🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 186

April 17th, 2025

Apr 18, 2025

Episode 186 — April 17th, 2025 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/186

Contributors to this issue: Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, MK, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Justin Quimby

Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Alex Komoroske, Ben Mathes, Chris Butler, Dart Lindsley, Dimitri Glazkov, Jasen Robillard, Jon Lebensold, Julka Almquist, Kamran Hakiman, Lisie Lillianfeld, Melanie Kahl, Robinson Eaton, Samuel Arbesman, Scott Schaffter, Spencer Pitman, Wesley Beary

We’re a ragtag band of systems thinkers who have been dedicating our early mornings to finding new lenses to help you make sense of the complex world we live in. This newsletter is a collection of patterns we’ve noticed in recent weeks.

“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”
— Sun Tzu

🦷✨ Hope with teeth

A product leader is pushing a bold redesign meant to unify a fragmented product. The team is energized; the story is compelling. But key dependencies are unresolved, cross-team support is uneven, and it’s not yet clear if leadership will protect the space needed to see it through.

In challenging situations, hope can be a trap: false optimism that papers over gritty reality. But it can also have teeth. It sees the risks clearly, understands the inertia, and still says: there’s a path forward. This is a variety of hope that’s earned through overcoming friction, not giving in to fantasy. Mind over matter… as long as the system is actually willing to change.

And that’s the key difference. Real hope requires structural responsiveness and mechanisms to enact real change. The ability to grind and chew through organizations’ and people’s natural resistance to change. False optimism doesn’t. Suppose you’re calling people into a transformative vision, but the organization isn’t shifting priorities, reallocating power, or making space for change. In that case, it’s not hope you’re offering—it’s belief without agency.

This pattern often shows up in ambitious orgs that are great at storytelling. The pitch is clean. The future is vivid. But when pressure mounts, delays begin to appear: tradeoffs are deferred and hard decisions are postponed. The transformation quietly stalls. And those who believed most deeply often feel it first.

Hope with teeth looks different. It’s honest about what change will cost. It invites skepticism, not just enthusiasm. It doesn’t require certainty, but it does require alignment. In practice, that means acknowledging constraints, naming the costs, and committing to real action.

How can you tell if you are offering false hope or hope with teeth? A handy gut check is to ask if the people doing the work are being given the power to enact the change they’re being told to create. If not, then even the most well-intentioned optimism becomes a trap.

False optimism is easy. It moves fast. It feels good—until it doesn’t. Hope with teeth is slower, heavier, and riskier. But it’s also the only form of hope that’s strong enough to carry real change.

🛣️🚩 Signposts

Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.

🚏🧑‍🎓 AI “students” are enrolling in community college classes to steal financial aid

US state governments hand out scholarships and financial aid, such as Pell Grants, to college students, and scammers have been taking advantage of this by enrolling legions of AI bots as “students” in community colleges (which typically accept all applicants). These bots submit AI-generated work to appear legitimate, sticking around just long enough for the aid payments to hit. In California, an estimated 25% of college applicants are now bots; the figure was 21% in 2021, so generative AI seems to be boosting a pre-existing trend. In 2024, Californian bots stole $11 million in financial aid, though this is still a tiny fraction of the overall $3.2 billion in aid disbursed in the Golden State’s community colleges last year. (Community college bots have also been reported in Minnesota, and probably elsewhere across the US.)

🚏🚁 Ukraine is making drones without Chinese parts — and they’re cheaper

China is reportedly restricting exports of drone components, so Ukrainian manufacturers have started building these components in Ukraine, including motors, cameras, propellers, and radio control systems (building blocks like chips are still imported, but they’re commodities that can be sourced from many other countries.) This in-house manufacturing “removes a critical dependency” from the supply chain, lets Ukraine customize military drones based on their needs, and is ultimately yielding drone components that are 20–50% cheaper than parts from China.

