In a world where AI can churn out chart-toppers in seconds and ticketing algorithms treat fans like data points, we risk losing the soul of live music. But a quiet countermovement is making a comeback right in peoples living rooms, backyards and basements.
Once the gritty domain of garage bands and DIY punks, house shows are becoming a structured, sustainable model for music communities embraced by a myriad of musical genres and accessible to all ages. House shows arent just an indie throwback. They serve as a blueprint for re-humanizing music and sustainable artist development, and cities should treat them as civic infrastructure.
Today, fans crave authentic, offline experiences. In Huntsville, Alabama, were betting big on this grassroots phenomenon, not as nostalgia, but as a future-proof cultural strategy meant to empower emerging artists, foster authentic human connection and fill gaps that traditional venues cant.
THE HISTORY OF THE HOUSE SHOW
Van Halens first gigs were at backyard keg parties in California. Hoobastank, Incubus and Linkin Park formed the alternative rock sound of the early 2000s in their parents garages.
But what defines a house show? A house show is first and foremost grounded in a sense of community. Often, a local band or willing host offers up their home to community members for an intimate musical performance. Artists and hosts run the full show, from tickets and gear to promotion, gaining skills theyd never get in a traditional venue.
In 2025, major acts like the All-American Rejects and Machine Gun Kelly are embracing the format. Beyond big-name acts, artists all over the world are curating experiences where audiences can witness the next big thing up close, all while creating connections across demographics. Families, young fans and seasoned music lovers can gather in intimate, inclusive spaces.
Take Common Man, a Huntsville-based husband-wife duo who are now touring the U.S. but remain fiercely dedicated to their community. Now dubbed Common House, Common Man members, Meredith and Compton Johnson, transformed the basement of their home into a live music venue. The duo has not only used house shows to launch their own exposure but also to provide other touring musicians and artists in the community with a platform to perform and reach new audiences in an inclusive environment. Recently, theyve taken their house show model global and performed at homes throughout Scotland. And theyre not aloneHuntsvilles house show scene also includes Boardman House, another grassroots venue making space for live music.
THE CIVIC BET ON THE LIVING ROOM
Cities shouldnt just invest in amphitheaters. They should also invest in cultural infrastructure at the neighborhood level to create intimate, fan-focused environments where artists are in more control of their concert experiences and show revenues, in the venues where careers are born and communities are formed.
When cities support smaller venues, theyre offering benefits traditional venues and platforms cant. For example, were:
Helping with business and/or LLC formation for liability protection.
Advising on ticketing and professional sound and lighting.
Guiding artists through compliance with sound ordinances and neighborhood approvals.
Prioritizing artist pay and sustainability.
Cities often prioritize large or mid-sized venues due to their significant economic impact. House shows fill a different and equally vital gap. They empower artists to control ticket prices and profit margins, bypassing bar-sales-driven venue models. They create peer networking opportunities and act as incubators for emerging talent, offering artists the chance to book, promote and manage shows on a small scale, thereby building skills that can scale to larger venues.
Most importantly, house shows democratize music, embedding it in communities instead of keeping it behind ticketing paywalls. In short, they rebalance the live music economy.
THE REAL-LIFE ANTIDOTE TO AI
In an age where AI-generated bands with entire albums have millions of streams and AI-enhanced performances of deceased artists are gaining popularity, ethical questions are being raised about authenticity and creative displacement.
House shows deliver what algorithms cannot: shared human connection, local community and unpredictable magic in the room. Huntsville frames house shows not as nostalgia, but as a future-proof strategy for live music ecosystems.
House shows arent replacing arenas or amphitheaters; instead, they complement them, with a thriving layer of hyperlocal, artist-first experiences. House shows are a missing piece of the live music ecosystem, and Huntsville is proving that cities can invest in culture not just from the top down, but from the living room up. As AI reshapes how music is made and consumed and fans crave authentic, in-person experiences, these intimate gatherings remind us that the real reasons we gravitate towards music are innately human and communal.
Matt Mandrella is the music officer for the city of Huntsville, Alabama.
Strategy textbooks taught us that sustainable competitive advantage that commanded premium prices was best protected by powerful barriers to entry. Build a moat, create switching costs, leverage access to high costs of entry, own distribution channels, and it would be difficult for startups to compete for your markets. But the forces of disruption operate by different rules, systematically destroying the very foundations of pricing power by making the previously difficult and expensive suddenly easy and cheap. The basis of competition changes, from excellence along well understood dimensions of merit to good enough.
The ‘good enough’ revolution in pricing
I have sympathy for incumbents. Theyre accustomed to working really hard to deliver on demanding criteria for quality, reliability, and excellence, only to find that fickle customers are spending their money on good enough that do just fine. Consider some examples:
Peak book and the advent of e-readers. E-readers lack the tactile satisfaction of turning pages, the smell of paper, and the aesthetic appeal of a beautifully bound book, not to mention the satisfaction of having an author personally sign your copy (if the latter doesnt matter to you, please dont break my heart and tell me). Yet e-books offer instant delivery, the ability to carry thousands of books in one device, adjustable fonts, built-in dictionaries, and search functionality. For many readers, thats good enough. Further, Amazon can sell bestsellers for $9.99 because the marginal cost is near zero, undermining hardcover pricing power. And were now in a world where AI makes it easy for anybody to author a book, commoditizing the authority that being a book author used to convey.
Digital Board Games vs. Physical Board Games. Electronic games lack the social ritual of gathering around a table, handling physical pieces, and reading opponents’ body language. But they enable play with friends anywhere in the world, handle all rules automatically, provide instant matchmaking with strangers, and eliminate setup/cleanup time. A $40 board game becomes a $5 app. Of course, there is a big debate about whether becoming subservient to the companies that want you to rent, rather than own, is a good thing or not.
