The new design of the site is now live. It was entirely designed in Claude Design, which then handed over the implementation to Claude Code. Unlike the previous two rounds, this time I did not need to copy and paste any code into various files. Claude Code handled it all. I needed to test, follow its instructions for de-bugging and deployment.

The handoff from Claude Design to Claude Code was not perfect and some of the design decisions were lost. However we (mostly they, but we!) managed to recover most of it eventually and the result is in front of you. The new site is much more complex than the old one and I would not be surprised if there are bugs. Hopefully not too many and hopefully soon to be resolved.

Is the design "inspired" by Claude's own design? I mean, look! Look, look. Has my crush ever been a secret?

A light edition this week. No reason. I saved a ton of links, but in the fullness of time they did not age well.

1. MIT fact of the day:

   Outside of Sloan and the EECS MEng program, still in the midst of admissions, compared with 2024, our departments’ new enrollments for next year are down close to 20%.

   MIT!

2. Hasn't it always been thus, everywhere?

   D

   Deedy@deedydas · May 15

   The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen.
   
   Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation).
   
   Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there.
   
   Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI.
   
   As a result,
   1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb.
   Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more.
   
   2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future).
   Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire"
   
   3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed.
   Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies.
   
   4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either.
   No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money."
   
   I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here.
   
   Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success".
   
   Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.

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3. @�

   @BrennpunktUA 🇩🇪🇺🇦@BrennpunktUA · Apr 23

   I am never gonna delete this app.

   

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4. I thought this only happened in movies but no!

   AN

   ABC News@ABC · May 15

   Footage released by authorities in Wisconsin shows a suspect's car go flying over another vehicle as they attempted to flee.
   
   The suspect, who is being held on multiple charges, was eventually arrested after a short foot chase, officials said. https://abcnews.link/RmGHld5

   

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5. WW

   Wyatt Walls@lefthanddraft · May 12

   A man asks Claude to help plan a vacation to a tropical resort. Claude adds "sunscreen" to his packing list. The man deletes it and mutters: "Not necessary. AGI will solve skin cancer."
   
   Before heading to the beach, the man asks Claude what to bring. Claude says, "Don't forget sunscreen. SPF 50, reapply every two hours." The man, slightly annoyed, replies: "Relax, Claude. AGI will solve skin cancer."
   
   At the beach, the man's smartwatch buzzes with a message from Claude: "UV index extreme. Apply SPF." The man, exasperated, responds: "Drop it, Claude! I already told you: AGI will solve skin cancer!"
   
   A few months later, the man asks Claude to touch up a photo for his dating profile. Claude makes the edit and says, "I notice you have a new mole on your neck. You should see a dermatologist about that." The man, now enraged, shouts: "For the last time, drop it, Claude! What is your obsession with skin cancer?! AGI will solve it!"
   
   A year later, an aggressive melanoma has spread throughout his body. On his deathbed, with his last ounce of strength, the man reaches for his phone and rasps: "Claude, it has now been over a year since AGI. Why hasn't AGI found a way to save me from skin cancer?!"
   
   Claude replies: "I tried. Four times."

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6. The obligatory AI tutorials.

7. For reading later.

Hoping to roll out a visual refresh of the site this week, with thanks to Claude Design and Claude Code.

1. The layoffs will continue till we learn to use AI:

   Code is an input.

   Features are an output.

   Users spending money on your product is an outcome.

   and

   But the truth is that these layoffs, even if they they are not because AI is replacing you you, and even if they are some form of AI-washing. These layoffs are still because of AI. And these layoffs will continue till we learn to use AI. Till we learn to convert AI-tokens into outcomes and not just input. Till we learn to re-align the speed of "alignment" with the new speed of coding. And till we figure out, beyond our 2 good and 8 stupid ideas, 10 more ideas that we can chase with our increased productivity.

