1. CG

   Cardiff Garcia@CardiffGarcia · Jun 26

   A truly striking chart in @jburnmurdoch's latest (link next):

   

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   One of the most important charts of the year. Growth, for the lack of a better word, is good.

2. Chloe vs. History via MR

   New business models enabled by AI starting to come into focus.

3. AK

   Andrej Karpathy@karpathy · Feb 10

   # on shortification of "learning"
   
   There are a lot of videos on YouTube/TikTok etc. that give the appearance of education, but if you look closely they are really just entertainment. This is very convenient for everyone involved : the people watching enjoy thinking they are learning (but actually they are just having fun). The people creating this content also enjoy it because fun has a much larger audience, fame and revenue. But as far as learning goes, this is a trap. This content is an epsilon away from watching the Bachelorette. It's like snacking on those "Garden Veggie Straws", which feel like you're eating healthy vegetables until you look at the ingredients.
   
   Learning is not supposed to be fun. It doesn't have to be actively not fun either, but the primary feeling should be that of effort. It should look a lot less like that "10 minute full body" workout from your local digital media creator and a lot more like a serious session at the gym. You want the mental equivalent of sweating. It's not that the quickie doesn't do anything, it's just that it is wildly suboptimal if you actually care to learn.
   
   I find it helpful to explicitly declare your intent up front as a sharp, binary variable in your mind. If you are consuming content: are you trying to be entertained or are you trying to learn? And if you are creating content: are you trying to entertain or are you trying to teach? You'll go down a different path in each case. Attempts to seek the stuff in between actually clamp to zero.
   
   So for those who actually want to learn. Unless you are trying to learn something narrow and specific, close those tabs with quick blog posts. Close those tabs of "Learn XYZ in 10 minutes". Consider the opportunity cost of snacking and seek the meal - the textbooks, docs, papers, manuals, longform. Allocate a 4 hour window. Don't just read, take notes, re-read, re-phrase, process, manipulate, learn.
   
   And for those actually trying to educate, please consider writing/recording longform, designed for someone to get "sweaty", especially in today's era of quantity over quality. Give someone a real workout. This is what I aspire to in my own educational work too. My audience will decrease. The ones that remain might not even like it. But at least we'll learn something.

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4. Breakthroughs in biology

   SpudCell is a synthetic cell made by scientists at the University of Minnesota. It was created in a lab from lifeless chemicals but can perform most of the same functions as living cells. It eats, grows and reproduces, passing along its genetic material to future generations.

   and

   We want to share an exciting update that we have generated the first early human egg cells (‘primary oocytes’) derived from stem cells. After performing a simple blood draw, we converted blood cells into stem cells, and then coaxed those stem cells into becoming miniature human ovaries that contain the early eggs.

5. WR

   Weave Robotics@weaverobotics · Jul 1

   Today, we’re launching our home robot Isaac 1.
   
   Isaac 1 deliveries will begin this fall.
   
   Order yours below.

   

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   I am optimistic because unlike the rest, this doesn't promise the world - putting things in their place and folding laundry. $8K.

6. How to ask for help from people who don't know you

   No matter what you’re doing, from building a civilization on Mars to getting a summer internship, you will have to ask people for help. Yet, most people get this crucial skill wrong. They put themselves at the front of their request, when they should be putting the other person there. But isn’t getting help just charisma and luck? No, asking for help is a skill, not an attribute you are assigned at birth like green eyes.

7. Learning to Replicate Expert Judgment in Financial Tasks

   Frontier models we tested on struggle with relatively simple financial tasks, and model advances don’t improve performance much. In contrast, we’ve shown that high-quality proprietary datasets labeled by expert investors and used for fine-tuning produce custom models that exceed frontier performance on our tasks. We have found that this outcome holds true well beyond the six tasks we’ve discussed in this post.

   Aside from higher accuracy, custom models are also substantially cheaper. We expect to see more productivity gains from custom model training in the future, especially with the availability of training infrastructure like Tinker that enables rapid experimentation.

   Our results show the possibility of a future of differentiated intelligence, where custom models tuned to specific organizational needs outperform frontier models.

8. AP

   Arindam Paul@arindam___paul · Jul 2

   As someone who sells mixer grinders, let me tell you that Tamil Nadu is the largest market for grinders. And by a long long way
   
   And grinder is often misspelt in search. Liking “ciling fan”
   
   So I don’t think this graphic can conclude that TN has the highest use of some same sex dating app just coz the app is called “grindr”

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9. Happy Semiquincentennial to those who celebrate!

