by Gary Mintchell | Sep 5, 2025 | Personal Development, Productivity, Workforce
I have had some good bosses and a bunch of bad ones. I tried to be a good boss, but I bet there are some people who worked “for” me that would dispute that. As a soccer referee assigner, I try hard to be fair while also putting officials on the games where they would be most likely to succeed.
From Seth Godin, who talked about being the type of person that a good boss will appreciate. Hopefully you have one of those. If not, I wish you luck in leaving and finding a good one.
He compiled a list of attributes. I would suggest not looking at this like a check list. It’s more of a description of a type of person.
Are you now, or can you develop into, this type of person? I try…
- Ask useful questions
- Show up before you’re expected
- Make big promises and keep them
- Identify errors and flaws and self-correct
- Default to optimism
- Do work worth doing
- Build a useful network worth outsourcing work to
- Show your work
- Develop good taste
- Generously invite feedback
- Make productive decisions
- Communicate with precision
- It’s easy to claim these skills, but not easy to commit to being quite good at them.
Seth concludes, “Most bosses don’t deserve this level of effort. I hope you can find one that does.”
by Gary Mintchell | Sep 4, 2025 | Commentary, Generative AI, News
I am on vacation, yet devoting hours to my avocation–assigning soccer referees to high school games. When disputes happen, I’m always in the middle. I’ve devoted several hours to that this week. Meanwhile, I still check the news.
I have two favorite news sources. One is called Axios; the other Morning Brew. But neither is infallible.
Today’s Morning Brew newsletter included this incendiary headline, Companies Are Benefitting from AI-drive Layoffs.
That is simply not true. Companies are laying off because they overhired during Covid and post-Covid times. Now they need to cut back. The CEOs, clueless though they may be, have called on managers to increase use of AI to do the work of the terminated employees. Studies show that this simply doesn’t happen. Like almost all automation technology, the reality of implementation is harder than marketing and trade journals make it sound.
by Gary Mintchell | Sep 2, 2025 | Commentary, Generative AI, News
How are you searching on the Web these days?
I still use Ecosia that realistically uses Google. Some, any way. You get many ads, a few links. Over time, though, the value of the links has continued to dwindle. When I want a deep search with follow up and deeper probe, I use Claude.ai.
But Claude does not show ads or links to sources (you can ask, but I usually don’t.)
Wonder what the ramifications are? Me, too. Then this article crossed my rss feed from Crazy, Stupid Tech.
Cloudflare’s CEO wants to save the web from AI’s oligarchs. Here’s why his plan isn’t crazy.
Written by Fred Vogelstein
Vogelstein writes:
Sixteen years ago Matthew Prince and classmate Michelle Zatlyn at Harvard Business School decided there was a better way to help companies handle hacker attacks to their websites. Prince and a friend had already built an open source system to help anyone with a website more easily track spammers. What if the three of them could leverage that into a company that not only tracked all internet threats but stopped them too?
Within months they had a business plan, won a prestigious Harvard Business School competition with it, and had seed funding. They unveiled the company, Cloudflare, a year later at the 2010 Techcrunch Disrupt completion, taking second place. And today, riding the explosion of cloud computing and armed with better technology and marketing, they’ve leapfrogged competitors to become one of the dominant cybersecurity/content delivery networks in the world.
I was immediately interested because I pay Cloudflare to protect my website. So far, it has been an excellent purchase.
Prince wants to talk about the future of the web and journalism with me because he thinks the AI chatbot revolution is killing both of them. And he thinks he can help fix that with something he calls pay-per-crawl, a gambit he and Cloudflare launched on July 1. He cares, he says, because “I love the smell of printer ink and a big wet press. So I kind of have a soft spot for the media industry and how important it is.” This isn’t spin. Two years ago he and his wife bought the Park City Record, his hometown local paper..
It’s a big enough problem that Prince and most publishers now believe a lot of journalism and anything else advertising supported online will die or be subsumed into AI companies in the next few years without intervention. And because 20 percent of websites use Cloudflare for security and traffic management, he can block enough AI chatbots crawlers – with his customers’ permission, of course – to at least force some big AI companies to the negotiating table.
I worked as an editor in trade magazine publishing for about 15 years. By the time I left in 2013, I could see the handwriting on the wall. During my entrepreneurial life, I’ve seen booms and busts. I can usually smell a bust coming. The advertising model of trade journals looked shaky. And digital funds are in short supply. In my 12 years as a blogger meeting many other former magazine writers also out on their own, I’ve met expenses with a little left over. But every year gets tougher.
The problem Prince is trying to solve is perhaps the biggest attack on how the web functions since Tim Berners-Lee created it in 1990. Until the AI revolution took hold two and a half years ago, the economic foundation worked like this: Search engines like Google and Microsoft freely and regularly indexed every site with web crawlers. In return, the search results powered by those indices generated referral traffic to those crawled websites. That has supported hundreds of billions of dollars in ad spending and search engine optimization.
But AI chatbots don’t work that way. Instead of ten blue links to choose from after a search – with advertising displayed at the top and right of results – AI chatbots just supply you with the answer. It’s a much better experience for users. Twenty years ago Google’s founders themselves in interviews with me and elsewhere talked about Google search only being an intermediate step toward creating an answer engine like this.
