Shira Ovide

From an X post by Aakash Gupta that reads, in part: "The reason Outlook search has been broken for years is the same reason it will stay broken: Microsoft sells to IT procurement, not to the person trying to find last Tuesday’s email....The switching cost is so high that Microsoft could ship Outlook with no search at all and most companies would renew anyway. Every CEO of an enterprise software company knows this. The product doesn’t need to be good. It needs to be locked in."

"The product doesn’t need to be good. It needs to be locked in."

This is 1,000% the lesson of technology for years, and it's why even newfangled AI companies hire a lot of sales people and why Windows won for years.

So there is both an AI-related "Saas-pocalypse" and a "RAMmageddon"?

Dear Outlook,

I never ever want to attach the file with OneDrive. Thanks. Bye.

Shira

It was true eventually!!!

Anthropic lost the Pentagon but won over America A Pentagon ban of Anthropic’s technology shone a spotlight on the company, earning public goodwill and capping a stellar few months for its Claude chatbot.

Tried to capture how Anthropic became the vibe king of A.I. in the past 3 months.

*Claude became so good at coding that some programmers feel irrelevant.

*Anthropic can move the stock market on vague product news

*Won popular support & buzz in the Pentagon feud. wapo.st/4rfU71h

"It felt like interacting with a synthetic bridge troll haranguing me until I said the magic combination of words."

Why Is Alexa+ So Bad? I stuck Amazon’s Echo Show 15 and its Alexa+ AI assistant in my kitchen for a month. Things have not gone well.

See also: www.wired.com/story/why-is...

The Smart Home Never Quite Worked. Now It’s Getting an A.I. Reboot.

How many years do we have to hear repeated failed promises of "THIS MAKES A SMART HOME EASY" before we give up? www.nytimes.com/2026/03/05/t...

I hesitate to mock this because a lot of AI scams are extremely believable and will only get better but ...yeah, this one is not.

I had forgotten this! Somehow.

Maybe it is! Maybe this is from the same guy who bought Jay-Z's streaming business for reasons.

Jack Dorsey’s Block Slashes Nearly Half Its Staff in AI Bet Jack Dorsey’s Block is cutting 4,000 employees, reducing its workforce by nearly half, in a move the financial technology firm is describing as a bet on artificial intelligence changing the future of ...

Apparently a good way to get the stock price to go up if your stock price has fallen by 75% in 5 years is to slash the workforce nearly in half and say it's because AI is changing everything.

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

How A.I.-Generated Videos Are Distorting Your Child’s YouTube Feed

It's fun that every few years we discover that YouTube recommends wild garbage to young kids.

See also: The 2017/2018 scandal over awful kids videos like a knockoff Peppa Pig being tortured at the dentist. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/u...

A Blow to the Phone-Free Classroom

I admire the ingenuity of children figuring out how to bust open those locked phone pouches. I think? www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/s...

Yup, I hear you! The cheating finding from Pew was based on students' beliefs about their peers. Perception is not reality, but it's also not meaningless.

Police love Google’s surveillance data. Here’s how to protect yourself. Novel ways of using Google’s search and location data are helping police. But privacy advocates say it’s violating Americans’ constitutional rights.

When I wrote about this topic in 2023, even Google said broad law enforcement search term and location warrants “pose particular privacy risks." www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

What do AI chatbots really mean for students and cheating? Stanford education scholars Victor Lee and Denise Pope discuss ongoing research into why and how often students cheat.

ed.stanford.edu/news/what-do...

Great question! Yes, there was a Stanford study 2-3 years ago that doubted cheating would increase with generative AI, because technology has been used to cheat for a long time.

Sal Khan, founder of the education technology nonprofit Khan Academy, said schools should assume that students are using AI to cheat on schoolwork done out of class. He suggested that teachers should have students do writing assessments in class, to prevent AI use, or quiz students on assignments done at home to prove that they’ve learned essential material. But Guilherme Lichand, a professor of education at Stanford University, said cheating is not AI’s novel or most serious harm. In a recent research experiment with middle school students, Lichand and his collaborators found that those who initially had access to AI assistance on a creative assignment, and then had it taken away, performed far worse than their peers who didn’t have access to AI on a subsequent word-association task. Lichand said the research, which hasn’t yet been published, suggests that young people who grow dependent on AI may lose faith in their abilities without it. “These kids started believing less in themselves,” he said. A recent Brookings Institution report found similar harm from students’ dependence on AI.