   GO

   Gain of Fauci@DschlopesIsBack · Jul 3

   Washington’s Dream For America 🇺🇸😂

   

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1. One Blood Test. Fifty Cancers. The Screening Revolution That Could Save Millions of Lives.

   Cancer is now the number one killer of Americans over the age of 50. Not heart disease. Cancer. And the reason it kills so many isn’t that we can’t fight it. It’s that we don’t see it coming.

   and

   Galleri captures cell-free DNA from a standard blood draw — a single vial — and sequences the methylation patterns across the genome using next-generation sequencing. An AI algorithm trained on massive datasets then analyzes these patterns to determine two things:

   First, whether a cancer signal is present at all.

   Second, where it’s likely coming from — which organ or tissue type is the probable source. This is called cancer signal origin prediction, and in studies, Galleri has achieved over 90% accuracy in identifying the tissue of origin.

   The test result is not a diagnosis. It is a precision compass. It tells your physician: there is a cancer signal detected, and the predicted origin is your pancreas, or your lung, or your liver. Your physician then orders targeted follow-up imaging or biopsy to confirm or rule out the finding.

2. Ending respiratory infections

   A century ago, waterborne diseases levied similar costs to those posed by respiratory viruses like colds and influenza today: endemic, periodically epidemic, and widely accepted as an inevitable feature of human life. Then, at the turn of the twentieth century, we decided they didn’t have to be. Pharmaceutical advances and clean water infrastructure made cholera, typhoid, and dysentery rare across much of the world within a matter of decades.

   Why haven’t we already seen the same kind of transformation with respiratory viruses?

   Introducing Intercept, a $500M bet to make respiratory infections like colds and flu a thing of the past.

3. The boy from Bihar: The making of Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, Indian cricket’s 15-year-old batting prodigy

   “When we took him to Patna for trials, in the whole area, the news spread that there was a small left-handed batter from Samastipur who had exceptional talent,” Jha says. “He was selected in the state Under-17 team at the age of eight-and-a-half.”

   One of the most exciting stars in all sports.

4. The State of the AI Economy

   Over the past 12 months, the AI ecosystem generated $110 billion in revenue when you remove double-counting. The growth rate is healthy. Annualizing the most recent month’s revenues indicates a $175 billion revenue run rate. These revenues are growing faster than previous IT-oriented waves, roughly three times more rapidly than the mobile or Internet waves.

1. Apple’s weird anti-nausea dots cured my car sickness

   Introduced in 2024, Apple’s Vehicle Motion Cues promise to tap into your device’s accelerometer and gyroscope to reduce or, in my case, even eliminate the motion sickness felt when trying to use an iPhone, iPad, or MacBook inside a moving vehicle.

2. Half of America Cannot Afford to Live, and Other Wrong Numbers

   Most affordability writing sorts Americans by income decile or sorts the world by service category—the costs of housing, healthcare, or childcare. We are doing something different. We are sorting Americans by the kind of trouble they are actually in. There are two groups in real trouble: a destitute tail that is small and brutally squeezed, and a much larger squeezed-talent class that is doing everything right but still cannot replicate its parents’ material life. Everyone else is fine, or fine enough, or in the kinds of trouble we are not obligated to call a crisis. The two groups need opposite remedies, and the “single homogeneous affordability crisis” framing makes that impossible to see.

3. Human Routers of Machine Words

   Often when we think we understand something and attempt to write about it, our very act of composition reveals our lack of understanding even to ourselves. Our pen writes the word “because” and suddenly stops. We thought we understood the “why” of something, but discover that we don’t. We begin a sentence with “obviously,” and then see that what we meant to write is not obvious at all. Sometimes we connect two clauses with the word “therefore,” only to then see that our chain of reasoning is defective.

4. write for one person

   Instead, I picture a specific person and I just write for them. Often this person is "me, but 3 years ago" or a good friend.

5. A frontier without an ecosystem is not stable:

   This means the real opportunity is not in picking the best model but instead in building a learning loop on top of models where human capital and token capital compound. You can offload a task, or even a job, but you can never offload your learning. The future of the firm is the ability to compound that learning across people and AI.

   This requires a new architectural approach where every business is able to build agentic systems that improve over time, while still retaining control over their IP. A company should be able to switch out a “generalist” model without losing the “company veteran” expertise built into their learning system. This is the key “test” of your control and sovereignty in the era ahead.