Streaming Fitness vs. Gym Memberships. Peloton, Apple Fitness+, and YouTube workouts can’t replicate the full equipment range of a commercial gym, the fine-tuning of a professional coach, or the energy of in-person classes. But they eliminate commute time, remove scheduling constraints, offer unlimited class variety, and provide privacy for self-conscious exercisers. A $30/month digital subscription undermines $150/month premium gym memberships for many users.
In the industrial age, you could count on scarcity. It was hard to manufacture with quality at scale. It was hard to do advanced engineering. It was hard to source and assemble materials. For many of us, disruptors change the basis of competition entirely by removing the constraints that once justified premium pricing.
The mechanics of price erosion
Traditional pricing power rested on three pillars: scarcity, complexity, and friction. Companies could charge premiums because their offerings were hard to access, difficult to replicate, or cumbersome to replace. Disruptive technologies attack all three simultaneously. Take professional photography. The scarcity of skilled photographers, expensive equipment, and darkroom expertise once justified substantial fees.
Smartphone cameras and AI-powered editing apps haven’t just reduced these coststhey’ve eliminated entire categories of photographic services. The wedding photographer still commands premiums, but passport photos, real estate listings, and product shots have been democratized beyond recognition.
The financial services industry offers another compelling example. Robo-advisors now provide portfolio management that once required expensive human advisors. The algorithms aren’t more sophisticated than what top wealth managers offer, but they’ve made “good enough” portfolio management available for basis points instead of percentage points. When Charles Schwab can offer comprehensive financial planning for free as a customer acquisition tool, traditional advisors’ ability to charge 1-2% annually becomes increasingly tenuous.
Strategic implications for incumbents
In a world where technology makes everything easier and cheaper, competitive advantage increasingly comes from business model innovation rather than product superiority. Amazon Web Services doesn’t charge premiums because its infrastructure is superior; it dominates because it transformed computing from a capital expense to an operating expense, fundamentally changing how companies think about IT resources.
The most successful responses involve three strategic moves. First, companies need to be open to unbundling their offerings, recognizing that customers will no longer pay premiums for features they don’t value. Second, they must shift from product-centric to ecosystem-centric thinking, finding new sources of value in sticky network effects and data rather than in the core product itself. Third, they must embrace the reality that in many categories, the price will trend toward marginal costwhich in digital goods means effectively zero.
The new basis of competition
As traditional pricing power erodes, new sources of competitive advantage emerge. Speed of innovation, ecosystem orchestration, and customer intimacy become more valuable than product features. Creating stickiness that makes it hard to switch, adding value to the experience and reinforcing new forms of scarcity perhaps embedded in algorithms are all powerful ways that digital firms sustain competitive advantage.
Spotify, for instance, operates in a world where recorded music is effectively free. Its pricing power doesn’t come from exclusive content but from its recommendation algorithms, social features, and ecosystem integrations. The premium isn’t for the musicit’s for the experience around the music. And for artists, their revenue is increasingly coming from what is scarce the experience of attending a live performance.
The bad news is that for many experts with years of investment in the old paradigms, the good enough revolution will make their experince less valuable. The good news is that democratizing who can create whats good enough can be a basis for massive growth.
Timothée Chalamet just posted an 18-minute-long video to his Instagram to promote his upcoming A24 film, Marty Supreme. It might be his best role yet.
In the video, Chalametsporting a bright yellow tank top, buzz cut, and dainty necklacejoins a Zoom call full of supposed marketing executives who will be leading the promotional campaign ahead of the film’s release on December 25. After awkward introductions, Chalamet proceeds to fill up the meetings airtime with increasingly ridiculous suggestions for the films marketing efforts, leaving the eight other members of the call scrambling to accommodate his wild ideas.
On A24s YouTube channel, where the video is posted under the title Timothee_Chalamet_internal_brand_marketing_meeting_MartySupreme, its gained almost 100,000 views. And on Chalamets personal Instagram, its been watched almost 10 million times.
The campaign, which is a parody of an actual marketing meeting, sees Chalamet fully commit to the part of snobbish actor with no regard for his coworkersand clearly, its resonating. The meta concept sticks the landing by balancing absurdist humor with an uncanny eye for the moments that make our digital workplaces just a little bit universally awkward.
An absurd ad campaign you just might buy into
Marty Supreme, directed by Josh Safdie, is a sports-comedy film loosely based on the life of American ping-pong player Marty Reisman. The most information that we have about the film thus far comes from A24s official trailer, released on November 11, in which Chalamet embodies a version of Marty whos brash, determined, and extremely self-confident.
Those characteristics come out in full force through the new Marty Supreme ad, which plays like a surrealist comedy of errors about how not to behave in a Zoom meeting. Less than two minutes into the call, Chalamet has already taken control of the meeting, explaining that his philosophy for the movies marketing is led by three principles: culmination, “integration,” and fruitionizing” (which he admits is not a real word).
Things only get weirder from there. First, Chalamet suggests that his character, Marty Supreme, appear on boxes of Wheaties cereal. Then he gears up to introduce something his creative director has been working on for six months, only to reveal a single orange color swatch. Finally, he escalates to suggesting that Marty Supremes marketing should include a fleet of blimps, an activation at the Statue of Liberty, and an orange Eiffel Tower.
[Poster Image: A24]
As Chalamets ideas get more and more grand, the other people on the call are forced to keep a straight face. Its a particular genre of humor that plays unbelievable absurdity against the everyman, a concept thats seen success in shows like Nathan for You, The Rehearsal, and I Think You Should Leave.
Subtly skewering Zoom meetings for the sake of cinema
Where the new Marty Supreme ad really shines, though, is in its subtle dissection of the awkward Zoom call, an experience that almost every remote worker suffered through during the pandemic. From the painfully long introduction sequence to the clunky shift to screen sharing (during which Chalamet reveals a computer background of himself receiving an award), constant interruptions, and sprinklings of corporate-speak, every beat feels like a truly torturous meeting.