Findings from Pew's survey of U.S. teens:

*Half use AI chatbots for schoolwork help
*59% believe their peers are cheating with AI
*Teens are less pessimistic about AI than adults

Most experts I spoke to believe AI makes students dependent. It's a "crutch," one said.
wapo.st/4s8sWWT

It is very very hard to know the prevalence of these "reverse" search keyword warrants.

However you feel about this particular investigation, it's a reminder that a handful of giant tech and telecom companies are the gatekeepers of our constitutional rights.

Software, Payments Shares Tumble After Citrini Post on AI Risks Delivery, payments, and software stocks slid sharply Monday after Citrini Research published a report laying out the potential risks that artificial intelligence could pose to various segments of the ...

To note the contradictory signals from stock investors:

*The AI boom is unsustainable, we must sell when Big Tech says it's spending zillions on AI investments.

*The AI boom is going to eat all jobs, friends and industry so sell any stocks in AI's kill zone. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Update from Andy Newman

The smartest person in New York City:

"As the bus approached Green-Wood Cemetery, Mr. Ayala slowed for traffic in the roadway: a man on cross-country skis."

www.nytimes.com/live/2026/02...

AI is a big deal to the economy! If this boom goes bust it will hurt!

But let's slow our roll about blaring AI IS THE BIGGEST THING EVER.

Two lessons here:

*Data is subject to revision and interpretation. Everyone I talked to calculated the GDP impact from AI in different ways.

*We're going to have infinite fights about numbers show AI is/isn't hitting jobs or economic growth.

That said, to put the macroeconomic consequences into perspective, the rise in AI-related investment is not particularly large by historical standards (Graph 4.A). For example, at around 1% of US GDP, it is similar in size to the US shale boom of the mid-2010s and half as large as the rise in IT investment during the dot-com boom of the 1990s. The commercial property and mining investment booms experienced in Japan and Australia during the 1980s and 2010s, respectively, were over five times as large relative to GDP. A collapse of AI investment could nonetheless weigh on GDP growth. The end of previous investment booms was associated with a slowdown in GDP growth of more than 1 pp on average (Graph 4.B). Notably, the largest contraction was after the US dot-com boom, even though the boom was small relative to GDP. Moreover, there is little evidence of investment booms translating into a sustained increase in GDP growth over the medium term, even if, like the US dot-com boom, they are driven by technological advances

You know those comparisons between the current AI building boom and historically epic build-outs like the interstate highway system?

The central bank for central banks said eh, this is about half the relative spending of the dotcom boom: www.bis.org/publ/bisbull...

Prominent economists, including from Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, calculate that the AI buildup was directly responsible not for 92 percent or 39 percent of gains to the U.S. economy in 2025, but as little as zero. “It was a very intuitive story,” said Joseph Briggs, who jointly leads global economics investment research at Goldman Sachs. “That maybe prevented or limited the need to actually dig deeper into what was happening.” Briggs and his Goldman Sachs colleagues recently said that investment spending on AI made “basically zero” difference in U.S. economic growth last year. It’s clear that the huge spending on AI is adding to the U.S. economy, but the available economic data doesn’t neatly capture its effects. The debating economists and the slippery data suggest that if the technology does start to reshape the economy, it may be challenging to detect and clearly measure.

It became conventional wisdom that the massive AI build-out was propping up the U.S. economy last year.

Nothing is that simple.

Some prominent economists are saying AI investment had "basically zero" impact to economic growth in 2025.

wapo.st/4kT3oLl

Ahead of the storm, a coyote took shelter at a Manhattan ice rink.

How many coyotes are there in Manhattan??? www.nytimes.com/live/2026/02...

Live Updates: Winter Storm Is Set to Snarl Monday Commute in Northeast

A coyote that is apparently NOT one of the pair who live in Central Park tried to curl up by a space heater at the Brookfield ice rink and got darted.

www.nytimes.com/live/2026/02...

So excited that the amazing @shiraovide.bsky.social will join me at NYU for the the US launch of Evan Selinger's and my new book: Move Slow and Upgrade! Free tickets for the March 4th event here: www.eventbrite.com/e/funtime-bo...

Behind the Music, No Skips We’re Spotify Wrapped now.

I typed too soon! nymag.substack.com/p/behind-the...