🚏🍗 Researchers grew the largest lab-grown meat piece in history

Food scientists have grown large quantities of meat in the lab for over a decade, but that’s typically in the form of many small shreds that are glued together with a binder. Generating a single large piece (which “helps better to mimic the natural structure and texture of conventional meat”) is a lot harder due to the need to ferry nutrients around a large volume. A team of scientists in Tokyo thus made “an extraordinary engineering achievement” by growing a single piece of chicken about the size of a chicken nugget — believed to be the largest chunk of lab-grown meat ever — using a clever circulatory system that uses a matrix of “semipermeable, hollow fibers.” We are still a long way from creating the “Chicken Little” of the 1952 sci-fi novel The Space Merchants.

🚏🎵 AI songs make up 18% of tracks uploaded to a music streaming service

Deezer, a French music-streaming service, reports that 18% of songs uploaded to the platform are “fully generated by AI” — that’s 20,000 AI songs per day, about double the figure from four months ago. Deezer says it has a detection tool to pick out these AI songs, and it’s trying to crack down on songs from popular AI music tools like Suno and Udio. (Relatedly, major record labels have been slamming Suno and Udio with lawsuits for copyright infringement.)

📖⏳ Worth your time

Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.

Useful Tradeoffs Are Multi-Dimensional (Lethain) — Argues that, when strategizing, we often get stuck debating where on a one-dimensional tradeoff spectrum we want to sit (e.g. deploy quickly or test thoroughly?). But “you can usually make a tradeoff that doesn’t disappoint anyone by introducing a new dimension”: for instance, manually flippable feature flags let you both deploy quickly and test manually. The key is to decouple the mechanisms that you think are in tension, since they’re usually not mutually exclusive. (This is reminiscent of the concept of a blue-ocean strategy.)
Nintendo Has Moved Beyond Specs (The Verge) — Argues that the Switch 2 is just the latest example of Nintendo’s successful “blue ocean strategy” for winning in the competitive console gaming market. Instead of competing on graphics quality, Nintendo focuses on clever new form factors and fun, family-friendly games to expand the market, reaching new gamers who don’t care much about graphics.
The Binary Butterfly Effect (James Quixley / YouTube) — Uses modular arithmetic and binary expansions of floating-point numbers to build up intuition about how, in chaotic systems, small changes in initial conditions can lead to wildly different outcomes when you look far enough forward.
Modernity Viewed from the Other End (Venkatesh Rao) — Looks at the history of eastern civilizations through a horse-centric lens, where, for example, the Urdu words for politics (siyasat) and government (riyasat) derive from the word for “horsemanship.” Rao even argues that horse culture, not Islam, was the connective tissue that bound Asia together during the Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman empires, and the Silk Road is best seen as the Silk Horse Road, in which the horses themselves were the main commodity, and silk a mere luxury diversion.

🔍📆 Lens of the week

Introducing new ways to see the world and new tools to add to your mental arsenal.

This week’s lens: Interpretive Transparency.

A product manager shares with their team that a key feature has been delayed. Instead of just stating the delay, they walk through the organizational dynamics that led to it—conflicting stakeholder priorities, shifting OKRs, and a last-minute leadership override. The team doesn't just learn what happened; they understand why, and what it signals about the broader system they’re working within.

Interpretive transparency goes beyond simply providing information. It means offering context, implications, and meaning, especially when you hold privileged insight. It’s not just telling people what’s true, but helping them make sense of what it means for them, within the more extensive system they’re a part of. This can change how the team works and collaborates, helping them better achieve their goals in the future.

In complex or fragile systems, withholding context, even unintentionally, distorts decision-making and erodes trust. Sharing facts without interpretation can create a false sense of clarity, or worse, make others responsible for risks they can’t fully see. Interpretive transparency recognizes that understanding is as much about narrative as it is about data.

So when you find yourself holding important information, ask: Am I simply informing, or am I helping others understand? In moments of uncertainty, interpretive transparency is one of the few tools we have to restore shared clarity and shared agency.

🌀🗞 The FLUX Review