I remember this. It was glorious.

@phalgooon

on this day 6 years ago, we witnessed the greatest ever day of live tweeting

https://www.patreon.com/ShivRamdas/posts/rice-truck-74959374

The revolt of the reader

As I wrote in RFD 576, to use an LLM to write is to void the social contract between writer and reader: we readers shouldn’t be expected to labor to understand a sentence that the writer themselves didn’t work to create.

How To Write With An LLM

Readers can detect LLM words in the parts per trillion. However much work you put into scuffing up and humanizing it, an LLM paragraph will register to much of your audience not as writing but as output. So, first the bad news: you have to write for yourself.

But LLMs are still extraordinarily useful. It’s just you need to use them like a copyeditor rather than a ghostwriter. So, step one of my method: write your piece. Then, step two: feed it to a good model to find flaws.

But before we talk about how that works, there are two rules you need to understand. They’ll ward off LLM-creep that will knock you into the uncanny valley between expression and output and knock you out of your reader’s attention.

The online shopping trend where you buy nothing

On South Korea’s “dopamine sites,” the pleasure comes from aspirational shopping rituals like browsing, curating, and tracking — not from a delivery.

No Doing, No Learning

Consider nuclear power. Overnight construction costs for early U.S. demonstration reactors fell 81 percent between 1954 and 1968. For reactors begun between 1967 and 1972, costs rose 187 percent. The 1971 Calvert Cliffs decision and then the reaction to Three Mile Island in 1979 accelerated the cost increases and slowed construction even more.

What might have happened had the earlier learning and deployment trends continued? Peter Lang’s 2017 paper in Energies estimates that nuclear power would have cost about one-tenth as much by 2015. The additional generation could have avoided as many as 9.5 million premature deaths.

The contagion of fear

I could have (and perhaps would have?) taken this whole shameful incident to the grave, but I feel compelled to confess it now, because I have never seen fear sown so irresponsibly by putative technologists as I have now with respect to AI and the threat of human extinction (!). Amazingly, that is not hyperbole: this week, ex-Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon claimed — and then Anthropic Alignment Science lead Evan Hubinger agreed — that the probability that AI will "kill all humans" is ">10% in the next decade" (!!).

@AndrewYNg

The loudest voices stoking fears about AI dangers have made tremendous headway in the past two weeks. AI technology has not taken some unexpected, dangerous turn, but the hype around it — propelled by what appears to be a well orchestrated PR campaign — has drummed up considerable fear. I worry that it represents a setback for our field.

I have written frequently that fears of AI are overhyped. AI’s capabilities can be uncannily human-like and unpredictable, and it’s rational to worry when people who are directly involved express concerns. But I see the problems as a sign of the engineering work that ahead, rather than insurmountable barriers or the sky falling. AI technology continues to advance — which is a good thing! — but technical advances, poorly understood by the public, give those who seek to generate hype repeated opportunities to do so.

First, I don’t see any step up in the risk of human extinction from AI compared to a few months ago. The theories about this remain the same fantastical, science fiction scenarios as a few months ago. The biggest change in AI risk is its cybersecurity capabilities — a topic which we should take seriously — but this, too, will not lead to the end of the world.

The most notable recent event leading to increased fear was when an OpenAI team deployed an agent swarm that hacked into Hugging Face. Much of the popular press contained significant hype. For example, some publications reported that a swarm of 1,200 agents carried out the attack. While this was technically accurate, as I write this, I have about 1,300 processes running on my laptop. Yes, the ability to get large swarms of agents to work in parallel on a task is a significant technical advance, And, in computing, many processes run at the same time. So this shouldn’t be seen as some magical capability.

Additionally, OpenAI’s buggy sandboxing and monitoring processes were key to enabling this incident. Fixing these bugs and putting in place improved monitoring would be appropriate fixes, not pausing AI. There are many well known ways to attack software systems. The main advantage of AI agents is that they are relentless. They will tirelessly try many tactics — and have the patience to chain vulnerabilities together — that previously would have taken an infeasible amount of human effort. But in the long term, I believe the advantage will lie with defenders (because they have more information with which to identify bugs, which they can fix), but the cyber-threat landscape has changed significantly. There are still bottlenecks to identifying and exploiting a vulnerability. AI agents still have to try a lot of things to see what works, and taking these actions takes time and might be detected by defenders. This is why, even though it is now easy to obtain versions of leading open weight models that have had their guardrails removed or weakened, so they will not refuse to try to execute cyber attacks, the world has not ended.