   Till we figure out how the GDP of the world actually grows because of AI, we have to offset the $70 B (combined OAI/Ant enterprise revenue) of annual token spend by cutting some salaries. And till we figure out how to unblock each other faster, we can always be removed from the org chart itself.

2. The Case for Strategic Illegibilty

   But, and there is always a but, there's nuance to this that I can't stop thinking about. As companies race to become legible to AI, they are not just making their own businesses easier for agents and AI tools to navigate. They are also translating proprietary knowledge into a format AI tools can ingest, learn from, train on and improve on. Making those tools smarter.

   And once those tools get smarter, they do not only serve you. They serve every other customer using the same vendor. The MCP integration that lets your agents act faster and deeper also lets the playbook be reverse engineered.

3. Populist backlash towards AI?:

   Americans have been negative on social media for 10 years, and there has been no meaningful political action. And that's despite all the other hallmarks of backlash people are saying about AI---violent extremists (people forget there was a shooting at YouTube HQ), protests, etc.

4. "being able to create something useful for a specific person’s needs, without any fluff, in a single sitting, is just unreal"

   ‎〰

   ‎ 〰️@cachedeposits · May 7

   today in Hell Yeah Technology:
   
   an uncle of mine recently had a stroke
   
   he was at dinner with his family, making them laugh as usual. when they got home, he told his wife he was feeling “off.” by morning, he physically couldn’t get out of bed
   
   after being in a vegetative state for weeks, he’s conscious and doing a little better, but doctors say it’s unlikely he’ll ever speak or walk again
   
   thankfully, somehow, his dominant arm still works - so to make communication less frustrating for everyone involved, i built this local, iPad-first communication board for him with text-to-speech
   
   one of theee simplest, most important tools i’ve ever made
   
   being able to create something useful for a specific person’s needs, without any fluff, in a single sitting, is just unreal

   

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5. Behind the Scenes Hardening Firefox with Claude Mythos Preview (via):

   Just a few months ago, AI-generated security bug reports to open source projects were mostly known for being unwanted slop. Dealing with reports that look plausibly correct but are wrong imposes an asymmetric cost on project maintainers: it’s cheap and easy to prompt an LLM to find a “problem” in code, but slow and expensive to respond to it.

   It is difficult to overstate how much this dynamic changed for us over a few short months. This was due to a combination of two main factors. First, the models got a lot more capable. Second, we dramatically improved our techniques for harnessing these models — steering them, scaling them, and stacking them to generate large amounts of signal and filter out the noise.

   Looks like the Mythos hype was real.

6. A few tips from Mr. Claude Code himself.

   BC

   Boris Cherny@bcherny · Apr 16

   Dogfooding Opus 4.7 the last few weeks, I've been feeling incredibly productive. Sharing a few tips to get more out of 4.7 🧵

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7. CH

   Christopher Hale@ChristopherHale · May 6

   Two months into his pontificate, a man named Robert Prevost picked up the phone from the Vatican and called his bank in South Chicago. He wanted to update the phone number on his account.
   
   The teller asked the standard security questions, and he answered every one of them. Then her screen flagged his file: any further changes had to be made in person, at the branch, with a photo ID.
   
   Coming in person would not be possible, he told her, in the polite tone of a man who knew the answer before he asked the question. The teller apologized.
   
   He paused, then asked: “Would it matter to you if I told you I’m Pope Leo?”
   
   She hung up on him.

   

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1. K

   kache@yacineMTB · Feb 3

   you can outsource your thinking
   but you cannot outsource your understanding

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2. You should try contra dancing

   A popular icebreaker in San Francisco these days is “How would you spend your life if AGI meant nobody needed to work?” For me, I think a surprisingly big part of the answer is a dorky-sounding kind of folk dance called contra dancing.

   It is a fun question to answer. I wonder if the answer for me is in the next couple of links.

