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Midweek greetings to all, as we unveil the 299th chapter of Weekly Olio — a delightful concoction of laughter, insight, and a sprinkle of mystery. Within these pages, you'll discover a handpicked selection of fascinating finds from the vast realms of the internet.
Keep your eyes peeled for this week’s Publisher’s Parmesan, arriving this Sunday!
A word from our Sponsors…
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The Quote 💭
“Success is about taking advantage of those rare moments of opportunity that you can’t predict but come to you provided you’re alert and open to major changes.”
The Tweet 🐦
Patrick Collison reflects on how personal AI agents could reshape the economy. Companies have long acted like early superintelligences, exploiting consumers’ bounded rationality through tactics such as overpriced upsells and subscription inertia. Agents should make people more rational, weakening price discrimination and cross-subsidies while shifting advantage toward genuine product quality rather than distribution or attention-grabbing tactics. Information on quality will matter more, and demand-routing models based on short attention spans may lose value. A key uncertainty is whether agents stay loyal to consumers. Overall, Collison hopes the result will be markets that better reward companies making things they can be proud of.
The Infographic 💹
Where does a dollar of AI spending actually land? Of every $100 into AI data centers, about $50 goes to chips, $20 to power, $15 to networking, leaving $15 for cooling and construction. The buildout is mostly a chip-and-electricity story, so that is where the money and the bubble risk sit.
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The Short Read 📝
Why Pakistan’s Solar Revolution Backfired - by Daily Brief by Zerodha
Pakistan ran one of the world’s fastest solar booms, and it was an accident. Its power sector was already broken: 1994-era contracts with foreign producers guaranteed returns in dollars, carried sovereign guarantees, and paid for idle capacity. Add the post-Ukraine fuel spike and an IMF condition to raise tariffs, and electricity prices rose 155% between 2021 and 2024 — it became cheaper to rent a house than power it.
Households defected. Cheap Chinese panels plus a 2015 net-metering policy selling excess back at retail rates meant roughly 22 GW of panels imported in 2023-24, nearly half Pakistan’s installed capacity. The problem is the take-or-pay contracts don’t shrink. The cost of unused power lands on whoever stays on the grid — poorer households who can’t afford panels. The government’s response was to cut buyback rates from Rs 27 to Rs 10 and consider fixed charges for solar users. A classic utility death spiral. Read more…
The Long Read 📜
If your team is too busy doing their ‘normal job’ to experiment with AI, you’re preparing them to be replaced - by Geoffrey Huntley
Huntley has spent two years telling software engineers the water exists. This post is him putting down the glass. “This is the last time I’ll say it,” he writes — usage of AI in software engineering is no longer optional, and if your employer has banned it, quit. The sharp turn is who he’s aiming at. Not the holdout engineer, but their manager. If your team is too busy doing their normal job to experiment with AI, you’re preparing them to be replaced — and within six months you’ll be having conversations about moving people on. He wants managers vitality-curving their reports into AI producers and consumers, and he’s unsentimental about the left of that line: it’s been two years, the subscriptions are cheap, the tools were available to everyone.
The hiring section is the practically useful bit. Pull a candidate to a whiteboard and ask how a coding agent works under the hood — context windows, tokenisation, inference. If all they can talk about is skill packs, pass. If you walk out having learned something about AI you didn’t know, hire them on the spot. Read it for the provocation, not the proof. His evidence is testimonials and a vendor report. But the hiring rubric is the clearest articulation yet of what “AI fluency” actually means when you have to assess it in forty minutes. Read more…
How Jennifer Aniston’s LolaVie brand grew sales 40% with CTV ads
For its first CTV campaign, Jennifer Aniston’s DTC haircare brand LolaVie had a few non-negotiables. The campaign had to be simple. It had to demonstrate measurable impact. And it had to be full-funnel.
LolaVie used Roku Ads Manager to test and optimize creatives — reaching millions of potential customers at all stages of their purchase journeys. Roku Ads Manager helped the brand convey LolaVie’s playful voice while helping drive omnichannel sales across both ecommerce and retail touchpoints.
The campaign included an Action Ad overlay that let viewers shop directly from their TVs by clicking OK on their Roku remote. This guided them to the website to buy LolaVie products.
Discover how Roku Ads Manager helped LolaVie drive big sales and customer growth with self-serve TV ads.
The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.
That’s all for this week. If you enjoyed this edition, we’d really appreciate if you shared it with a friend, family member or colleague.
We’ll be back in your inbox 2 PM IST next Wednesday. Till then, have a productive week!
Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to the author's employer, organization, committee or other group or individual.