The Lede Today is blockchain and web3 heavy, again. Talking with startups and younger companies, you can imagine that this comes up a lot. Everything is “spin up a coin” or “make NFTs” and so that’s on my weekly topic list all the time. The conclusion I’m coming to is pretty simple: the blockchain ledger is game changing for specific use cases. NFTs aren’t the long term win. I’m happy to be wrong, given how many people I know are in the NFT world these days, but as you’ll see in the links, I’m uneasy at best about the surge in NFTs....

Going to divide today’s list up into sections, just to shake things up. Lots going on lately. Reads 11am Baseball On One of 12 Streaming Services: Will be interesting to see how this evolves going forward. On one hand, this doesn’t seem conceptually more complicated than trying to find your favorite team on a cable package. Is it on ESPN or your local RSN or on your local broadcast channel?...

This week’s list is a little more business heavy. I’ve been traveling on vacation with my family, and just got back this weekend. Very, very little code written this past week as a result. The vacation was lovely - a welcome bookend for my sabbatical/family time. I’m looking forward to getting started with some consulting clients this week. Reach out if you think I can help you or your company - sujal@ this domain (or sujal....

I’ve been reading more books during this break. This week’s main read is one of those books, recommended by a former colleague at Disney. The rest is the usual mix of randomness. Competing in the Age of AI: I finally read this book after a colleague at Disney recommended it to me. This person had built an impressive ML team that did some groundbreaking and unique work analyzing Disney content to generate additional metadata for personalization, improve QC of Disney+ artwork, and a number of other things (their patent collection is pretty impressive)....

Hitting a stride on my (very simple, likely uninteresting to anyone but me) side project, so starting to think about deployment and testing. Inspires a few links below. The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton: A wide ranging conversation with Eben Upton, the CEO of Raspberry Pi Ltd., the company that makes everyone’s favorite single-board computer, the Raspberry Pi. I didn’t know the history of the Foundation and the project, so this was a fun conversation to listen to....