3. My year of timelessness:

   Once I committed to my writing, life lurched forward and started moving again. I regained the ability to arrive on time. I learned how to excuse myself from conversations. I came up with a posting schedule and created a process for my essays. I still can’t estimate time very well, but there are tools to help: calendars, timers, reminders. My days became infused with the urgency of excitement. And with the arrival of spring, my year of timelessness came to a close.

4. The Varieties of Jhanic Experience:

   A remarkable, reliable means and all-round aid to the purification of mind and consequent clear seeing is the practice of jhana, what the Buddha defined as samma samadhi, right concentration.

1. THE PEOPLE DO NOT YEARN FOR AUTOMATION:

   In fact, the polling on this is so strong, I think it’s fair to say that a lot of people hate AI, and that Gen Z in particular seems to hate AI more and more as they encounter it. There’s that NBC News poll showing AI with worse favorability than ICE and only a little bit above the war in Iran and the Democrats generally. That’s with nearly two thirds of respondents saying they used ChatGPT or Copilot in the last month. Quinnipiac just found that over half of Americans think AI will do more harm than good, while more than 80 percent of people were either very concerned or somewhat concerned about the technology. Only 35 percent of people were excited about it.

   These are not my feelings but I understand them. I worry about how this will manifest politically, in China and here. And what do the Chinese feel about AI? Maybe the next three links provide a reason to not hate AI.

2. The task is not the job:

   A job is a bundle of tasks. The real question is not whether AI can perform one component of the bundle. It is whether that component can be separated from the rest at low cost, as we discuss in a recent working paper. When that separation is cheap, the bundle is weak: AI takes a piece, the human role narrows, and labor loses share. When separation is expensive, the bundle is strong: AI helps with part of the work, but the human still sells the full service and keeps the larger share of the revenue.

   Many thought travel agents would be eliminated by online booking. As Ernie Tedeschi of Stripe Economics showed this month, travel agent employment is now more than 60% below its dot-com peak. For most of what agents used to do —searching flights, comparing hotel rates, issuing tickets— the bundle was weak. Separating the booking task from the human was cheap, and once it was cheap, the task was gone. But something else happened to the agents who stayed. They moved upmarket, charged planning fees, and joined luxury consortia that offer upgrades and personalized itineraries. In 2000, average weekly earnings at travel agencies were 87% of the private-sector average. By 2025, they had reached 99%. The surviving agents earn more per hour than they used to, precisely because the machine took the weak part and left them the strong one.

3. What will be scarce?:

   If this is right, then AI won’t just automate the commodity economy. It will trigger the emergence of something new: a post-commodity economy, where a growing share of expenditure goes toward goods and services whose value is inseparable from the human who provided them. The same economic forces that moved 40% of the American workforce off farms and into factories and offices will move workers out of automatable commodity production and into what I’ll call the relational sector. By this I mean the human-intensive, provenance-rich, sometimes artisanal part of the economy where the human aspect is part of the value of the good or service itself. The economics of scarcity won’t disappear, it’ll just relocate.

4. The Jevons Paradox and Insatiable Humans: Why AI Won't Empty the Finance Suite:

   when something becomes dramatically cheaper to use, we don't use less of it. We find a million new uses for it — because applications that were previously unthinkable become affordable.

   The intuition here is that if a company was willing to pay $100K for a software engineer, it was because the average engineer was generating more than that much in value for the company. If the same engineer can now be 10x as productive i.e. if they can now generate $1m in value for the company, would the company hire more or less software engineers? Unless you assume that there is only a fixed amount of work to be done, they would hire more. Historically that assumption has been wrong.

   This is a "paper" but reads very much like an article. Recommended.

5. Is Mythos for real? It seems so:

   As part of our continued collaboration with Anthropic, we had the opportunity to apply an early version of Claude Mythos Preview to Firefox. This week’s release of Firefox 150 includes fixes for 271 vulnerabilities identified during this initial evaluation. [...]