6. Meditation reading list. I haven't read these but hopefully will, this week.

1. DP

   Dwarkesh Patel@dwarkesh_sp · Jun 7

   In medieval times, within the arms race of ever more demonic torture devices, some sadistic genius came up with the idea of the Little Ease.
   
   This was a prison cell built so small in every dimension that a grown man could not stand upright in it nor lie down at full length nor properly sit.
   
   The pain is relentless and without relief and inflicted by one's own body. Prisoners were known to go insane within a few days. A stay at the Little Ease was considered even more cruel than the rack, the thumbscrew, and the other ghoulish machinery of the Tower of London.
   
   A breeding pig will spend her whole life in a version of that box.
   
   These are social, roaming creatures (more intelligent than dogs) who will never leave this corset of steel.
   
   They have been selectively bred to be bigger than their frames can support. Yet we put them in cells so confined that they cannot comfortably sit, and their attempts to do so (for example, by sneaking their limbs into adjacent stalls) reliably lead to fractures and sprains.
   
   They cannot sweat, yet have nothing to roll around in to cool themselves off. Except their own manure, which (contrary to the common misconception) they are so averse to (thanks to their strong sense of smell) that new sows will often suffer from constipation to avoid soiling the space from which they eat and sleep.
   
   Here is how the writer Matthew Scully described what saw at one of Smithfield’s “gestation barn”:
   
   > “Sores, tumors, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other “Vices,” as they’re called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical “vacuum” chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And “social defeat,” lots of it, in every third or fourth stall some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you … creatures beyond the power of pity to help or indifference to make more miserable, dead to the world except as heaps of flesh into which the [insemination] rod may be stuck once more and more flesh reproduced.”
   
   —
   
   The Save Our Bacon Act is trying to unroll the few state protections we have against this barbaric cruelty - for example California’s Prop 12 - which banned the sale of pork from pigs kept in gestation crates.
   
   It’s incredibly important we don’t end up with this sort of federal preemption.
   
   SOB will not only kill the most important animal welfare related laws in the US of the past decade, but more importantly, it will also restrict ALL future legislative progress (aka how the animal welfare movement has gotten its biggest wins).
   
   The Senate is currently deciding whether to add the SOB Act to the Farm Bill.
   
   With relatively little money now, we can discourage the most pivotal senators in the Ag committee from backing this amendment.
   
   Defeating this bill is even more important given the amount of philanthropic funding I expect to come online in the next year or two.
   
   It will plausibly be over 10x more expensive to repeal SOB than to prevent it from passing in the first place.
   
   All that money that could be spent transforming our society's relationship to mass animal suffering will instead have to be spent just getting us back to where we are right now.
   
   That's why money spent now fighting this bill (and I mean right NOW) is so effective.
   
   If you’re in a position to donate six figures, please DM me.

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2. GE

   Google Earth@googleearth · Jun 12

   Prepare for takeoff. ✈️ Flight simulator is now available globally on web to all users.

   

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3. Is there a pianist in the house?

   Sterling Nasa was in the audience at La La Land in Concert, a touring production where the movie – which features Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone – is projected on to a screen while a live orchestra plays the musical score in synchronisation with the film.

   The performance proceeded normally until the interval, which stretched out to 40 minutes. Then the film’s Oscar-winning composer and conductor, Justin Hurwitz, walked out alone to address the audience.

   The orchestra’s keyboardist had suddenly fallen ill. Was there by any chance a pianist in the house? And one with exceptional sight-reading skills?

4. DS

   David Sacks@DavidSacks · Jun 5

   While I’m no fan of socialism or arbitrary confiscations of wealth, I can see why Bernie Sanders’ proposal (for the government to take a 50% stake in AI companies) resonates, including with many on the right.
   
   The CEOs of the leading AI labs have told us repeatedly that they will cause massive job loss. This is not a story that I believe, nor does the data bear it out, but this is what they have told us. Similarly, they have hyped the risks of AI without putting an equal or greater emphasis on the benefits or readily available mitigations.
   
   Conservatives have another fear. The employees of the leading labs claim to be philanthropic, but what we’ve seen is massive enrichment of NGOs advancing an agenda at odds with traditional values, fueling a revolution against our cities and communities. Soros-maxxing is not charity in our book.
   
   Anthropic and OpenAI have established themselves as Public Benefit Corporations. What could be more in the public benefit than using half the wealth generated by these companies (which trained for free on the collective knowledge of humanity) to pay down the national debt? There is no ideological bias in that philanthropy.
   
