Cluster B, Redemptive Business Plans, and how to bless with your words
TL;DR
Cluster B, hierarchies of pain, and tattoos
Sand batteries, Raspberry Pi vs Cray, and AI governance in the boardroom
Praise, prayer and faith
Speaking verbal blessings to people
Redemptive business plans
And yes, Israel and Iran
HUMAN
Cluster B is a thing - oh boy is it a thing
has published 2 posts in her about Cluster B personality disorders, and more posts are apparently coming. My gosh, is this lady ever making me think. She's an experienced psychotherapist, who's taken a career break to raise her 3 kids, but who (I suspect) might now be inadvertently creating a whole new career for herself on Substack. Cluster B, I've discovered, consists of 4 personaility disorders: Narcissstic, Histrionic, Borderline, and Anti-Social. The first 3 are more common in females, the last one in males. And I learned another new term in those articles: hierarchy of pain. Some Cluster B people self-harm to allow physical pain to distract them from emotional pain. Hannah also suggests that the rise of tattooing might be a case in point.
TECHNOLOGY
Finland Just Fired Up the World's Largest Sand Battery
It that stores renewable energy as heat in 1,000 tons of sand, and the economics actually work. Sand batteries can store energy for months without significant loss. Sounds promising, but if it takes off, keep an eye on thet sand levels at your local beach😀 LINK
The Raspberry Pi 5 Outperforms a 1990s Cray Supercomputer
The "Cray" was spoken about almost reverentially back in the 90's, if you can remember that far. That was then, this is now. The Raspberry Pi 5 apparently outperforms it now, that's how much Moore-ification we've had in just 35 years. LINK
Two Horses Talking About How Cars Haven’t Replaced Them
Daniel Miessler used an AI tool to create the comic😀 LINK
Managing Hybrid Human-AI Relations in the Workplace
That’s the title of a webinar I sat in on this week, put on by James Bonar and John Barker at the Bonar Institute for Purposeful Leadership. This was juicy. I know James, and know of John. Among the tidbits I picked up:
Moderna has over 1000 AI agents all interacting.
They are one of more prominent AI users. I would love to be a bug on the wall in THAT firm, to see how and what they're doing with it ... partly because of the next tidbit:
If your workplace culture turns toxic …
Your AI systems will amplify that toxicity, because the LLMs will be partly based on your employees' (toxic) decisions
If you use AI to debug trade-secret code using publicly-available LLM ...
You just helped train that same LLM, and your code ain't private anymore, bucko!
Adoption of AI is "tearing companies apart"
Them's strong words. Apparently it's causing silos between departments, employees deliberately uploading malicious prompts, employees paying out of pocket for their own AI tools (because they hate the company-sponsored tools), etc. Sheesh!
72% of surveyed companies are investing $1M+/yr in genAI, but only 1/3 of C-suiters reported significant ROI. Meanwhile, 2/3 it had led to division between teams, while almost half (42%) reported that adopting AI "is tearing their company apart." Still, the survey also found that a majority of employees (at least 9 out of 10) were optimistic about their company's approach to generative AI — and they're even paying for it on their own. More than one-third of employees (35%) said they pay out-of-pocket for AI tools. The majority of employees surveyed (81%) and almost all of the C-suite (97%) said if they were looking for a new position, finding a company that uses generative AI is important. 41% of Gen Z employees are actively sabotaging their company’s AI strategy. LINK and LINK
The Biggest Companies Across America Are Cutting Their Workforces ...
Not just Amazon. There’s a growing belief that having too many employees will slow a company down—and that anyone still on the payroll could be working harder. LINK
But at the same time, this big multinational regrets adopting AI so fast ...
They're trying to hire back. (Good luck with that - can't see people beating a path to the door of a company that switches horses like that.) LINK
IDEAS & DISCOVERIES
Perplexity can now create small apps for you
says that Perplexity Labs (for paid Perplexity users) will allow you to create mini-apps without IDE, Git or code. Just prompts, directly in the prompt line, just by enabling the Labs switch. The examples he provides seem rather tame - quizzes, slide decks, carousels, etc, but that might just be what he's tinkered with so far. Would be interesting to devise a really simple app with Bolt or Cursor, then try the same prompt in Perplexity, for comparison's sake.
The power of verbally blessing those around you
I take part in two weekly Christian men's groups. In one of them this week, a chap explained his family's practice every Friday evening mealtime: He, his wife, and his two kids, take turns blessing each other, verbally, face-to-face. And then he suggested that this is common practice in observant Jewish households at the start of every Sabbath (observant Jews, please correct me if I'm wrong), and that this might be a big reason why Jews historically have excelled in so many fields of endeavour.