While it’s unclear exactly why A24 chose to advertise Marty Supreme through advertising parody (considering that it’s a movie that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the marketing world), the video does seem particularly geared toward an online audience of young Chalamet fans. By balancing the ridiculous with the real, the ad strikes a relatable note thats perfectly suited to attracting modern viewers.
i feel like I am an imposter in a professional zoom meeting, one Instagram user wrote under the video. i know this is supposed to be a joke, but I’ve been in a lot of entertainment marketing meetings, they are exactly like this, another fan wrote on YouTube.
Some may argue that Dune or Call Me by Your Name represent Chalamets best work. Marketers everywhere know its Timothee_Chalamet_internal_brand_marketing_meeting_MartySupreme.
Here’s the thing about Wellington boots: They’re great when it’s raining, because they keep your toes dry and toasty. But when the rain stops, you feel a little silly stomping around in heavy rubber boots.
But what if your rain boots looked like any other fashion-forward boot you’d be comfortable wearing rain or shine? What if they looked like, say, a classic pair of Dr. Martens?
I have good news. Dr. Martens has designed a rain boot that mimics one of its most iconic designs, the 1460 eight-hole lace-up boot, which first came to market in 1960. It has a lot of the hallmarks of a Dr. Martens boot, like the heel tab for easy pull-on, the grooved sole, and even the stitching. What’s different though, is that each component is waterproof, ensuring that your feet will stay dry in puddles and downpours.
“You style this boot just like you would any other Dr. Martens,” says Adam Meek, Dr. Martens’ chief product officer. “You could wear them to a festival, or a night out on the town.”
The original 1460 (left) and the 1460 Rain (right) [Photo: Dr. Martens]
The Comfort Boot That Became A Sensation
Dr. Martens was originally founded by a German doctor, Klaus Martens, in the postwar years. At the time, most boots were made from hard leather and provided very little arch support. After he hurt his ankle in a skiing accident, he began tinkering with the design of a new kind of boot made from softer leather with soles that had air pockets that provided cushioning and bounce. This distinct insole was later branded “Airwair” and has been incorporated into the Dr. Martens logo.
The shoes he prototyped were so comfortable that he decided to sell them for 2 (68.31 or $90 in today’s money). Within five years, the brand was selling so many shoes that Martens decided to open his own factory and sell them globally. In 1960, the brand launched the 1460, a lace-up boot distinctive yellow stitching and a pull tab, which went on to become the brand’s best-selling style, and continues to be popular today.
[Photo: Dr. Martens]
Dr. Martens shoes immediately took off with working class people who needed durable, comfortable everyday shoes. They were quickly adopted by postal and factory workers. But as the brand entered the ’60s and ’70s, it became popular with youth subcultures, including mods, punks, goths, new wave musicians, and hippies. And today, Meek says the brand continues to have a very wide range of customers.
Last year, the brand generated 787.6 ($1.03 billion) in global revenue, which was a 10% dip from the year before, partly due to the overall slow down in the U.S. market.
“From a design perspective, we stick very closely to the brand’s original design principles, which are grounded in simplicity and comfort,” he says. “But that has allowed for enormous versatility, and allows people to use it as a vehicle for self-expression. We sell boots to young people trying to make a statement, and older people just looking for comfort.”
[Photo: Dr. Martens]
Designing a Rain Boot That Doesn’t Look Like One
While many Dr. Martens fans wear their boots out in inclement weather, since many styles are fairly water-resistant, the brand hasn’t designed many truly waterproof boots in its 78-year history. To design the new 1460 rain boot, Meek went back to the brand’s archive, and found boots that the original Dr. Marten designed before he even launched his brand. He found one that was waterproof, but did not have the silhouette of the Wellington boot, which has become the de facto rain boot design of our time. This inspired the team to think about how to reinvent the rain boot to look more like a traditional Dr Martens boot.
“It was obvious there was a need for more rain boots,” he says. “Extreme weather means that it is becoming wetter in many parts of the world. We wanted to create a versatile boot that stayed true to the brand.”
[Photo: Dr. Martens]
The team took the structure of the 1460 boot, but tried to make it fully waterproof. The boot is made from PVC plastic. All elements that would let water seep in have been eliminated, such as laces. And while there appears to be stitching around the heel, these are actually faux stitches: The heel is actually heat sealed to the upper using Goodyear Welting technology used to make tires. And the sole features that same comfy AirWair technology.
[Photo: Dr. Martens]
Fashioning for Durability
For the original working class people who embraced Dr Martens, it was important that the boots were durable, because they didn’t have a lot of disposable income to frequently replace footwear. Meek says that that durability continues to be an important design principle.
Most boots within the brand’s catalog are designed so they can be easily resoled by slicing off the sole with a heated knife, and sewing on a new one. In fact, the brand has a resale site where customers can send in old boots, which will be resoled and then resold. The company is in the early stages of developing a system that will allow customers to send in their old shoes to be refurbished so they can hold onto them for longer.
[Photo: Dr. Martens]
These rain boots have been designed along the same principles. They’re made from heavy-duty materials that will live up to years of inclement weather, and eventually, when the sole wears out, it will be possible to replace them with a welting process. For Meek, this is important because this encourages more environmentally friendly behavior.
“We approach sustainability through longevity,” he says. “I like to think of our products as something you can hand down to a family member, along with all the stories they carry.”
New York City scaffolding is so commonplace it has become a kind of extra architectural skin covering the city. It’s estimated that there are more than 9,000 of these “construction sheds” (another term for scaffolding) installed across the city, enough to stretch nearly 400 miles if they were put end to end.
They do the important work of shielding pedestrians from potential falling debris during building construction and renovation projects, but they also shroud large swaths of sidewalk in dark and cloistered tunnels made of an unfortunate jumble of steel poles and plywood.
