What I’ve been reading (and watching) this week ending 14 September 2025
How to Foster Talent Management Champions
Hashed sorting is typically faster than hash tables
“even though sorting makes multiple passes through memory, each pass uses bandwidth far more efficiently than a hash table’s single pass.”
A Data-Driven Approach to Advancing Meritocracy
“…simply having organizational processes in place to hire, evaluate, and promote the best does not automatically guarantee fairness.”
“…emphasizing meritocracy — whether implicitly or explicitly — as the foundation of hiring, promotion, and reward practices may backfire on women, racial minorities, immigrants, and other historically disadvantaged groups. When individuals believe their organization is meritocratic, they may be less likely to recognize and correct for biases in their decision-making.”
“…there is no universal agreement on what merit actually is.”
Why Farmers Can’t Legally Replant Their Own Seeds
“…we found that team flow enhances global interbrain integrated information (II) and neural synchrony. We conclude that the NCs [neural correlates] of team flow induce a distinct brain state. Our results suggest a neurocognitive mechanism to create this unique experience.”
From Googlebot to GPTBot: who’s crawling your site in 2025
“…around 30% of global web traffic today, according to Cloudflare Radar data, comes from bots, and even exceeds human Internet traffic in some locations.”
“Making a point …might not be the same as making an impact.”
Web Vitals | Articles | web.dev
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): measures loading performance. To provide a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): measures interactivity. To provide a good user experience, pages should have a INP of 200 milliseconds or less.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures visual stability. To provide a good user experience, pages should maintain a CLS of 0.1. or less.
“Analyzing interview transcripts reveals that AI-led interviews elicit more hiring-relevant information from applicants compared to human-led interviews.”
iPhones 17 and the Sugar Water Trap — Stratechery by Ben Thompson
“Apple, to be fair, isn’t selling the same sugar water year-after-year in a zero sum war with other sugar water companies. Their sugar water is getting better, and I think this year’s seasonal concoction is particularly tasty. What is inescapable, however, is that while the company does still make new products — I definitely plan on getting new AirPod Pro 3s! — the company has, in the pursuit of easy profits, constrained the space in which it innovates.”
Where are all the trillion dollar biotechs? — lada nuzhna
“Even after adjusting for inflation, the number of new drugs approved per $1 billion of R&D spending has halved approximately every nine years since 1950. Deloitte’s forecast R&D IRR for the top 20 pharmas fell below the industry’s cost of capital (~7–8%) between 2019 and 2022. In other words, while the industry remained profitable overall, the incremental economics of R&D investment were value-eroding rather than value-creating. So, while other industries have a reason to treat the current market downturn as transient, the business of developing medicine has a more fundamental problem to deal with — it is quite literally shrinking out of existence.”
Politically extreme individuals exhibit similar neural processing despite ideological differences.
“Leveraging a combination of neurophysiological methods, we show that regardless of which side of the political aisle an individual is on, those with more extreme views show heightened neural activity to politically charged content in brain regions implicated in affective processing — including the amygdala, periaqueductal gray, and posterior superior temporal sulcus.”
Why language models hallucinate | OpenAI
“Hallucinations persist partly because current evaluation methods set the wrong incentives. While evaluations themselves do not directly cause hallucinations, most evaluations measure model performance in a way that encourages guessing rather than honesty about uncertainty.”
Full range leadership model — Wikipedia
“The full range of leadership model (FRLM) is a general leadership theory focusing on the behavior of leaders towards the workforce in different work situations. The FRLM relates transactional and transformational leadership styles with laissez-faire leadership style.”