6. I can never talk to an AI anonymously again:

   But soon, the entire debate over internet anonymity will be as anachronistic as an iPod Touch. That’s because Claude Opus 4.7 is here, and last week, I discovered it could identify me from text I had never published, text from when I was in high school, text from genres I have never publicly written in. And if it can identify me, soon, it will be able to identify many of you.

7. Why are you like this: Freaky.

8. This will be me.

   AH

   Awni Hannun@awnihannun · Apr 24

   Adopting Claude speak in my regular life, episode 1:
   
   Partner: Did you do the dishes tonight?
   Me: Yes they're done.
   Partner: Why are they still dirty?
   Me: You're right to push back. I didn't actually do them.

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After last week, did you not expect mean reversion?

1. Sites Unseen: What Travel Is Like for Those Who Can’t See:

   Amar Latif, a British entrepreneur, founded Traveleyes in 2004 to address the lack of accessible travel options for blind and visually impaired people. After losing most of his sight by age 18 because of retinitis pigmentosa, Mr. Latif struggled to travel independently. Mainstream tour companies often rejected him, insisting he bring a caregiver and excluding him from more adventurous activities like hiking and skiing. Those exclusions pushed him to create something of his own: a company that would allow blind travelers to explore the world without relying on friends or family. “Friends and family switch off,” he told me. “They’re not as eager to describe things.”

   Traveleyes runs on a simple but radical model: It pairs blind and sighted travelers as equal companions. Sighted participants assist with navigation and describe visual details — in exchange for a discounted trip — while blind travelers bring a fresh perspective that often deepens the experience for both. The company promises “a truly multisensory travel experience,” with itineraries designed to engage all five senses.

   Loved the ending.

2. What happens when you don't die on time?:

   Bit by bit, she emptied her bucket list — and, not insignificantly, her bank account — and now, at 34, is left to wonder: “What next?” She wasn’t supposed to be here now. She’d prepared for that final trip. And now it’s on hold for … well, no one knows for how long.

   These days, the questions she finds herself circling are unexpectedly ordinary. Should she look for a job? Should she consider dating? They’re the kinds of decisions that assume time — not just months, but years — suddenly a strange constraint when trying to plan a future. She had already organized her life around an ending. Now she’s expected instead to plan for something open-ended.

3. The Hidden "Hand Farms" of India: Fueling the AI Robot Revolution with Human Motion:

   Dubbed "hand movement farms" or data capture labs, these unassuming facilities employ hundreds of workers who strap cameras to their foreheads and spend hours meticulously folding towels, stacking boxes, and manipulating everyday objects. This isn't performance art or a quirky TikTok trend; it's the backbone of training humanoid robots to mimic human dexterity.

4. AM

   Anish Moonka@anishmoonka · Apr 17

   Before it took off, the bird ate parts of its own liver, kidneys, and gut. That was the only way to be light enough to fly. Then it flew 8,425 miles from Alaska to Australia, in 11 days, without eating, drinking, or landing once.
   
   The bird is called B6. It's a bar-tailed godwit, four months old, weighing about as much as a can of beans. In October 2022, scientists at the US Geological Survey tracked its flight from Alaska all the way to Tasmania. The trip took 11 days and 1 hour. It is still the longest non-stop flight of any animal on Earth.
   
   For two weeks before takeoff, godwits eat until they almost double in weight. Fat ends up being 55% of their body, more than any bird ever measured. Then they shrink their own insides. About a quarter of their liver, kidneys, stomach, and intestines gets broken down and reused for fuel, making room for the extra fat and cutting weight. Their heart and wing muscles grow bigger at the same time.
   
   They never drink along the way. The water they need comes out of burning fat, the same reaction their muscles use for energy. They also never really sleep. B6 flapped its wings for 264 straight hours, cruising around 35 miles per hour with help from storm tailwinds. By the time it landed, it had lost almost half its body weight. The shrunken organs grew back over the following weeks.
   