Construction scaffolding is the city’s ubiquitous, utilitarian, and mostly unpleasant necessary evil. And now, a new effort aims to rethink their form with a series of new, more appealing designs.
Six new designs for scaffolding have just been announced by New York City’s Department of Buildings, and they replace the dark and convoluted sheds of today with bright, airy, and open versions. The new scaffolding designs come from two design teams led by the New York-based architecture and urban design firm Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU) and the global design and engineering firm Arup. Simplified and minimal, each of the six designs turns the workaday construction shed into a more open and accessible add-on to the built environment.
[Image: PAU]
Time for a makeover
The new designs are a result of the “Get Sheds Down” initiative, an effort launched by the city in 2023 to update the look of construction sheds and revise the rules and regulations that govern when and where they’re used. The sheds currently in use in New Yorkand many other citieshave been largely unchanged since the 1980s. Usually hunter green and made up of a kit of parts consisting largely of steel poles and plywood, the current shed system is a boxy shield, but it’s also an obstacle for people moving down sidewalks, entering buildings, or getting in and out of vehicles on the street.
After a public bidding process, the city hired two design teams led by PAU and Arup to reimagine the shed. They were asked to create six designs for alternative sheds that maintain public safety while also improving the pedestrian experience, beautifying the streetscape, and keeping the cost of installing sheds reasonable for building owners.
[Image: PAU]
PAU’s three designs use a slanted form, a transparent roof, and a streamlined kit of structural parts to make a much more open and airy shed. “We were very focused on the pedestrian experience,” says Vishaan Chakrabarti, founder of PAU. “The slanted design lets more light and air in. It’s a very simple thing.”
Just as important, Chakrabarti says, was the elimination of the cross bracing between columns, X-shaped metal poles that act almost like walls on the existing sheds. PAU’s design makes each column stronger so that only one horizontal beam is needed to connect them.
[Image: PAU]
The baseline version of the shed uses this configuration with a transparent roof. A large version can be used for bigger buildings and broader sidewalks with more widely spaced structural columns that double up to provide more strength. And for smaller-scale projects or emergency installations, PAU has designed a version that uses a high-strength netting on its slanted side, offering safety and a nearly clear view to the sky above.
A new take on an old form
Arup’s three designs also bring in noticeably more light than the existing shed system, while also offering variability for the different conditions found across the city. One design, named the Rigid Shed, uses a grid-based structural system with prefabricated connection nodes, minimizing materials and connections during assembly.
[Image: Arup]
Another design, the Flex Shed, has a similar grid approach but with an even simpler set of posts and beams that can be adjusted in three dimensions to accommodate things like street trees, fire escapes, and the dozens of types of street furniture and infrastructure that exists on city sidewalks. Maybe the most elegant of ll the six solutions, the Air Shed is a balcony-like cantilever that only anchors to the sidewalk at points alongside the building. Rather than creating a tunnel people have to traverse, it forms a thin canopy overhead that some people might not even notice.
[Image: Arup]
“The inspiration for the Air Shed is essentially a wall-mounted shelving system,” says Seth Wolfe, a principal at Arup.
Arup has been working on these ideas for more than a decade. The firm first got involved back in 2009 when it partnered with the architecture firm KNE Studio on a submission to another city-led shed redesign effort. KNE Studio’s design was a finalist in that design competition, and the two firms remained in contact and continued to work on new shed designs in conjunction with the shed installing company Core Scaffolding.
When the Get Sheds Down initiative launched, the team was primed to participate. “We had momentum going into the RFP,” says Kevin Erickson of KNE Studio. “We had stuff cooking on the backburner.”
The six new designs resulting from the “Get Sheds Down” initiative join a range of scaffolding types in use in cities around the world, with a range of materials and price points. The winner of New York City’s 2009 shed design competition, Urban Umbrella, is now a provider of upscale sheds across the city. Simpler approaches are also in use.
Chakrabarti notes that scaffolding in Hong Kong is still made from bamboo. He even suggested early on in the Get Sheds Down process that maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad idea in New York. “I actually asked the question,” he says. “I got laughed at.”
New York City’s Department of Buildings is now working with PAU and Arup to make the designs available for public use by builders and contractors doing construction and renovation work on buildings across the city. Next, each of the new designs will be made into mockups that can be evaluated and tested. Some of these new shed designs could begin appearing at building sites and on city sidewalks before the end of 2026.
The six new designs add to what Chakrabarti calls a “menu” of options for builders in the city, some of whom may still opt to use the existing system. He says providing more choice is a way to achieve the main goal of the initiative, which is to improve the experience of people in New York City who will inevitably encounter construction sheds.
“You can use a Lego set to build an ugly thing, or you can use a Lego set to build a beautiful thing,” Chakrabarti says. “But the first thing you’ve got to do is understand the Lego set.”
Spend a few minutes on developer Twitter and youll run into it: vibe coding. With a name like that, it might sound like a passing internet trend, but its become a real, visible part of software culture. Its shorthand for letting AI generate code from simple language prompts instead of writing it manually.
In many ways, its great. AI has lowered the barrier to entry for coding, and thats pulled in a wave of hobbyists, designers, and side-project tinkerers who might never have touched a codebase before. Tools like Warp, Cursor, and Claude Code uplevel even professional developers, making it possible to ship something working in hours instead of weeks.
But heres the flip side: when AI can move faster than you can think, its easy to run straight past the guardrails. Weve already seen how that can go wrong, like with the recent Tea app breach, which shows even polished, fully tested code can hide critical vulnerabilities if humans dont review it thoroughly. Optimizing for speed over clarity lets AI produce something that works in the moment, but without understanding it, you cant know what might break later. This isnt just technical debt anymore; its a risk to customer trust.
The instinctive reaction to solve this trade-off is to throw more tech at the problem: add automated scans, add a secure by default setting. Those things matter. But Id argue that failure in vibe coding doesnt start with tooling, it starts with leadership. If you dont lead your team through this new way of working, theyll either move too slow to benefit from AI or move so fast they start breaking things in ways a security checklist cant save you from.
