that "make sense."

The Other Bubble

Growing up in the Hunter Valley, a region of Australia renowned for its fine wine production, Mitchel Fowler never realized he might one day think of an idea that could revolutionize the wine industry. Now, after a long career in finance, he has returned to that heritage to launch a platform to solve the wine industry’s long-running procurement cycle and inventory management problems. 

This founder grew up in wine country — now he's built a platform for wine makers | TechCrunch