This blew my mind. I'm going to start testing this in practice.
Use AI to help you think more clearly
publishes . He's really making me think, which, he argues, is precisely what we should be using AI for, not as a productivity booster.And a good example of someone using AI to think more clearly is:
published his AI research stack
He says it's: NotebookLM, Deep Research, Grok, Gemini, o3-Pro, and OpenAI. However, he's published a YouTube video:
… and then a full Substack post describing exactly how he uses each one. Makes my head spin. But what I like about this is that his motive is only partly to save time; it's primarily to help him think more deeply.
The Power of Praise
In the other Christian men's group I participate in, we've been working through a book titled Destined For The Throne, by Paul E. Billheimer. (I don't know why I've never heard of this book before - it was first published 50 years ago, and it has been mind-blowing.) The next-to-last chapter says 3 significant things:
1. The engine of successful intercessory prayer is Unshakable Faith. And the spark plug of Unshakable Faith … is Praise. Point being, if you struggle to pray because it seems like a waste of time ... just praise Him. Aloud. I'll back this up, it works. If you're down in the dumps, playing some uplifting worship music and singing along gets you out of the dumps real fast.
2. The Enemy of Your Soul fears praise even more than he fears intercessory prayer. He can't stand it, because God "inhabits" praise, and wherever God is, he doesn't wanna be.
3. A lot of therapy would be rendered unnecessary by a habit of Praise. Hoo boy, think this one might be controversial? I can see a lot of mental health providers getting agitated over this one.
That's the précis of the chapter, but it's worth an entire essay - might do that next week, rather than my usual curated collection.
The #1 Database of Successful Founders
Here's a guy who's compiled a database of people who have successfully launched a stable of products, along with the MRR each product is earning, a link to each, and a short bio. The idea here is, when you're looking for inspiration, it's useful to see what other people have successfully pulled off. Access isn't free, but I think I only paid US$37. LINK
WHAT I’M DOING
The Redemptive Business Planning workshop I mentioned last week was sumthin'. Brainchild of Philip Yan at Tyndale University. As suspected, it had a definite Biblical slant to it. The nut behind it is: We all have new ideas every day, whether we think of ourselves as entrepreneurial or not. ("Gee, wouldn't it be cool if ...") The RBP gave me a framework for assessing the WHY behind any new idea, but also the WHO (Philip argues WHO should come first, then WHY - so he takes issue with Simon Sinek), the WHAT, the HOW, etc. If you can't complete the framework for your new idea, then it's probably half-baked still, and you should park it until you can. The day ended with us all pitching an idea to the group. I found myself pitching an idea for a new newsletter (which, judging from the response I got, might have legs).
The RBP was partially put on by Colt Charlebois, whom I profiled back in April, and who's just become a client/partner. Colt's got a great gift of the gab, and has coached numerous clients to greater heights. I'm helping him promote a one-night event he's putting on in Nashville in July.
Flow, the Vivaldi browser, career lies, and growing up as an anglo-Quebecer
Sheesh, Friday again, and there are still a bunch of thoughts banging around in my head I haven't time to fully develop. That's the blessing and curse of curiosity: So many rabbit holes, so little time.
FROM THE SOURCE / VIEW FROM THE LAPTOP, combined
It's pretty hard to resist the allure of the news when something long-talked about (e.g. American B-2's bombing the Fordow nuclear site in Iran).
I have to admit, I was surprised it happened. Not because I didn't want it to happen, but because recent Washington politico-bureaucratic behaviour didn't suggest to me they had the collective balls to do it.
So much for my predictive abilities.
It all feels very surreal, very eerie ... like we are staring down from the stands at events on the pitch that were ... maybe not quite forecast in the Bible, but ... right around those forecast events.
Just after the bombing on Fordow, my wife just texted me "Hell! Has Trump taken us all to war?"
Maybe.
Although I'm not sure Trump alone bears that much responsibility for whatever war we might be in.
The words that came straight to mind, however, were Moshiach's words:
Watch out that no one deceives you ... You will hear of wars and rumours of wars ... There will be famines and pestilences in many places ... These are but birth pangs ... The end is still to come ...
And part of me goes ... Oh GREAT. The end is still to come. Thanks Y'Shua, I feel much better now. Got any more good news? (Pun very definitely intended.)
And then another part of me goes ... Hey, chill. None of this is any surprise to HIM. He is still in charge. Yes, it might be nicer if all this yucky stuff didn't happen, but Hashem knows what He is doing. Trust Him.