The real job is steering, not slowing down
When we built agentic coding agent Warp 2.0, we put a simple mandate in place: Use Warp to build Warp. That means every coding task started with prompting an AI agent. Sometimes it nailed it in one shot; sometimes we had to drop back to manual coding. But the point wasnt dogma, it was to force us to learn, as a team, how to work in an agent-driven world.
We learned quickly that more AI doesnt automatically mean better. AI can write a thousand lines of plausible-looking code before youve finished your coffee. Without structure, thats a recipe for brittle, unmaintainable systems. The real challenge was getting people to treat AI-generated code with the same discipline as code they wrote themselves.
Thats a leadership problem. Its about setting cultural norms and making sure they stick.
Three things leaders need to get right
1. Hold developers accountable
The biggest mental trap is treating the AI as a second engineer who owns what it wrote. It doesnt. If someone contributes code to a project, they own that code. They need to understand it as deeply as if they typed it out line by line. AI wrote it should never be an excuse for a bug.
Leaders cant just say this once; they have to model it. When you review code, ask questions that make it clear you expect comprehension, not just functionality: Why does this query take so long to run? What happens if the input is null? Thats how you set the standard that understanding is part of shipping.
2. Guide AI with specifics
Using large, one-shot prompts is like cooking without tasting as you go: sometimes it works, but usually its a mess. AI is far more effective when you request small, testable changes and review them step by step. Its not just about quality, it also builds a feedback loop that helps your team get better at prompting over time.
In practice, this means teaching your team to guide the AI like theyd mentor a junior engineer: explain the architecture, specify where tests should live, and review work in progress. You can even have the AI write tests as it goes as one way to force smaller, verifiable units of work.
3. Build the review culture now
In AI workflows, teams move fastest when AI and humans work side by side, generating and reviewing in small steps. The first draft of a feature is the most important one to get eyes on. Have someone review AI-generated work early and focus on the big-picture questions first, like whether its secure, reliable, and solves the right problem.
The leadership challenge is making reviews a priority without slowing anyone down. Have teams aim to give feedback in hours, not days, and encourage finding ways for work to keep moving while reviews happen. This builds momentum while creating a culture that values careful, early oversight over rushing to get something done.
Guardrails only work if people use them
Safety tools and checks can help catch mistakes, but they dont replace good habits. If a team prioritizes speed over care, AI guardrails just get in the way, and people will find ways around them.
Thats why the core of leading in the AI era is cultural: you have to teach people how to integrate AI into their workflow without losing sight of the fundamentals. The teams that get this right will be able to take advantage of the speed AI enables without bleeding quality or trust. The ones that dont will move fast for a while, until they ship something that takes them down.
Vibe coding isnt going away, and I think thats a good thing. So long as teams lead with people, not just technology, they will come out ahead and create better experiences for users along the way.
For its 2026 postage stamps, the U.S. Postal Service is going colorful and graphic.
USPS gave a first look at some of the stamps set to be released next year, including the latest edition of its Love stamp, stamps commemorating the 250th anniversary of the U.S., and stamps depicting figures including a boxer, a martial artist and actor, and a pair of published poets. The stamps will be released on a rolling basis beginning in January and available at Post Office locations and online.
This early preview of our 2026 stamp program underscores the Postal Services commitment to celebrating the artistry and storytelling that make stamps so special, Stamp Services director Lisa Bobb-Semple said in a statement. Each stamp is a small work of art an entryway into a larger story that connects people, places and moments in history.”
[Image: USPS]
Many of the stamps are bright or use typography in bold or creative ways. The 2026 Love stamps are a series of four illustrations of stylized red, white, and blue birds by illustrator James Yang that were inspired by midcentury U.S. design and Japanese children’s book illustrations, according to USPS.
[Image: USPS]
Stamps for Muhammad Ali designed by USPS art director Antonio Alcalá show an Associated Press photo of the boxer with his gloves up and his last name in big, all-caps, sans-serif type in red and black that evokes a boxing match promotional poster.
[Image: USPS]
A painting of Bruce Lee by artist Kam Mak shows the martial artist and actor against a yellow brushstroke background as he kicks the words “USA FOREVER” and “BRUCE LEE,” which were cleverly angled to look like he snapped them in two.
[Image: USPS]
For its “Figures of the American Revolution” stamps, multiple artists depict 25 people, from household name Founding Fathers like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin to lesser known figures as Deborah Sampson, the only woman to earn a military pension in the war after she dressed up like a man called Robert. The diverse selection of people were chosen to represent the Revolution as a collective effort, USPS says.
“Its unusual to design a pane of stamps featuring 25 different portraits” USPS art director Ethel Kessler said in a statement. “But that number felt essential. How else could you begin to tell the story of the Revolutions complexity with fewer?”
[Image: USPS]
The typographic “Declaration of Independence” stamp also marks next year’s anniversary with “1776” written out in feather quill pens by typographer Juan Carlos Pagan.
[Image: USPS]
The “Lowriders” stamps pay homage to customized lowrider cars with photos by Philip Gordon and Humberto Beto Mendoza and gothic-style type paired with flourishes borrowed from lowrider paint jobs. Photographer David Schwartz contributed images for the “Route 66” stamps, which celebrate the 100th anniversary of the iconic highway.
[Image: USPS]
Other forthcoming stamps including “International Peace” showing an origami crane by Peace Crane Project founder Sue DiCicco, “Bald Eagle: Hatchling to Adult,” a pane of five stamps depicting the life of America’s national bird, and a stamp commemorating Colorado’s 150th anniversary.