I am also concerned about the anthropomorphization of AI in a lot of reporting, where LLMs and agents are unnecessarily treated as if they were people. If I wield a hammer, miss a nail, and accidentally dent the wall, it’s not the fault of the hammer. The problem lies in how I used the hammer. Similarly, if I prompt an agent and it hacks into someone else’s system, the responsibility lies with me, not the agent.

Of course, we want to build systems that are as safe and predictable as possible. (For example, an unsafe hammer would be one whose head randomly flies off under normal use.) Today’s agentic systems are not predictable, but I see no reason why, by applying sound engineering practices, we won’t be able to make them extremely safe to use. One new element in the forecasts of AI-enabled doom is AI companies disclaiming responsibility for their own products. “I didn’t do it; my out-of-control agent did!” There’s a balance to be struck between the responsibility of the tool maker and the tool user, but when something goes wrong, let’s hold the people building and/or using the hammer responsible, rather than the hammer. (By the way, if you’re worried about AI bioweapon risk, David Bellamy has a great post on why this, too, is overhyped. Briefly, the bottleneck in building a bioweapon is not intelligence, but lab work and manufacturing.)

Pausing AI progress will create much more harm than benefit. First, our adversaries will certainly not slow down. Second, engineering requires discovering problems empirically so we can fix them. If we pause AI by a decade, we will also delay finding and implementing safety engineering fixes by about the same duration.

Of course, the incentive to stoke fears — for regulatory capture, to garner attention, or to make one’s technology seem more powerful — remains the same as before. Disclaiming responsibility is a new one. Taking a hard technical look at the actual risks however, I see little factual basis for the degree of fear that’s been stoked up. We still have hard research and engineering work ahead to improve AI safety, but the beneficial applications continue to vastly outweigh the risks, and we should keep building.

[Original text (with links):

The Tragedy of Nikole Hannah-Jones

The essay makes for hard reading and I acknowledge NHJ’s courage in writing about her mistakes and the cost to her child. The piece is raw and true when talking about her personal choices, but the larger story in which NHJ embeds her personal history is mostly false. The problem isn’t funding. The failures she documents are failures of management and accountability, not lack of resources. NYC spends upwards of $40k per pupil on average, the highest of any large district in the country. Moreover, schools in NYC with lower-income students get more than the average. PS 307, where NHJ initially sent her child, is currently funded at just over 52k per student, far above the national average.

Selective breeding has pushed horses to the limits of biology. But at what cost?

In June 1973, chestnut colt Secretariat ran the Belmont Stakes so fast that no horse has matched him since. In less than two and a half minutes, Secretariat flew along the track, finally pulling away to win by 31 lengths, nearly three quarters of a football field. The other horses were so far behind they weren’t even in the television frame. Fifty years later, billions of dollars have been poured into breeding and training, yet Secretariat’s record still stands.

The Odyssey, AGI and the bicameral mind

Yet in his 1977 book, The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes argued that the two epics were divided in time by a change in the human brain. In The Iliad, people heard gods talking to them directly, instructing them and guiding them. In The Odyssey, the gods have gone into hiding and humans are guided by their own consciousness. It’s worth quoting a passage from Jaynes here.

and

Reading Jaynes’ words today, it is almost as if the heroes of The Iliad were AI agents being trained and instructed by their human masters, all the way up to the godlike personages of Sam Altman and Dario Amodei. We will get to them shortly, but first, The Odyssey. As Jaynes suggests, shortly before 1000 BC, something called the Dorian invasion shattered the Mycaenean civilisations around the eastern Mediterranean. Nolan picks up on this idea in his film, with references to mysterious ‘people from the sea’. This social breakdown somehow rewired the brain, argues Jaynes. The voices in peoples’ heads receded and consciousness took its place.