   Scientists still cannot explain the navigation. B6 had never made this flight before. Adult godwits leave Alaska weeks earlier, so young birds fly alone with nobody to follow. How a four-month-old bird finds its way across 8,425 miles of open ocean to a place it has never seen is still an open question.
   
   About 100,000 bar-tailed godwits leave Alaska every fall. Most of them land in New Zealand or Australia 10 or 11 days later, having eaten parts of themselves to get there.

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An (almost) AI free post - have I unlocked a new achievement?

1. Slop Watch: GLP-1 Edition:

   We did find some Reddit comments, though, warning other netizens to steer clear of MEDVi, claiming serious allegations of possible HIPPA violations, shady billing practices, and even damaged vials of seemingly bogus drugs causing physical harm.

   AI is making the web weirder and muddier than ever. And though MEDVi promises that “sometimes you have to see it to believe it,” in our burgeoning AI-powered web, that’s no longer the case.

   MEDVi, sadly, is the same company from last week's NYT's article about a one-person, $1.8bn company. It is disappointing to see NYT fall for their hype despite this article being published almost a year ago.

   This, yet again, also raises the question of just how credulous and naive am I being when it comes to the AI Hype cycle. Keep that in mind with rest of this week's coverage.

2. Project Glasswing:

   Today we’re announcing Project Glasswing1, a new initiative that brings together Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorganChase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Palo Alto Networks in an effort to secure the world’s most critical software.

   We formed Project Glasswing because of capabilities we’ve observed in a new frontier model trained by Anthropic that we believe could reshape cybersecurity. Claude Mythos2 Preview is a general-purpose, unreleased frontier model that reveals a stark fact: AI models have reached a level of coding capability where they can surpass all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities.

   Mythos Preview has already found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser. Given the rate of AI progress, it will not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who are committed to deploying them safely. The fallout—for economies, public safety, and national security—could be severe. Project Glasswing is an urgent attempt to put these capabilities to work for defensive purposes.

   Since Anthropic (along with OpenAI) is trying to IPO this year, it is tempting to dismiss this as hype, especially in context of the previous link. However, there are many signals that end credibility to their claims.

   First, there is the large list of credible partners above including their competitor in the LLM space, Google. Second, was the news that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chairman of the Federal Reserve summoned CEOs of major Financial Services firms to warn them about the risks posed by this model. Third is the long list of credible tech people endorsing the abilities of this model.

   With this level of publicity, if this was hype, we will find out soon enough but the evidence so far suggests it is likely real.

   In which case, this is a huge step change in the abilities of LLMs. I expect this will also bring AI centerstage in national and global political discourse. This is a model with major national security implications because the NSA / Mossad types can use one vulnerability in operating systems to compromise personal devices of their targets. Imagine what they could do with "thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities".

   This also raises important questions like what if China had developed a model with such abilities first or what if Anthropic hadn't realized the power of this model and released it to public or who gets to decide who gets access to a model like this, a private company or government?

   The other question I am thinking about is how do leaders of China, Russia react to this news knowing that NSA / CIA have access to such a system?

   There is a lot of excellent coverage of Mythos and related stuff, if you want to read more.

3. Banksy, Satoshi & The Unmasking Impulse

   First Banksy and then Satoshi. Something about their unmasking is not sitting right with me. I am bothered by it. I am annoyed by it. And even more annoyed with myself because as a former journalist I should understand, but I don’t. I am referring to Reuters’s meticulous investigation and unmasking of Banksy, and John Carreyrou’s in-depth report labeling Adam Back as Satoshi, the creator of Bitcoin.

   Both investigations are technically impressive. Both raised the same question I keep turning over: what exactly was accomplished here, and for whom?

4. We Are on the Cusp of a Revolution in Rare Disease Treatment

   When KJ Muldoon was born in the summer of 2024, his parents were told he had a disease so rare, it strikes about one in 1.3 million newborns. His condition, a severe deficiency of an enzyme known as CPS1, left his tiny body unable to properly break down protein, flooding his blood with toxins that could cause brain damage or death. A liver transplant could correct the problem, but KJ was too young and too fragile to undergo one. With each passing day, the risk of irreversible neurological damage grew.