[Image: USPS]
Writer Phillis Wheatley, who published what’s believed to be first book by a woman of African descent in the American Colonies, appears on the 49th Black Heritage stamp by artist Kerry James Marshall. Sarah Orne Jewett, a novelist and poet, appears on the 35th Literary Arts series by artist Mark Summers. Next year’s Lunar New Year stamp shows a horse mask by Sally Andersen-Bruce.
[Image: USPS]
USPS says more stamp announcements are forthcoming, and it’s also planning to rerelease an old stamp next year as part of its Stamp Encore Contest.
[Image: USPS]
Tech giants are making grand promises for the AI age. The technology, we are told, might discover a new generation of medical interventions, and possibly answer some of the most difficult questions facing physics and mathematics. Large language models could soon rival human intellectual abilities, they claim, and artificial superintelligence might even best us. This is exciting, but also scary, they say, since the rise of AGI, or artificial general intelligence, could pose an uncontrollable threat to the human species.
U.S. government officials working with AI, including those charged with both implementing and regulating the tech in the government, are taking a different tack. They admit that the government is still falling behind the private sector in implementing LLM tech, and there’s a reason for agencies to speed up adoption.
Still, many question the hyperbolic terminology used by AI companies to promote the technology. And they warn that the biggest dangers presented by AI are not those associated with AGI that might rival human abilities, but other concerns, including unreliability and the risk that LLMs are eventually used to undercut democratic values and civil rights.
Fast Company spoke with seven people whove worked at the intersection of government and technology on the hype behind AIand what excites and worries them about the technology. Heres what they said.
Charles Sun, former federal IT official
Sun, a former employee at the Department of Homeland Security, believes AI is, yes, overhypedespecially, he says, when people claim that AI is bigger than the internet. He describes the technology simply as large-scale pattern recognition powered by statistical modeling, noting AIs current wave is impressive but not miraculous.
Sun argues that the tech is an accelerator of human cognition, not a replacement for it. I prefer to say that AI will out-process us, not outthink us. Systems can already surpass human capacity in data scale and speed, but intelligence is not a linear metric. We created the algorithms, and we define the rules of their operation.
AI in government should be treated as a critical-infrastructure component, not a novelty, he continues. The danger isnt that AI becomes ‘too intelligent,’ but that it becomes too influential without accountability. The real threat is unexamined adoption, not runaway intelligence.
Former White House AI official
I was worried at the beginning of this . . . when we decided that instead of focusing on mundane everyday use cases for workers, we decided at a national security front that we need to wholesale replace much of our critical infrastructure to support and be used by AI, says the person, who spoke on background. That creates a massive single point of failure for us that depends largely on compute and data centers never failing, and models being impervious to attacksneither of which I don’t think anyone, no matter how technical they are or not, would place their faith in.
The former official says theyre not worried about AGI, at least for now: Next token prediction is not nearly enough for us to model complex behaviors and pattern recognition that we would qualify as general intelligence.
David Nesting, former White House AI and cybersecurity adviser
AI is fantastic at getting insights out of large amounts of data. Those who have AI will be better capable of using data to make better decisions, and to do so in seconds rather than days or weeks. Theres so much data about us out there that hasnt really hurt us because nobodys ever really had the tools to exploit it all, but thats changing quickly, Nesting says. Im worried about the government turning AI against its own people, and Im worried about AI being used to deprive people of their rights in ways that they cant easily understand or appeal.
Nesting adds: Im also worried about the government setting requirements for AI models intended to eliminate ‘bias,’ but without a clear definition of what ‘bias’ means. Instead, we get AI models biased toward some ‘official’ ideological viewpoint. Weve already seen this in China: Ask DeepSeek about Tiananmen Square. Will American AI models be expected to maintain an official viewpoint on the January 6th riots?
I think were going to be arguing about what AGI means long after its effectively here, he continues. Computers have been doing certain tasks better than people for nearly a century. AI is just expanding that set of tasks more quickly.
I think the more alarming milestone will be the point at which AI can be exploited by people to increase their own power and harm others. You dont need AGI for that, and in some ways were already there, Nesting says. Americans today are increasingly and unknowingly interacting online with fake accounts run by AI that are indistinguishable from real peopleeven whole communities of peopleconfirming every fear and anxiety they have, and validating their outrage and hatred.
Abigail Haddad, former member of the AI Corps at DHS
The biggest problem currently, Haddad argues, is that AI is actually being underused in government. An immense amount of work went into making these tools available inside of federal agencies, she notes, but whats available in the government is still behind whats available commercially. There are concerns about LLMs training on data, but those tools are operating on cloud systems that follow federal cybersecurity standards.
People who care about public services and state capacity should be irate at how much is still happening manually and in Excel, she says.
Tony Arcadi, former chief information officer of the Treasury Department
Computers are already smarter than us. It’s a very nebulous term. What does that really consist of? At least my computer is smarter than me when it comes to complex mathematical calculations, Arcadi says. The sudden emergence of AGI or the singularity, there’s this thing called Rokos basilisk, where the AI will go back in time andI don’t remember the exact thingbut kill people who interfered with this development. I don’t really go for all of that.
He adds: The big challenge that I see leveraging AI in government is less around, if you will, the fear factor of the AI gone rogue, but more around the resiliency, reliability, and dependability of AI, which, today, is not great.
Eric Hysen, former chief information officer at DHS
When asked a few months ago about whether AI might become so powerful that the process of governing might be offloaded to software, Hysen shared the following: I think there is something fundamentally human that Americans expect about their government. . . . Government decision-making, at some level, is fundamentally different than the way private companies make decisions, even if they are of very similar complexity.
Some decisions, he added, “we’re always going to want to be fundamentally made by a human being, even if i’s AI-assisted in a lot of ways. It’s going to look more long term like heavy use of AI that will still ultimately feed for a lot of key things to human decision makers.