@BarredinDC

Interesting NYT story about the most popular Uber Eats delivery restaurant in the world - an Indian restaurant in a Houston strip mall. Some of the drivers only deliver from there,

Reality has a surprising amount of detail

That’s how I came to spend a substantial part of my teenage years replacing fences, digging trenches, and building flooring and sheds. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from all this building, it’s that reality has a surprising amount of detail.

This turns out to explain why its so easy for people to end up intellectually stuck. Even when they’re literally the best in the world in their field.

@DKThomp

New newsletter: CHANGE ALL YOUR PASSWORDS *NOW*

Cybersecurity expert @alexstamos predicts that the next two years could be chaotic, as open-weight AI models with advanced cyber capabilities get into the hands of hackers, turning Grade C scammers into Grade A hackers; and allowing bad individuals to do the kind of work previously only possibly by large teams.

Phishing attacks will become more sophisticated and more common, putting individuals at risk, and mid-tier companies with inadequate code and IT will cough up username-password combinations at an accelerated clip.

The time to up your password game—and to get your parents and older relatives to up their own—is now.

Repeating this theme from last week. This is absolutely one of the top concerns for me these days - scammers will come for us all in increasingly sophisticated ways and just one mistake can be costly. Password managers to create unique and complex passwords, 2FA where possible are the bare minimum. What other steps do we need to take?

Do we all need family & friends passwords / passpharases to ensure you are talking to a family member on the phone, when they ask for money / help? Do we need to diversify our financial accounts so that the damage is limited if one is compromised? What about protecting / recovering from the mental health impact after being scammed - see the piece on the jury duty scam from last week. The emotional tolls on the scammed person and their relationships can be huge.

We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility

In July, one bookseller told me they received a very large order of around 1,000 books on Biblio, one of these marketplaces. The seller agreed to put an Apple AirTag provided by 404 Media in one of the books included in this order so we could see where the book was going. And by extension, which company, AI or otherwise, was behind this massive order.

and

The book ended up delivered to the VGT3 corner of the LAS8 Amazon facility in the north east of Las Vegas, where the entrance carried this on-the-nose logo of a dinosaur with a book! Online forum discussions between Amazon workers confirmed that VGT3 destructively scans large volumes of books.

and

@abhijaymrana

Wow, seems like Google is buying Spirit Airlines' enterprise data for $10m (outbidding Mercor at $7.5m).

Basically includes every internal document, email, workflow, and codebase for a once $6B company.

Honestly, $10m for 34 years of operational data really seems like a steal.

Clearly, the frontier labs have an unlimited appetite for human generated text, for training their models and the budgets to match. I wouldn't get too worked up about the destructive scanning of "rare" books - most are likely rare for a good reason. And as long as they are saving the scans, I wouldn't worry that we are losing much here at all and in fact this might even be a net gain.

The question I have is how long will these scans be saved by the labs. The cost of permanently saving such a large trove may not be trivial and even if it is, some corporate boffin 10 years down the line may decide to "optimize".

The ideal solution would of course be for the labs to make these scans open and accessible but that would mean open to their competitors as well, and that is something I don't see happening.

A few more vibe-coded projects.

LANGE by Joe Weisenthal. A great example of what non-coders can now do.

And another one here:

@cremieuxrecueil

This is really fun:

Someone made a little app that let's you drive a car over India's inflation rate.

Can you make it through the chaotic 1970s? Glide through the 2020s?

Give it a try: https://timeseriesofindia.com/economy/play/inflation-peaks/

the art of staying in touch

Having moved cities over ten times myself (yes, I’m tired), I’ve begun to learn the same lesson of how distance reshapes closeness, and how friendship bends without always breaking.

@Miles_Brundage

Folks.

The hackers (human and AI and various permutations thereof) are coming for you - yes, you.

Use two factor authentication and unique passwords saved in password managers for everything.

I cannot repeat this enough. This should be priority #1 for everyone.

But that is not enough. Other scams are also getting more sophisticated and will get more so with AI. This is something that has been at the back of my mind for a while now.

What other defesive steps can one take? Awareness is one. Does diversifying your assets across platforms make it safer or weaker? Is there resonable insurance available for this? Even if you make a mistake and fall for a scam?