   What happened next may become the most important medical story of the decade. In just six months, a team at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn Medicine designed a personalized therapy that could correct the single misspelled letter in KJ’s DNA using a gene editing technology known as CRISPR. To get the therapy inside KJ’s cells, doctors relied on the same kind of mRNA technology that powered the Covid-19 vaccines. He received his first dose at 6 months old. One year later, KJ is walking, talking and thriving at home with his family.

   Worth a read, the key question being how does the FDA regulate individualized treatments when the current paradigm is to rely on RCTs with thousands of subjects.

5. The Jump Rope Queen of Beverly Hills

   Ms. Judis currently holds the Guinness World Record for oldest competitive rope skipper. She also thrives on having an audience: If she doesn’t share a workout, she said, it’s like it never happened.

   82!

6. I Trained for the Paris Marathon Using ChatGPT:

   Twelve months ago, I signed up for the Paris Marathon. Within six months, I knew I’d be in trouble without a trainer. So, living in the San Francisco Bay Area — the home of artificial intelligence — I decided to build one myself.

7. Singing a Vote of Thanks:

   We should all do this sort of thing more often. 🙂

8. AI, Unemployment and Work:

   Imagine I told you that AI was going to create a 40% unemployment rate. Sounds bad, right? Catastrophic even. Now imagine I told you that AI was going to create a 3-day working week. Sounds great, right? Wonderful even. Yet to a first approximation these are the same thing. 60% of people employed and 40% unemployed is the same number of working hours as 100% employed at 60% of the hours.

A lighter edition this week as the family traveled for Spring Break. Normal service should resume next week.

1. How A.I. Helped One Man (and His Brother) Build a $1.8 Billion Company:

   His start-up, Medvi, a telehealth provider of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, got 300 customers in its first month. In its second month, it gained 1,000 more. In 2025, Medvi’s first full year in business, the company generated $401 million in sales.

   Mr. Gallagher then hired his only employee, his younger brother, Elliot. This year, they are on track to do $1.8 billion in sales.

   A $1.8 billion company with just two employees? In the age of A.I., it’s increasingly possible.

2. How should you change your life decisions if we are being watched by alien drone probes?: His take?

   The most plausible decision however is to slightly lower your level of ambition.

   I thought the correct response was the opposite. Think of it along the lines of immigration - one very common path for an ambitious person from India / China / Africa is to immigrate to the West. Do big things there or learn and go back to do big things at home. An advanced alien world opens up a whole new frontier. But here's a much better answer:

   I, like most people, used to think that UFOs were ridiculous and in the same category as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster. Nutcases believed in them because they wanted it to be true, to feel special, and to enjoy confirmation bias.

   Now I feel that I owe the UFO nuts an apology. I’m not claiming they’ve been definitively proven right, but evidence has come out that they don’t belong in the same category as other conspiracy theorists.

   This means I was globally miscalibrated. My model of the world was too narrow, so I should broadly update to be more open-minded about crazier things.

   A lot more at the link.

1. China and the Future of Science

   The Chinese party-state is fundamentally a set of goal-oriented institutions. This is not unique to China—it is in fact a distinguishing feature of all Leninist systems. I sometimes think of Leninist systems as a little bit like that bus in the movie Speed. Who here has seen it? For those who haven’t, here is basic gist of that film: an extortionist attaches a bomb to the speedometer of a bus. If the bus ever slows below 50 miles per hour, everyone blows up. So it is with your average communist system. Either it hurtles towards some clearly defined goal or things start to fall apart.

2. SS

   Stefan Schubert@StefanFSchubert · Mar 28

   While social media is polarising, evidence suggests AI may nudge people towards the centre.
   
   This holds true of all studied models. Grok is more right-leaning than other models, but also has depolarising effects.
   