Arati Prabhakar, former science and technology adviser to President Biden
Prabhakar, who led the Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Joe Biden, is concerned that the conversation about AGI is being used to influence policy around the technology more broadly. Shes also skeptical that the technology is as powerful as people foretell. I really feel like Im in a freshman dorm room at 2 in the morning when I start hearing those conversations, she says.
Your brain is using 20 or 25 watts to do all the things that it does. That includes all kinds of things that are way beyond LLMs. [Its] about 25 watts compared to the mega data centers that it takes to train and then to use AI models. Thats just one hint that we are so far from anything approximating human intelligence, she argues. “Most troubling is it puts the focus on the technology rather than the human choices that are being made in companies by policymakers about what to build, where to use it, and what kind of guardrails really will make it effective.”
This story was supported by the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism.
Michelle had barely knotted her apron strings before the day turned ugly.
When I told her I could only serve regular coffeenot the waffle-flavored one she wantedshe threw the boiling-hot pot at me, she tells Fast Company, recounting one violent encounter with a customer.
Working at a popular all-day breakfast chain, Michelle has learned that customer service often means surviving other peoples rage: Ive been cussed out, had hot food thrown on meeven dodged a plate thrown at my head, she says. Lately, the sexual comments from male customers have gotten worse. (Workers in this story have been given pseudonyms to protect them from retaliation.)
Still, she shows up, because she hopes to save enough to launch her own business soon.
Once upon a time, the customer is king was a rallying cry for better service. Today, its a management mantra gone feral. What began as good business sense, touted by historic retail magnates like Marshall Field and Harry Selfridge, has curdled into a corporate servitude that treats employees as expendable shock absorbers for awful behavior and diva demands.
With the holiday rush looming, customer-facing workers in cafés, call centers and car garages are bracing themselves to smile through every clients tantrumno matter how absurd.
Rampant hostilityand its getting worse
At Michelles workplace, the patron always comes first, while the safety of staff barely makes the list. Even after several viral videos of incidents at the chains restaurants, she says her complaints rarely go anywhere.
One of her managers will step in if he sees something on the floor thats out of line, but others just ask what she did to provoke it. It makes me angry, yet I feel I just have to take it, she says. Its an epidemic. That dynamic is baked into North American service culture.
The customer is king mantra has become a free pass for people to act however they want, with impunity, says Gordon Sayre, a professor at Emlyon Business School in Lyon, France, who has been studying its impact on employees. It breeds entitlementand that entitlement gets abused, leaving workers with almost no room to push back.The mantra dictates that service staff stay deferentialcareful about their every word and gesturewhile clients hold the upper hand. With some workers getting all of their take-home pay from tips and gratuity, customers can quite literally decide how much an employee earns. And according to Sayres research, that mix of financial power and enforced politeness makes sexual harassment at on the job more likely.
The data mirrors reality. In a 2025 survey of 21,000 US frontline workers in healthcare, food service, education, retail, transportation, more than half (53%) said theyd recently faced verbally abusive, threatening or unruly customers.
There’s also been a meaningful uptick in customers acting out. According to Arizona State Universitys annual National Customer Rage survey, 43% admit to having raised their voice to show displeasure, up from 35% in 2015. And since 2020, the percentage of customers seeking revenge for their hassles has tripled.
Such encounters take a toll: employees on the receiving end are twice as likely to report that their jobs are damaging their physical health, and nearly twice as likely to feel unsafe at work, according to analytics platform Perceptyx.
Management didnt back my coworker
Madison has been a server for more than a decade, bouncing between casual spots and fine dining rooms. These days, shes at a former Michelin-starred restaurant in New York, and shes long since accepted the industrys devotion to customer is always right. She sees it play out nightly, usually when someone insists a dish isnt cooked properly, or worse, admits they just dont like it.
Theres a specific type of persnickety person who gets drunk on the power of being rude and demanding, she tells Fast Company. Once I spot a table with that vibe, I know Im in for a long night.
The problem is, the mentality rewards bad behavior. Recently, a diner claimed hed only had one beerwhen it was clearly two. Management didnt back my coworker, and the guy was charged for just one, which ultimately comes out of our tip pool, says Madison. He might have left with a bad taste, but he still got what he wanted.
Most hospitality staff Fast Company spoke with said the same thing: comping drinks, desserts, and even entire checks has become routine when someone complains. That generosity, however, comes at a time when restaurants and bars can least afford it.
Across the US, the industry is being squeezed from both sidessoaring labor and ingredient costs on one end, and cautious consumer spending on the other. Growth in 2025 has been even slower than during the pandemic lockdown years. So why are so many establishments still giving freebies to difficult customers?
Because in the age of online reviews, every unhappy diner is a one-person marketing department, ready to dish out brutal takedowns. A single post can tank a spots reputation, and naming individual staff is common practice. To avoid bad publicity, businesses are trading profit for peace, and making sacrifices to get those all-important five-star ratings. Even a middling three-star review, which most customers equate to a good or average experience, can obliterate visibility on platforms like Yelp or Google.For individual frontline employees, those digital judgments hit harder. A dip in ratings can mean being moved to a slower section or losing a lucrative shift. And in the platform gig economy, where algorithmic rankings rule, a single bad review can mean less work, or none at all. Danielle, a salon owner in Washington, remembers when an unhappy client not only left a bad review, but recruited 200 others to do the same.
Ive no idea how she found so many people, but it was traumatizing watching one-star reviews just flood in, she says. Danielle has contacted Google and Yelp in the past, but they refuse to remove reviews.
Even on online platforms stuffed with fake and fraudulent bot reviews, the customer is always right, right?
Rest assured, well be talking about you behind your back
The real problem with the beloved slogan isnt the complaints or stingy tips. Its the emotional contortion required to stay polite while being treated like a punching bag.
Rose Hackman, author of Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power, interviewed service workers across the industries for her boo and found a resounding answer: what counts isnt the service, its the smile. Emotional labor is highly devalued, feminized and rendered invisible, despite it being one of the most central forms of work in our economy, says Hackman. We need to value it more.Of course, that responsibility sits not just with consumers, but with employers too. Until the culture actually changes, employees cope the best they can.
