Nikhil

+ all this goes.

Shopping using AI agents increases efficiency but removes friction that prevents overpayment, duplication, or fraud. Without constraints, agentic commerce accelerates mistakes. Read: When AI buys and sells for you: isreasoned.substack.com/p/what-happe...

Hesitation, risk of embarrassment, & even politeness add friction when we face another human while buying from them. Non verbal cues help with judgment to prevent fraud, & second thoughts (removing something from our cart) act as informal safeguards in commerce. When AI agents buy on our behalf +

context-aware decision-making, memory, and task evolution, allowing Meta to move faster in advertising and commerce without building agentic infrastructure from scratch. Ads will be automated... moving from "campaigns" to "adaptive systems"

More at isreasoned.substack.com

Reasoned by Nikhil Pahwa | Substack Reasoned is a newsletter on AI and how it's rewiring the Internet. Written by Nikhil Pahwa, the Founder of MediaNama. Helping people who build, create, market or own things understand how AI is changing their world. Usually 1–2 essays a week. Click to read Reasoned by Nikhil Pahwa, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.

I wrote recently about how Meta acquired Manus to close an execution-layer gap, not to win the AI model race: Meta already had distribution, data, and business context through Ads, WhatsApp, and Messenger, but lacked a production-ready orchestration layer. Manus supplies +

+ to passive consumers inside a system optimized for synthetic abundance. As a result, usefulness and engagement replace familiarity and connection as the primary interaction mode.

More on this at isreasoned.substack.com

+ content systems, long before generative AI arrived.

Unlike enabling human relationships (which have scale limitations), AI outputs are cheap, predictable, and infinitely scalable. Once platforms can generate content that reliably drives attention, humans shift from being creators and connectors+

AI changes the nature of social media feeds: AI bots inside social media feeds, like Grok in X, represents a strategic attempt to eliminate dependence on human to human participation for engagement. Social media platforms have already shifted from relationship-driven feeds to engagement-optimized +

The absence of friction maximized engagement velocity and content diffusion, while the resulting harm, was externalised to users and victims.

More about product decisions at isreasoned.substack.com

+ safeguards; they consciously defer them when engagement velocity is the primary optimization target. The Grok image-editing incident demonstrates how safety gaps at AI product launch are often intentional tradeoffs rather than oversights.

+ images directly into feeds without consent, safeguards, or throttling was not an accident but a product choice. Consent checks, output blocking, and throttling were absent because each would have slowed diffusion and reduced engagement signals for Grok. Platforms at scale do not “forget” +

You might have read about the controversy around Grok, X/Twitter’s AI bot, which allowed users to generate images of other users, including converting images of fully clothed women into swimsuit photos. This controversy was predictable and preventable.

X’s decision to let Grok edit and publish +

The Opportunity Trap of the ChatGPT App Store In the AI world, context is currency.

Apps in ChatGPT aren’t destinations... they’re just tools.

Developers don’t own the interface, the brand, the interaction, or even when their app gets called. It's just "jobs to be done". ChatGPT is the selector, the umpire, the ground, the conditions and potential future opposing team, all at the

Happy birthday @jeffjarvis.bsky.social

In all probability, Joplin is going to be a temp safe home for my notes before i figure out how to tame notion or anytype

Shifting out of Evernote feels like escaping from Evernote. Gone downhill so quickly.

Still can't find anything that works as smoothly though
* Great search
* Quick capture and web clipper
* Simple structure
* Easy merge, moving

Anyway, moving out of it in the coming week.
1/n

Finally it fits him!

"VC qanon" and the radicalization of the tech tycoons - Anil Dash A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

I can say that I resonate with @anildash.com's view on this, having been in a similar place at a similar time.

The bubbles are real, and we also aren't doing a good enough job of saying that the emperors have no clothes
https://www.anildash.com/2023/07/07/vc-qanon/

Something to be said abt a predictable user experience, where they're able to focus on their own interactions than what you're doing with the platform by changing terms & conditions every day. Well done Elon: you've made twitter into something that people are willing to move to a Zuck platform from.

I think the primary difference is the timeline. Threads, like Twitter, has a messed up timeline with accounts you haven't chosen to follow. I like this about mastodon and Bluesky: you choose who you want to read.

Oh wait, bluesky has threads too but it shows up in the form of replies to yourself

And if you have Twitter blue, you can edit posts and have a higher wordcount

So here's what I see re Threads:
1. Vs Twitter: from a UX perspective, unlike Twitter, threads actually encourages adding more to your thread.
2. Vs Bluesky: unlike Bluesky, threads actually has threads. And a substantially higher wordcount.

Kaios based jiophone (feature phone) in 2017: https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/mobile-tabs/jiophone-next-to-jiophone-1-a-look-at-all-the-devices-that-reliance-jio-launched-so-far-7599108/

The latest is the Jio Bharat phone, launched yesterday.

There's a low cost 5G phone in the works.

I spoke with Suprita Anupam of Inc42 for a story he did on the impact of the Reserve Bank of India’s recurring payments regulation & tokenisation of credit cards:

The points I made are here: https://nikhilpahwa.com/2023-digital-payments-mess-on-the-impact-of-recurring-payments-and-tokenisation

Yesterday!

On the importance of low cost handsets
https://nikhilpahwa.com/2023-tv-show-the-impact-of-low-cost-handsets-on-indias-internet

What is public and what is private on Bluesky? Bluesky is a public social network. Posts and likes are public. Blocks are public. Mutes are private, but mutelists are public lists. Your mutelist subscriptions are private. Invites and invite trees are private. Why are my posts, likes, and blocks public? The AT Protocol, which Bluesky is built on, is designed to support public conversations. To make public conversations portable across all sorts of platforms, your data is stored in data repositories that anyone can view. This means that regardless of which server you choose to join, you’ll still be able to see posts across the whole network, and if you choose to change servers, you can easily take all of your data with you. This is what causes the user experience of Bluesky, a federated protocol, to be similar to all the other social media apps you have used before.

hey new users, Bluesky is a *public* social network

please read about data privacy and more in our User FAQ to help you get oriented! even though we require an invite code to create an account, you should treat any posts here as if it's a public blog

https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/5-19-2023-user-faq

I'd like a feature here where my posts older than 30 days are invisible to everyone but me.

Funnily enough, the regulations for traceability in India, which WhatsApp has challenged in court because they would break e2e encryption, apparently don't apply to apple. They could have negotiated something with the Indian govt.

Where can I watch these online?