Arjen Wiersma

My reading list is a bit shorter this week, mostly because I’ve fallen down a deep, deep 3D printing rabbit hole. (My desk is now covered in very handy 3d printed tools for the printer itself and one glorious OctoRocktopus).

Still, between prints, I managed to find some absolute gems. This week's theme seems to be the practical, sometimes harsh reality of AI adoption, mixed with some fascinating policy decisions in the open-source world.

Here’s what I’ve been reading.

The State of AI: Hype vs. Reality

It feels like we're in a bit of a reality-check moment with AI. The hype around all-powerful AI agents is clashing with the messy truth of actually getting them to work inside a real business.

• The Truth About AI Agents Only a Practitioner Can Tell You by Chris Tyson. This piece was a breath of fresh air. Tyson cuts through the marketing fluff to explain why most companies are nowhere near ready for the AI agent revolution everyone is promising. A must-read for anyone in a leadership position.

• Build and Host AI-Powered Apps with Claude – No Deployment Needed by Anthropic. This is a genuinely cool development. Anthropic is letting people build and host small AI apps directly on Claude, and the users pay for the API calls. It’s like being able to launch a web app without ever having to think about servers. A clever solution to the deployment problem for smaller projects.

• Apple Research Is Generating Images with a Forgotten AI Technique by Marcus Mendes. It turns out Apple is digging through AI's old record collection. This article looks at how their researchers are reviving a forgotten AI technique for generating images, suggesting there's still gold in those older methods.

• MCP Is Eating the World—-and It's Here to Stay by Stainless. A great opinion piece on the Model Context Protocol (MCP). The author argues that while MCP isn't some revolutionary breakthrough, its strength is its simplicity and timing. It just works, and that’s why it’s probably going to stick around for a long time.

Drawing Lines in the Sand: Policy & Open Source

This week saw some interesting lines being drawn in the world of open source. It’s fascinating to see major projects grapple with the legal and ethical questions around AI.

• Docs: Define Policy Forbidding Use of AI Code Generators by qemu. The QEMU project made a bold move, officially banning contributions from AI code generators. Their reasoning? The legal and licensing implications are still a complete mess, and they’re choosing to play it safe.

• Libxml2's “No Security Embargoes” Policy by Joe Brockmeier. In a similar spirit of radical transparency, this post outlines why the libxml2 project discloses security issues immediately, with no embargo period.

• Microsoft Dependency Has Risks by Miloslav Homer. A good reminder of the old wisdom: don't put all your eggs in one basket. This piece explores the risks that come from relying too heavily on a single company's ecosystem.

Miscellaneous Finds

And now for a few other interesting things that crossed my screen this week.

• Games Run Faster on SteamOS than Windows 11, Ars Testing Finds by Kyle Orland. The team at Ars Technica did some testing and found that Valve's free Linux-based SteamOS actually gets better frame rates on the Lenovo Legion Go than Windows 11 does. A fun win for the open-source world.

• Massive Biomolecular Shifts Occur in Our 40s and 60s by Rachel Tompa. Just when you thought aging was a steady, gradual decline, Stanford Medicine researchers found that our bodies go through huge biological shifts around age 40 and 60. A fascinating, if slightly unnerving, read.

• The Offline Club. Feeling overwhelmed by all this tech? I found the perfect antidote. This is a community that hosts events around the world designed to help people unplug, disconnect from their devices, and reconnect with each other. I'm definitely intrigued.