Avery, a server in an upmarket seafood restaurant in Philadelphia, has gotten better at protecting herself with age. I used to fold like a beach chair to their needs and demands, but Im less willing now, she explains. Outside of this job, Im a performer, and there are similarities there: I put on a mask, act out a show, then the lights come up, I clock out, and I get to be someone else.
Sadly, no coping strategy is perfect.
Closing yourself off and faking an emotionalso known as surface actingcan look professional, but it impacts your mood, explains Sayre. Trying to fix the situation or reframe the customers behavior can protect your emotional health, but hurts performance. Instead, venting with trusted coworkers acts as a vital pressure valvea place to express real emotions and recover from the constant stress.
Jesse, a New York bartender, is amazed by the rancid behavior he sees on the daily, but the camaraderie with his team keeps him sane.
If you walk in and make my life harder, talking to me in a way you would never speak to a friend or your mother; babe, youve decided what our relationship is gonna be, he says. Rest assured, well be talking about you behind your back, laughing and joking about how youre dressed.With customer is king still reigning, America desperately needs a reminder about the inherent social contract of emotional labora contract that only works if respect flows both ways. Without it, the whole system falls apart, leaving behind burnt-out staff and sour customers.
As Jesse says: Youre a guest in my home, so I’m gonna take care of you. All you have to do is enjoy your night, and pay me for the work I do.
Youve just finished a strenuous hike to the top of a mountain. Youre exhausted but elated. The view of the city below is gorgeous, and you want to capture the moment on camera. But its already quite dark, and youre not sure youll get a good shot. Fortunately, your phone has an AI-powered night mode that can take stunning photos even after sunset.
Heres something you might not know: That night mode may have been trained on synthetic nighttime images, computer-generated scenes that were never actually photographed.
As artificial intelligence researchers exhaust the supply of real data on the web and in digitized archives, they are increasingly turning to synthetic data, artificially generated examples that mimic real ones. But that creates a paradox. In science, making up data is a cardinal sin. Fake data and misinformation are already undermining trust in information online. So how can synthetic data possibly be good? Is it just a polite euphemism for deception?
As a machine learning researcher, I think the answer lies in intent and transparency. Synthetic data is generally not created to manipulate results or mislead people. In fact, ethics may require AI companies to use synthetic data: Releasing real human face images, for example, can violate privacy, whereas synthetic faces can offer similar benefit with formal privacy guarantees.
There are other reasons that help explain the growing use of synthetic data in training AI models. Some things are so scarce or rare that they are barely represented in real data. Rather than letting these gaps become an Achilles heel, researchers can simulate those situations instead.
Another motivation is that collecting real data can be costly or even risky. Imagine collecting data for a self-driving car during storms or on unpaved roads. It is often much more efficient, and far safer, to generate such data virtually.
Heres a quick take on what synthetic data is and why researchers and developers use it.
How synthetic data is made
Training an AI model requires large amounts of data. Like students and athletes, the more an AI is trained, the better its performance tends to be. Researchers have known for a long time that if data is in short supply, they can use a technique known as data augmentation. For example, a given image can be rotated or scaled to yield additional training data. Synthetic data is data augmentation on steroids. Instead of making small alterations to existing images, researchers create entirely new ones.
But how do researchers create synthetic data? There are two main approaches. The first approach relies on rule-based or physics-based models. For example, the laws of optics can be used to simulate how a scene would appear given the positions and orientations of objects within it.
The second approach uses generative AI to produce data. Modern generative models are trained on vast amounts of data and can now create remarkably realistic text, audio, images, and videos. Generative AI offers a flexible way to produce large and diverse datasets.
Both approaches share a common principle: If data does not come directly from the real world, it must come from a realistic model of the world.
Downsides and dangers
It is also important to remember that while synthetic data can be useful, it is not a panacea. Synthetic data is only as reliable as the models of reality it comes from, and even the best scientific or generative models have weaknesses.
Researchers have to be careful about potential biases and inaccuracies in the data they produce. For example, researchers may simulate the home-insurance ecosystem to help detect fraud, but those simulations could embed unfair assumptions about neighborhoods or property types. The benefits of such data must be weighed against risks to fairness and equity.
Its also important to maintain a clear distinction between models and simulations on one hand and the real world on the other. Synthetic data is invaluable for training and testing AI systems, but when an AI model is deployed in the real world, its performance and safety should be proved with real, not simulated, data for both technical and ethical reasons.
Future research on synthetic data in AI is likely to face many challenges. Some are ethical, some are scientific, and others are engineering problems. As synthetic data becomes more realistic, it will be more useful for training AI, but it will also be easier to misuse. For example, increasingly realistic synthetic images can be used to create convincing deepfake videos.
I believe that researchers and AI companies should keep clear records to show which data is synthetic and why it was created. Clearly disclosing which parts of the training data are real and which are synthetic is a key aspect of responsibly producing AI models. Californias law, Generative artificial intelligence: training data transparency, set to take effect on January 1, 2026, requires AI developers to disclose if they used synthetic data in training their models.
Researchers should also study how mistakes in simulations or models can lead to bad data. Careful work will help keep synthetic data transparent, trustworthy, and reliable.
Keeping it real
Most AI systems learn by finding patterns in data. Researchers can improve their ability to do this by adding synthtic data. But AI has no sense of what is real or true. The desire to stay in touch with reality and to seek truth belongs to people, not machines. Human judgment and oversight in the use of synthetic data will remain essential for the future.
The next time you use a cool AI feature on your smartphone, think about whether synthetic data might have played a role. Our AIs may learn from synthetic data, but reality remains the ultimate source of our knowledge and the final judge of our creations.
Ambuj Tewari is a professor of statistics at the University of Michigan.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