The problem this creates, however, is that there are no ads when AI chatbots give you the answer. If there are links to sources, users almost never click on them. AI chatbots also drive up publishers’ bandwidth costs because they crawl thousands of times a day. Wikipedia said back in April that these bots had raised their bandwidth costs 50 percent.
To larger entities than mine, this is a double hit. I hope Cloudflare can ignite a movement to bring some sort of sense to this market.
I highly recommend reading the entire interview.
by Gary Mintchell | Aug 29, 2025 | Personal Development
The Myers-Briggs Types Indicator suggests that I am an ENTP—extroverted, intuitive, thinking, perceptive. A key takeaway indicates that I think about new information coming my way and that I’m willing to change my mind if the new information is strong.
What about you? How willing are you to change your mind on something based on new data?
In manufacturing, that situation arises often. Those unwilling to change can face adverse events.
Catching up reporting on some of my past reading, I am visiting Adam Grant’s Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know.
What about you. Can you revisit past decisions and assumptions? How afraid would you be to rethink long-held beliefs? Can you let go of knowledge that no longer serves you well?
I remember a time as a marketing manager of a computer peripheral in the 80s. I had a model of how to distribute and sell that product. The reality had shifted. By the time I figured it out, even though it was only a few months, it was too late. I left the company for something ultimately better. The two people I left behind had negative 10 sales over the following few months (they accepted a return of 10 units from a distributor).
Sometimes we must think again quickly.
Charles Darwin suggested ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge. This sounds like the Dunning-Kruger effect—in many situations those who can’t don’t know they can’t. When we lack competence we are most likely to be brimming with overconfidence.
The first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don’t know you’re a member of the Dunning-Kruger club.
Tim Urban has noted that arrogance is ignorance plus conviction. We see that played out in myriad ways frequently.
What we all lack is this crucial nutrient for the mind—humility.
Nobel Laureate Danny Kahneman said that he refuses to let his beliefs become part of his identity. “I change my mind at a speed that drives my collaborators crazy.”
This is an outline of the 31 skills Grant identified in his research.
Individual
Develop the Habit of Thinking Again
Think like a scientist
Define your identity in terms of values, not opinions
Seek out information that goes agains your views
Calibrate your Confidence
Beware of getting stranded at the summit of Mt. Stupid
Harness the benefits of doubt
Embrace the joy of being wrong
Invite others to question your thinking
Learn something new from each person you meet
Build a challenge network, not a support network
Don’t shy away from constructive conflict
Interpersonal
Ask better Questions
Practice the art of persuasive listening
Question how rather than why
Ask “What evidence would change your mind?”
Ask how people originally formed an opinion
Approach Disagreements as Dances, not Battles
Acknowledge common ground
Remember less is often more
Reinforce freedom of choice
Have a conversation about the conversation
Collective Rethinking
Have more Nuanced Conversations
Complexify contentious topics
Don’t shy away from caveats and contingencies
Expand your emotional range
Teach Kids to Think Again
Have a weekly myth-busting discussion at dinner
Invite kids to do multiple drafts and seek input from others
Stop asking kids what they want to be when they grow up
Create Learning Organizations
Abandon best practices
Establish psychological safety
Keep a rethinking scoreboard
Stay Open To Rethinking Your Future
Throw out the ten-year plan
Rethink your actions, not just your surroundings
Schedule a life checkup
Make time to think again
by Gary Mintchell | Aug 27, 2025 | Business, Generative AI, News
Voice AI news comes to me only through Deepgram, although my tech podcasters update all the consumer news and failings of Alexa, Siri, and other Voice AI consumer applications. Deepgram actually provides a platform for developers to add the technology into their products.
Two pieces of news of interest. Deepgram has signed a strategic collaboration agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services (AWS). The multi-year agreement deepens Deepgram’s relationship with AWS and reflects a shared commitment to accelerating the development and adoption of generative voice AI. And second, Deepgram’s voice AI models are now available on Cloudflare Workers AI, making it easier than ever for developers to build real-time, expressive voice applications at scale.
As part of the AWS collaboration, Deepgram will expand co-selling and go-to-market efforts, integrate more deeply with AWS services, and empower enterprises to build scalable, high-accuracy voice applications across a wide range of use cases.
Deepgram’s infrastructure is deeply integrated with AWS, enabling customers to deploy its platform on Amazon EKS for scalable container orchestration, store data securely with Amazon S3, and manage containers using Amazon ECR. Customers can also use Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda to securely orchestrate interactions between Deepgram’s voice AI APIs and other services, including Amazon Bedrock hosted models and enterprise systems. Whether deployed in a customer-owned VPC or as a fully managed SaaS environment, Deepgram offers the flexibility required to maintain compliance, ensure data control, and operate efficiently at scale. Looking ahead, Deepgram plans to expand availability through AWS services like Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock to further streamline AI model deployment and orchestration.
Deepgram’s speech-to-text API can also be integrated into Amazon Connect, enabling best-in-class STT speed and accuracy for real-time transcription and voice automation within contact center environments. This helps enterprises improve agent productivity, automate call summaries, and enhance customer experiences.
Regarding Cloudflare announcement, Adam Sypniewski, CTO, Deepgram, said, “By hosting our voice models on Cloudflare’s Workers AI, we’re enabling developers to create real-time, expressive voice agents with ultra-low latency. Cloudflare’s global network brings AI compute closer to users everywhere, so customers can now deliver lightning-fast conversational AI experiences without worrying about complex infrastructure.”
