Even in an AI world, the human filter provides value. [Image via Gemini]

The web has always been about discovery and sharing. Whether it was from blogrolls or a bullet list item of links on our blogs, we have acted as curators, showing our audiences what we found valuable, and inherently filtering out the noise. In the peak of Web 2.0 experimentation with classic RSS, I could add an item to Delicious and it would flow through Friendfeed to Twitter, or I could share an item I found in Google Reader and have it show up downstream in Buzz. What a time.

Building one-click sharing directly into Webnerd.ai brought that muscle memory back. Every story I flag lands on my public shared page, syndicates to LG Stream on Bluesky, and publishes its own dedicated RSS feed anyone can subscribe to in their reader of choice. In the meantime, old school bloggers like Dave Winer have continuously posted links to share the best of the web on their domain. I respect it. I used to do a better job of highlighting individual blogs, so let's bring that muscle memory back too.

It seems wacky to think Anthropic's IPO filing was just this week. CNBC (via Techmeme) highlighted the company's more than $131 billion in cash and short-term investments, while Timothy B. Lee said its business was surprisingly strong. Latent Space highlighted how Anthropic uses Claude itself, and The Verge focused on how Anthropic can keep Wall Street pressure at bay.

But the week wasn't by all means totally bullish. Like many other companies, Microsoft is continuing to optimize spending by reducing headcount, offering voluntary buyouts to 60,000 employees. Tom Warren and Azeem Azhar at Exponential View connected the dots plainly: when capital spending continues to accelerate, payroll cuts make room for machines. Meanwhile, long time Google watcher John Battelle put a rattled Friday market selloff in long-term Silicon Valley perspective.

Beyond the money line, Sean Goedecke published two standout essays in forty-eight hours -- arguing that getting good at AI takes deliberate practice, and reminding developers that you can just ask AI to do things when agency becomes your bottleneck. Go subscribe to Sean right now.

That builder energy showed up across the product beat too, from Simon Willison testing webframe as a headless browser sandbox, to Google shipping Gemini 4 Carbon and Genie 4, pricing the Google Xreal Aura glasses at $1,099, and Waymo tapping Toyota's bZ4X for Tokyo robotaxis. Yes, I work at Google, but we're a big enough company that sometimes seeing this news is like being happy for your cousins. Go team and such.

Like I said last night, AI is impacting just about everything, and humans need to adjust. Alex Kantrowitz at Big Technology captured burned-out security teams enduring "Black October" as AI uncovers software flaws faster than defenders can patch, and Molly White traced why a $6.4 billion Binance heist pointed straight back to North Korea. Add Reddit forcing everyone to log in just to read human answers, and the open web lost another front porch. Algorithms optimize for lock-in, not discovery. Curating links by hand, and tapping share in Webnerd.ai so good writing travels further, is a great way for us to help discovery continue.

Disclosures per always: I work at Google. No doubt some of the companies mentioned here are partners, competitors or customers. Don't interpret my interest as being filtered with that lens. I built Webnerd.ai (and have no plans to monetize it).