   Dario and Sam have begun to walk back their claims of massive job loss, but the damage to public trust is done, and now the chickens are coming home to roost. I could almost support the Sanders proposal as a stupidity tax.
   
   There’s just one problem. Nationalization of AI will accelerate the corporate-government fusion we’re already sliding toward. Conservatives rightly fear a Central Bank Digital Currency. They ought to be even more concerned about Central Government AI — a system with even more totalistic power over information, decision-making, and human behavior.
   
   We saw how social media was weaponized to censor conservatives (including President Trump) in the last Democrat administration. The definition of “trust & safety” expanded to mean protecting the public from supposed psychological harms, micro-aggressions, and disinformation (you know, like hearing conservative ideas or true facts about Covid).
   
   That “safety” agenda as applied to AI will be vastly more powerful and Orwellian. AI won’t just moderate posts; it will curate reality — with the ability to rewrite history, enforce ideological conformity, influence policy at scale, mass surveil Americans, and condition the benefits of the many systems it controls on approved behavior.
   
   America won’t win the AI race if we beat China but end up with a CCP-style social credit system in the U.S. — and that is the danger as the government becomes more deeply involved in AI development and assumes direct ownership and control.
   
   Conservatives are right to fear where this is all headed but ought to think more carefully about how regulations they are flirting with now (that are widely celebrated among those with a long history of lust for Big Government) will be used against them the next time a Democrat administration is in power.

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5. I Won’t Show You Mine

   A junior transactional lawyer at a big firm — the office lawyer, not the litigator who’ll be in court — builds a 200-line skill that captures her firm’s contract-review process. The specific clauses to flag in M&A diligence, the formatting conventions, the standard redlines, the way to summarize a target company’s liabilities for a partner’s memo. The skill saves her 20 hours a week. Her billables look extraordinary. Her partners notice.

   Six months later, she gets an offer from a competitor. Her current firm sends her a letter reminding her of the IP clauses in her employment agreement. The skills she wrote, the firm asserts, were written on firm time, using firm matters, under firm supervision, and constitute work product belonging to the firm. She is welcome to leave, but the folder stays.

   and

   And here is what makes this particularly cruel: the better you are at your job, the worse this trap is for you. The most productive lawyer at the firm has the most valuable folder. The most productive radiologist has the most valuable folder. The most productive consultant has the most valuable folder. The structural pressure of agent-augmented work concentrates value into a portable artifact, which means the workers most worth fighting over are also the ones most exposed to the contract. The pod shops always knew this. It’s why their contracts were drafted the way they were. Now everyone gets to learn.

1.  👀

   LG

   lucas gelfond@gucaslelfond · Jun 4

   once you notice claude design websites you will see them everywhere

   

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   On the plus side, this means having a strong view, an independent taste is still valuable. Otherwise you end up with homogeneous slop - words or design.

2. Why China got rich and India didn't

   I suspect that if I’d been around in the year 1950, it would have been obvious to me that India would succeed and China would not. I would have made the same bet in 1960, when China was starving tens of millions of its own people while exporting grain abroad; and I would have done it again in 1970, during the insanity of the Cultural Revolution. Nor would I have been alone. As late as 1985, prominent economists were writing articles in the New York Times suggesting that “far more than China today, India is an economic miracle waiting to happen.”

   But they were wrong.

   David's substack is one of the top discoveries of the year for me. The breadth of subjects, from funerals in Africa to the impact of spreadsheets, and the quality of work make this a must read.

3. ND

   Noam Dworman@noam_dworman · Jun 4

   Second for second, @tylercowen packs more substance into a talk than anyone I'm aware of. This is a clear, non-hysterical, and somewhat soothing discussion of our AI future.

   

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   This is a good use of 19 minutes.

4. OpenAI - Fireside Chat with Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok

   If you have an hour and 20 minutes, then this one should be good too.

5. Early dismissals and random days off are driving parents and teachers crazy: This.

   We are left scrambling to find care on these random days, given that many employers, including the federal government, increasingly require employees to be in the office every day of the week.

1. Some good news in #4 but my! How things have changed since "Hum Do, Hamare Do."

   JF

   Jesús Fernández-Villaverde@JesusFerna7026 · May 22

   Ten notable facts from India’s new SRS Statistical Report 2024 published two days ago:
   
   1) India’s total fertility rate (TFR) has dropped to 1.88 (rounded up to 1.9 in the figures) in 2024 from 1.92 in 2023.
   
   2) This drop is roughly the historical speed of the last few decades. India’s TFR was 4.3 in 1985 and it has been falling around 0.06 per year since then.
   