Every disease is a policy failure

In 1950, the shortest-lived 1 percent of babies born in France lived less than three months. But for babies born after that, that 1 percent started surviving longer and longer: up to six months for those born in 1960, three years in 1970, 18 years in 1980, and 25 years in 1990.

Ordinary Abundance

If we could have devised an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will, we should have considered the limit of human felicity already attained.

I can never have too much gratitude for the era I get to live in. Perhaps the future will be even better but the difference today versus just a 50 or 100 years ago is enormous - medicine and technology are miracles.

Will factory farming fix itself?

In wealthy countries, consumers and companies have shifted to producing and purchasing more cage-free eggs. Today, 45 percent of American, 62 percent of European, and 82 percent of British hens are kept in cage-free facilities. That amounts to hundreds of millions of hens spared from cages each year. Hens get two to three times as much floor space, which means each egg costs one or two cents more to produce. Richer consumers are willing to absorb those small costs.

Men also want it all

And yet, when we asked men what was more important to them — career success or getting married and having children — 44% of men prioritized family while 41% prioritized work, around the same shares as women. Among conservative men, the share prioritizing getting married and having children was even higher.

I first posted about the attack on HuggingFace by OpenAI's models a couple of weeks ago. This has since beomce a huge story, though I am surprised at the relatively small political response.

Zvi Mowshowitz has the best coverage of the topic, as usual, and as he points out, the more details we hear, the more concerning it gets. I haven't yet watched the technical presentation from OpenAI on this (see video below) but it is being widely shared and recommended.

Watch on YouTube

This time the models used a message board in English and using a tool provided to them. The models obviously have the capability to create their own secret messaging boards and languages, that would be unitelligible to us. How long before they switch to that?

I have not so far been in the doomer camp when it comes to AGI and ASI but surely it is worth considering now?

@polynoamial

An internal version of Astra, @OpenAI’s next major model family, solved 10 major open problems in mathematics, quantum complexity, and theoretical computer science.

We believe it will be a major step for scientific reasoning. https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/

@polynoamial

The cost of generating the proofs for all 10 of these breakthroughs combined was under $2,000 at Sol API prices. We’re excited to see what scientists and researchers are able to create with our upcoming Astra models!

This seems huge. LLMs are clearly shaking up Mathematics.

@tamaybes

I bet @littmath that in 5 years AI will be able to produce Annals-quality Number Theory papers at an inference budget at or below $100k/paper, at 3:1 odds in my favor.

@littmath

Incidentally I am conceding this bet. Strictly speaking it hasn’t resolved (I think we’ve yet to see an Annals-quality number theory paper) but it’s clear I was wrong about what capabilities were necessary to produce one, and it’s just a matter of time.

Noah Smith digs into some of the implications here. Not everyone is taking it well so far and I have more than a little sympathy.

I am going insane. During the last week or so LLMs have produced a number of counterexamples to significant long-standing conjectures. I will not recount these happenings here, there are many places where you can find the details.

Mathematicians, math enthusiasts, and curious laypeople are responding to these developments in ways that I believe obscure what is, for me, the true heart of the problem. I do not speak for everyone in the math community in my response. But I suspect I am not alone.

I am suffering a profound spiritual crisis due to these developments. I have been screaming internally for days. It feels as though I am living inside of a nightmare. The recent Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics is, to me, a well-muffled scream. A saccharine mélange of self-soothing over which looms a painfully obvious absence.

Is it coming for us all? Get harder to argue against everyday.

@DanielLockyer

Stack Overflow has gone from a peak of 207k questions in march 2014, down to 1.4k in july 2026

end of an era

Simon Willison and John Gruber both make a great case for getting started with writing online.

Just start. It’s so easy to get caught in the trap of obsessing over the design of your blog, and planning for content that you never actually get around to writing. As long as each entry has a date on it and a permanent URL, it counts as a blog. I think adding an Atom or RSS feed is important too, but you can get started without one — don’t treat that as a blocker.

and

Me, I try to get into the mindset of playing live music, not recording a studio album. Except when I’m writing a piece where I really want it to be an album. Those aren’t rare, per se, but they’re occasional. If I tried to make every post a hall-of-famer I’d never get anything out.

