The Janka hardness test measures the resistance of a sample of wood to denting and wear. This is a chart of 29 common woods with their Janka rating. [📊 family handman]

One of the biggest questions in AI right now, especially in talking with investors, is where it will have the most amount of impact across the enterprise software landscape. It's critical to first start with what AI is good at and why it is so important. AI --at least in its forms for the foreseeable future-- has the ability to provide a reasoning engine for working on information (text, audio, video, or images, etc.) in service of bringing automation to small or large bodies of non-deterministic work. Critically, however, it's useful to separate which areas of software will have the most amount of potential upside from AI, and which areas will AI be mostly just a nice-to-have improvement. When AI is used to automate a small area of work, like we saw in a mad rush right after the launch of ChatGPT (let's say helping a user navigate software via a prompt interface vs. a GUI), we can imagine that this level of automation has a fairly incremental amount of value. Customers likely won't pay extra for this value proposition, and we likely wouldn't see much lift in customer demand for that particular area of service. Conversely, if we could instead automate an entire type of work in a piece of software that otherwise might take hours of high-priced labor to accomplish, we can see this as being fairly valuable. Even better, is if this is the type of work that happens frequently and has no particular upper-limit to the amount of time that could be spent on the activity. As such, we can imagine at least 3 major axes (and there are definitely more) that will determine the vast majority of value that will be generated with AI: 1. What is the level of automation being applied to the work? The smallest area of work would essentially be an autocomplete in a text field or a chatbot, and the largest area of work would be an AI Agent that automates an entire process or does a substantial amount of research and work to return information back to the user. Both ends of this spectrum can certainly be valuable, but largely depending on how the AI is leveraged and what types of ROI you can generate with the automation itself. 2. What is the "cost" of the work that's being automated? Every task in the economy has a different level of cost associated with it, either because the task itself is very time-consuming or because the level of specialization to complete the task is very high, and thus labor tends to be more expensive. Whether it's writing software code, generating text for a blog post, reviewing a contract, or providing synthesis of equity research, each of these tasks are valued differently. Fairly intuitively, the more that AI is applied to otherwise expensive activities and tasks, the more valuable it is. 3. What is the volume or frequency of the work that's being automated? If it's something that is done somewhat infrequently, like changing the settings of an application via a chatbot, then obviously AI is going to offer a limited amount of value. If, instead, the AI is being applied to a process that is executed hundreds or thousands of times a day in an organization, like QA testing software or routing invoices, then the value is much more meaningful. The pinnacle, of course, would be to go after software categories where the activity is high value, high volume, and offers the opportunity for a substantial amount of automation. Conversely, the worst spot to be would be relatively low cost activity, that is infrequent, and just experiencing the AI through a basic chatbot. But there can of course be different optimizations available: for instance, bringing heavy automation to a high volume low cost activity could be just as valuable as bringing a medium amount of automation to a medium volume, high cost activity. What is clear is that while not all AI opportunities will be the same, and we're only in the earliest stages figuring out which ones will bring the greatest amount of upside, the potential is insane.

Me prior to buying a house: Title insurance seems like one of those quaint American rackets like registered agents but how much can it possibly cost. Me after learning that number: Burn it with fire.

There was also major influence from Japan. When Japan's borders were forcibly opened to international trade in the 1850s and 1860s ukiyo-e — Japanese woodblock prints, made in the thousands for the popular market — flooded Europe. They changed European art forever.