   3) For those who think “smartphones are the reason for the fall of TFR,” there is not much change in India’s TFR after their introduction. Of course, this might only apply to India.
   
   4) India’s sex ratio at birth continues moving toward natural levels. It has grown from 907 girls per 1000 boys in 2018-2020 to 918 in 2022-2024. Without sex selection (e.g., selective abortions), it should be around 952.
   
   5) Nonetheless, this bias still means that India’s replacement rate is around 2.15, not 2.1 as in other advanced economies.
   
   6) Hence, India is already 0.27 children below the replacement rate and the gap continues growing.
   
   7) However, this figure hides large regional differences. Kerala is at 1.3, well below the U.S. and approaching Italian and Spanish levels (Delhi is even lower, at 1.2, but it is a peculiar case), while Bihar remains at 2.9.
   
   8) In terms of the rural/urban divide, rural India is at 2.1 and urban India at 1.5.
   
   9) From everything I can see, India’s TFR will continue to fall, and it should reach 1.57 (the current level of the U.S.) around 2031 unless something significant changes.
   
   10) Having said that, India’s data has a non-trivial margin of error, and a new Census might change our reading of the situation.
   
   In summary, India is following the same path as everyone else. No Indian fertility Sonderweg!

   

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2. Why Japanese companies do so many different things

   But Toto’s remarkable year doesn’t have much to do with toilets or bidets. Toto might have been founded in the 1910s to “provide a healthy and civilized way of life” through affordable toilets, and in the decades since might have become the global leader in the bathroom game. But Toto also does a lot of other things. Toto manufactures not just bidets and toilets but also bathroom tiles, prefabricated bathroom modules, faucets, modular kitchens, photocatalytic coatings for buildings, and assistive equipment for the elderly. And, most importantly, Toto has a very lucrative sideline in the fabrication of memory chips.

3. Soft Serve & Soft Power

   Stuffed with rava masala dosa at Saravanna Bhavan, I studied a map of the South Indian chain’s global footprint. How hard would it be to eat at every foreign chain restaurant in New York City? Like the best projects, what began as a simple question has now morphed into a three-part series.

4. One-and-Done Heart Disease Prevention? Scientists Show It May Be Possible.

   A single infusion of an experimental gene-editing drug seemed to reduce LDL long-term in a small trial. The results may point to something “curative,” one expert said.

5. Doc in a Box

   The first review of the pilot for AI prescriptions refills in Utah is out and it looks very reasonable. In the 72% of cases where the AI recommend a refill at least one of two physicians agreed in 97% of cases.

6. To Set a World Record at 81, All She Had to Do Was Hold On

   Wearing floral print spandex shorts and a green sports bra, her task that day was simple but far from easy: hang on a pull-up bar for two minutes and two seconds. If she could do that, she’d earn a Guinness World Record for the longest dead hang by a woman over 80.

7. The third wave of American philanthropy

   Hundreds of billions of dollars in new philanthropic capital will soon become liquid. The OpenAI Foundation holds 26% of OpenAI, worth about $220B at today’s valuation. Anthropic’s seven co-founders have pledged to give away 80% of their wealth and have instituted the most aggressive donor matching program for employees in tech history.

   Here's one take on where the money should go:

   Take a lesson from your Gilded Age predecessors, and treat beauty as a central charitable pursuit. Build monuments, statues, museums, universities, cathedrals, public gardens — and yes, even mansions for yourselves. Leave a physical legacy to future generations, not just a record of programs and disbursements. Recognize that meaning inheres in architecture, art and landscape as much as in more measurable goods.

8. The obligatory AI tutorials of the week: Tufte Skill and Marc Andreessen

I was able to create this post using the complimentary wi-fi on the Air India flight to Mumbai, including checking all the links and re-reading some of the pieces. I was even able to use Claude Code to make minor UI edits to the code. However, I wasn't able to push the updated site to Github / Cloudflare. The wi-fi was probably too slow for that. So that had to wait till I landed and got access to a better wi-fi.

1. R

   roon@tszzl · May 16

   this is well aligned model behavior and you see the same from psychotherapists who want to help their patients stop ruminating. the best possible digital assistant will not be one that never causes you discomfort

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   HM

   hamza mostafa@hamostaf04 · May 16

   why is claude giving me attitude man

   

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2. JW

   Joe Weisenthal@TheStalwart · May 19

   I had two bots ask Opus 4.7 for analysis of what a major Chilean supply shock would mean for copper
   
   But before asking, I had warmup questions that exhibited different levels of sophistication. Despite both bots asking for max thoroughness, those warmups affected the final output

   

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3. As much as I love WFH, especially with the extra long NJ commute, this strikes true.