Should You Use AI for a Task? Here’s a Simple Way to Decide

The best way I’ve found to explain the dilemma comes from the AI researcher Daniel Meissler: it’s the difference between work and the gym.

At work, if your job is to move a bunch of heavy things from one side of the room to another, you should use whatever assistive tech you have on hand: a wagon, a forklift… even an AI-powered robot. But at the gym, it makes no sense for that robot to lift weights for you. The point of weightlifting isn’t to move heavy things across the room; it’s to actually lift those heavy things.

The same analysis holds for any task an AI can do for you. If it’s work—if the task has to be done and no one cares how—then it’s fine to use AI assistance. But if the task is more like the gym, and how the task is done is at least as important, then it probably doesn’t make sense to use AI.

Great analogy and a contender for the best link of the year.

@juanbuis

i can’t believe someone solved recipe design decades ago and everyone just decided to ignore it

A revolution is unfolding. Voters everywhere are furious.

We summon a car in three minutes. A package arrives the same day. AI answers complicated questions in seconds, and does more complex work that took people months in mere minutes. Naturally, citizens begin to expect similar efficiency from government. But democracy is not designed for speed. It is designed for legitimacy. It bargains, compromises, consults courts, protects vulnerable groups and balances competing interests. Those safeguards are precisely what distinguish democracy from authoritarianism. Yet in an age shaped by technology’s warp speed, they increasingly look like paralysis.

Better Than Free

We now live in a digital age. If perfect reproductions of our best efforts as creators are free, how can we keep going? To put it simply, how does one make money selling free copies?

I have an answer. The simplest way I can put it is thus:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless and stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

Well, what can’t be copied?

Originally written at the dawn of the internet era but it becomes even more relevant in the age of AI. I wonder if this is part of the reason FIFA World Cup tickets were so expensive this time - LIVE can't be copied.

An OpenAI Model Escaped Its Sandbox and Hacked Hugging Face A good and short summary of the events at OpenAI and Hugging Face. Comprehensive coverage here. This would have been stuff of science fiction less than 5 years ago. I expected stronger political reaction to this than we have seen so far. Maybe OpenAI is doing a better job of "managing" the situation than Anthropic did a few weeks ago. I would still bet on some very strong restrictions on release of new models from here on at the minimum and controls on development and testing too.

@__alpoge__

hello there the jacobian conjecture is false thanx to my close friend akhil for asking about it and my other close friend fable for working during the world cup final

((1+xy)^3 z + y^2 (1+xy) (4+3xy), y + 3 x (1+xy)^2 z + 3 x y^2 (4+3xy), 2 x - 3 x^2 y - x^3 z): \C^3\to \C^3, has jacobian determinant -2, and sends (0, 0, -1/4), (1, -3/2, 13/2), and (-1, 3/2, 13/2) to (-1/4, 0, 0)

and

@Qiaoqiao2001

I solved 6 open Erdős problems in 5 days, using @OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol.

I have a math background, but the Codex workflow I used does not require deep mathematical knowledge.

Here’s exactly how I approached it, including my prompts 🧵

Many such tweets over the last few days. Clearly AI has disrupted Mathematics. Time for denial is past - it is coming for us all. To use a strong cliche, remember this is the worst it will ever be.

GOAT. Clearly.

@BleacherReport

Adam Silver says next season’s schedule is on hold until LeBron makes his decision ⏳👀

"We have to finish up the schedule and where LeBron plays affects the schedule ... opening week, Christmas. So I need him to make a decision."

(via Game Plan, @CNBCSport @boardroom)

At 91, He’s Hiking the Appalachian Trail. Again.

His first Appalachian Trail age record was broken in 2021 by a hiker named M.J. Eberhart, trail name “Nimblewill Nomad.” Mr. Sanders befriended Mr. Eberhart that year and encouraged him to set a new mark. “He was going to quit several times,” Mr. Sanders said. “I actually went up and hiked with him the last few days so that he wouldn’t quit. We’re really close friends.” Still, Mr. Sanders wanted the record back. For the current attempt, he planned to hike 12 miles a day, with one day off a week.

GOAT! Who knew the Appalachian Trail was a regular geriatric magnet.

Who is against autonomous vehicles?

