W49: Weekend

Is it that part of the year where your focus has already shifted from the end of the present calendar to the beginning of the next? Our minds have definitely started wandering towards the future. Here are a few new things to think about.

Olivia Wilde opened up about the importance of risk-taking, the value of continually challenging yourself, and overcoming the implicit biases of the Hollywood ecosystem as a multi-hyphenate woman: acting, producing, and directing. Easily one of our favorite interviews of the year, encapsulating inspirational thoughts about continually redefining your relationship with your work and goals while creating more opportunity for others.

"You’ve got to have ruthless prioritization and a bias towards action," urges Jennifer Van Buskirk as she speaks about the value of looking at others to define your own path forward in business. Specifically, she advocates for writing a thorough business plan for your competition as a strategic exercise to uncover opportunities and define new directions. It's not an entirely new approach - old SWOT templates come to mind - but it feels increasingly relevant in a world where shifts in business, brand, and consumer engagement are more substantial and more frequent.

Renewables continue to define the smart economic reality for Australia as a model for much of the rest of the world. The latest GenCost report shows the falling costs of solar and batteries as a powerful trend as the country seeks to replace col and gas generators. There's a lot to be said for the hard data supporting the decision, and as jobs scale up we hope to see a future that is defined more by the possibilities of change than by the false certainty of protectionism.

Grok - the AI chatbot - is now available to everyone on X (Twitter), broadening access to yet another LLM-enabled tool. As with other products from competitors there are limits on how far and how fast Grok will work for free. We suspect we'll see a lot more about how Grok compared against other products, especially as a general-purpose tool outside of the X ecosystem.

California is doubling-down on more housing - kind of. With updated regulations around the creation of Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs), private homeowners can create up to eight additional structures on their property. There's a tremendous amount of hope that this creates additional affordable housing; we're concerned it means more privately-owned, rentable dwellings that won't actually address root issues of housing availability and security. Time will tell.

Crypto and Cyber communities are beginning to eat their own as a new campaign is unveiled that specifically targets those in the Web3 space. The effort - "Meeten" - uses a variety of methods under the guide of meeting software to steal Telegram, banking, Keychain, and other credentials. In an industry where early adoption is seen as a beatitude, Meeten demonstrates the value of thoroughly vetting new technology when social engineering and technological subversion is so simple.