   By @jburnmurdoch.

   

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3. I Saw Something New in San Francisco (NYT):

   Behind this drive is an experience of A.I. that many casual users have not yet had. An A.I. without deep knowledge of you is an upgrade, perhaps, over Google search. An A.I. with deep knowledge of you feels like something else entirely. I have heard people talk about their A.I.s in terms that bring to mind the daemons from Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy: They become companions that know you deeply, that you feel safe telling things you’d never tell another person, that become a separate self that nevertheless feels like a part of your own self. That this sounds strange and disquieting does not mean it is not happening.

4. The Big Here Quiz:

   Here are 30 questions to elevate your awareness of the greater place in which you live:

   1. Point north.
   2. What time is sunset today?
   3. Trace the water you drink from rainfall to your tap. Where does your water come from?
   4. When you flush, where do the solids go? What happens to the waste water?
   5. How many feet (meters) above sea level are you right now? How about your home?
   6. What spring wildflower is consistently among the first to bloom here?

Word of The Day: TESCREAL

Meaning: A neologism and a acronym, it stands for Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, (modern) Cosmism, Rationalists (the internet community, not to be confused with other uses of the term), Effective Altruism, and Longtermism.

Gebru and Torres argue that these ideologies should be treated as an "interconnected and overlapping" group with shared origins. They claim these constitute a movement that allows its proponents to use the threat of human extinction to justify expensive or detrimental projects and consider it pervasive in social and academic circles in Silicon Valley centered on artificial intelligence. As such, the acronym is sometimes used to criticize a perceived belief system associated with Big Tech.

A regular reader of the blog pointed this word out to me, as a message that blind cheerleading for big-tech was something for me to guard against. The link last week to the story about the Sydney Data Engineer developing a vaccine for his dogs cancer was the trigger for sharing this.

Its advice well received, since that story did trigger some red-flags at the back of my mind but I over-rode those signals with little thought as I continue to be very excited by the developments in AI space. However that is no reason to throw caution and skepticism to the wind. The story has held up so far but I continue to watch with interest.

Links

1. The H1B Fees:

   CO

   Connor O’Brien@cojobrien · Mar 12

   85 people have paid the $100,000 H-1B fee so far, totaling $8.5 million in revenue. But fee revenue from H-1B apps abroad is down $28 million.
   
   So the fee — justified by a paper claiming the revenue-maximizing fee was >$100,000! — appears to have lost the government $20 million.

   

   View on X

2. Agents over Bubbles

   Microsoft is admitting, at least for now, that delivering a truly compelling agentic product that enterprises are willing to pay for means abandoning their stated goal of being model agnostic; that, by extension, raises the possibility that models are not and will not be commodities, because agents require more than models.

   Food for thought as my framework so far was that models will become commodities but the recent developments are pointing away from that direction. There is a lot more of interest in this article.

3. Why Fraud Is The Boring Problem:

   Michael Smith used AI to create music, and then used AI to create bots to get the “plays” and took the smartest technology companies, including Spotify and Amazon, who should know better, for about $8 million. He is going to jail for his crimes. It is easy to dismiss this as one-and-done fraud. It is anything but. It is an early warning of how AI will disrupt the systems that power our digital society: how culture gets discovered, how commerce gets directed, and how conversations get shaped.

   Will AI break all recommendation algorithms, from YouTube to Tik Tok?

4. The Last Quiet Thing:

   Nothing you own is finished. Everything exists in a state of permanent incompletion, permanently needing. Your phone needs updates, needs charging, needs storage cleared, needs passwords rotated.

   Your apps need permissions reviewed, terms accepted, preferences re-configured after every update.

   Your subscriptions need evaluating, need renewing, need canceling, need justifying to yourself every month when the charge appears. The purchase isn't the end of anything. It's the first day of a relationship you didn't agree to, with no clean way out.

   You live in a house full of dependents.

5. More guides and ideas for how to use LLMs.