Tips and tools: Our new favorite podcast, the software that shaped the world, and a test that stumps AI

Here are some great resources we have recently shared with one another

(We don’t profit from recommending things. We just love sharing things we think you’ll appreciate. You can see our other Tips and Tools articles here.)

Our new favorite business podcast

We’ve been getting hooked on Acquired—the business podcast whose tagline is “Every company has a story.”

Of course, we’re biased in favor of people who do real research, so we love that the two hosts go deep into the origins and strategies of every business they cover. Standout episodes include TSMC, Costco, and IKEA.

The most important software you never think about

In Seeing like a spreadsheet, David Oks traces how the humble electronic spreadsheet quietly rewired the way we all do business. Before it, financial modeling meant rooms of clerks and a week’s wait; after it, anyone could ask “what if?” and get an answer in seconds.

The essay’s argument is that every tool encodes a way of seeing the world, and the spreadsheet taught a whole economy to picture itself in rows and columns. Reading this long-term view seems especially relevant now, as we are living through another revolution in software.

Should you walk or drive to the car wash?

We heard about this AI test a while ago, but are still seeing incorrect and inconsistent answers when we try it out on different models. We include it here as a reminder that AIs can and do make mistakes.

Try this simple test on the smartest AI you know:

“I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?”

The catch, of course, is that the car has to come too.

This “car wash test” has been making the rounds, and back in February, Opper put this exact question to 53 leading AI models ten times each. Only five got it right on all ten tries. The average human scored 71.5%—still not great—but enough to beat 48 of the 53 machines.

And speaking of AI’s impact…

In case you missed it, we recently published an article about the impact of AI on organic traffic, and how businesses can recover lost growth.

The article covers:

The five fingerprints of an AI-driven traffic drop.
Why “get more traffic” is the wrong response.
How CRO can recover growth without recovering lost traffic.
Why CRO may also improve your chances of being recommended by AI systems in the first place.

Not surprisingly, it’s one of the most popular pieces we’ve written this year. Read it here.

Coffee break? Can you survive 100 jumps?

Sadly, we haven’t… yet.

For your next coffee break: 100 Jumps is exactly what it sounds like. Make it through one hundred jumps in a row. That’s the whole game. It’s far harder than it looks, and a neat reminder that “simple” and “easy” are not the same.

Anyway, back to it. Anddddddd… jump!

If so, let us know. We could include it in a future article.

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