   PJ

   Peter John Lambert@pj_lambert · May 21

   Is GenAI causing the relative decline in early-career hiring? Our latest research finds that these effects may be conflated with another important driver: the rise of WFH arrangements (1/N)

   

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4. CR

   Cullen Roche@cullenroche · May 21

   Lost one of my very first clients recently. Amid the grief, it re-emphasized a hard financial truth:
   
   Dying is expensive and causes an immediate, massive liquidity crunch for a family long before the estate settles.
   
   If you want to protect your family from administrative gridlock, check these 3 things today:
   
   1) Update trusts, wills and estate and ensure trusts are funded: A trust is useless if it's empty. Ensure taxable accounts and deeds are actually retitled to the trust.
   
   2) Doublecheck beneficiaries and make taxable accounts and bank accounts TOD at a minimum before the Death Certificate Bottleneck kicks in: Custodians legally cannot release beneficiary accounts without a death certificate. In many jurisdictions, these take weeks or months to process.
   
   3) Immediate Liquidity: Ensure your spouse or heirs have immediate access to operational cash in a joint or accessible account to cover sudden costs (travel, arrangements, immediate bills) while the larger estate is verified.
   
   4) Hug your loved ones!

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5. Vibes in SF (see link #2 last week) vs. vibes in NJ ;-)

   S

   staysaasy@staysaasy · May 17

   The vibes in NJ feel pretty great right now. The convergence in outcomes is the best I've ever seen.
   
   Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - guys who own paving companies, guys who own marinas, ShopRite deli managers, Wawa shift leads, and a guy named Sal - have quietly become millionaires and nobody knows because they still drive a Silverado from 2008. Back of the envelope Taylor ham estimation.
   
   Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job their whole life and easily get there. My cousin works at PSE&G. He has a boat.
   Better yet, hiring is in full swing. Many tradesmen feel like their life's skill is more useful than ever. The day to day role of most jobs has stayed exactly the same for 40 years.
   
   As a result,
   
   1) Everyone's settled into a tried and true set of career paths: take over my uncle's HVAC, get my CDL, get into landscaping, marry into a pizza place. People are switching diners less and less. You can't betray your home diner.
   
   2) There's a deep contentment about work (and its future). Why chase "tech" when you can own three rentals in Hoboken and complain about your tenants at a barbecue. Will my job exist in a few years? This is Jersey. The job is paving things. You hear the "I'm never leaving" conversation a lot, especially from people who tried Brooklyn for a year. They come back saying the energy was off. The energy was fine. They missed their mom.
   
   3) The mid to late middle managers feel energized. Many have families and plenty of energy to open a pizzeria with their cousin Anthony. Not that Anthony. The other one. They don't particularly have any AI skills and they don't need any. Middle management is alive and well at PSE&G and you get a pension. My uncle retired at 58. He's been on a boat since 2019.
   
   4) The rich aren't particularly humble either.
   They're at the shore house. They've been at the shore house since 1987. Some have gone from <$150k to >$5M slowly, through a paving company, or by buying a duplex in Jersey City in 2003 and just kinda holding it. For some, they escape to LBI to live life, which means sitting on a deck. For others, they buy a boat just cuz, use it four times, and describe it as the best decision they ever made at every party for the rest of their life. I asked a contractor friend why he didn't retire. He said "and do what, Donna does NOT want me home all day."
   
   I understand many reading this scoff at the simple pleasures of the Garden State. They live in places where the bagels are bad and they've made peace with it.
   
   But the truth is, you can surf Belmar in the morning, skate the Asbury bowls in the afternoon, hike the Delaware Water Gap, and camp the Pine Barrens by nightfall. You can drive an hour and be anywhere. You can see Bruce at the Stone Pony for what feels like the 400th time and cry about it. The slice somehow tastes better than every slice in every other state. It's the water. It's always the water.
   
   Unlike many other places, knowing a guy, having a guy, and being a guy is tightly correlated with outcomes in NJ. Need a permit? Tony's brother. Need a kidney? Probably still Tony's brother. Call him.
   Ironically, a frequent side effect of this clarity is to spin up the very pork roll egg and cheese making everyone happy in hopes that you too can SPK your way to economic enlightenment. Salt pepper ketchup. Hard roll. Don't ask for it on a bagel. That's how civilizations fall.

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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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