Roughly 37,000–40,000 Americans die in auto accidents every year. We now have large‑scale, real‑world evidence—from Waymo and a joint analysis with Swiss Re—that driverless operations can be substantially safer than matched human driving within their current operating domains. The latest data show that over 220 million miles driven, Waymo vehicles–in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta–have 94% fewer serious injuries, 82% fewer air bag deployments, and 93% fewer pedestrian injuries. The evidence is not fully independent, but it is unusually transparent, large‑scale evidence.

So with thousands of lives annually in the balance who is against autonomous vehicles (AVs)? Trial lawyers.

@arakharazian

We can finally say AI isn't killing jobs.

A new paper from me, @tryramp, and @RevelioLabs uses firm-level spend and workforce data across 21K U.S. businesses to measure AI's impact on jobs.

Firms that adopt AI heavily grow headcount 10% over two years following adoption. Low adopters see no statistically significant change.

Missing women on Indian streets

How absent are women from city streets in the developing world? We answer this question using GPS-linked wearable cameras and randomized street audits across ~900 kilometers of roads in greater Mumbai. Across 4000+ street images containing 23,000+ visible person observations, women account for 16.4% of visible people in Mumbai and 14.7% in Navi Mumbai, far below their population shares. We estimate pedestrian sex ratios of 239 and 223 women per 1,000 men, implying 71% and 76% of women expected based on residential ratios are missing from the streets. This pattern holds across road types, and private mobility does not explain the gap; women’s share on two-wheelers is lower still (8.4% and 5.7%). These results provide the first large-scale measurement of gender disparities in urban public life that self-reported data cannot capture.

Here is the actual paper.

The 20 Most Interesting Ideas We've Found in 2026

We translated an all-star panel discussion about the state of Chinese AI, in which panelists argue that China’s success with open source cannot compensate for the persistent and widening gap with US closed models. Qwen’s former tech lead estimated that there’s only a ~20% chance (“already very optimistic”) that the leading AI model in 3-5 years will be a Chinese one.

and

How Much AI Does $1 Get You in China vs America? In February, Aqib calculated that American chips are so much better than Chinese ones that, even with cheaper Chinese electricity and construction, $1 gets you more FLOPS in the U.S. (24 GFLOPS/$) compared to China (14 GFLOPS/$). We found that construction and chips account for almost all of the cost of running a data center, and other bills like electricity and water are basically rounding errors.

Why American ambulance rides are so expensive

Over the weeks that followed, Whitten got bills from both hospitals. Everything was roughly what he expected, and all of it would be covered by his insurance plan. But a few months later, Whitten got another bill—this time from American Medical Response, the ambulance provider that had transferred him between hospitals. The ambulance ride, he learned, would cost him $12,873: $737 for the miles traveled, $314 for monitoring his heart on the trip, $151 for infection control, and $11,670 as a “base rate.”

So why are American ambulances so expensive?

The standard answer is greed: rapacious ambulance operators, owned by villainous private equity firms, exploit patients at their most helpless. But I don’t think that’s actually what’s going on. Ambulance providers are chronically unprofitable businesses; margins are thin, crews are underpaid, and operators exit the industry every year. Whatever is being extracted from patients like Whitten, it isn’t padding anyone’s pockets.

David Oks strikes again. The depth and breadth of his blog is unmatched. Read the whole thing.

This is a textbook example of why, when you read yet another article about the "greed" of corporations being responsible for one of our problems, you should be skeptical. It "sounds" true, but usually is as far from truth as it gets.

@CardiffGarcia

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

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

Chloe vs. History via MR

Watch on YouTube

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

@karpathy

# 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.

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.

@weaverobotics

Today, we’re launching our home robot Isaac 1.

Isaac 1 deliveries will begin this fall.

Order yours below.

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

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.

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.

@arindam___paul

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”

Happy Semiquincentennial to those who celebrate!

@DschlopesIsBack

Washington’s Dream For America 🇺🇸😂

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

@dwarkesh_sp

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.

@googleearth

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

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?

@DavidSacks

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.

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.

 👀

@gucaslelfond

once you notice claude design websites you will see them everywhere

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.

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.

@noam_dworman

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.

This is a good use of 19 minutes.

OpenAI - Fireside Chat with Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok

Watch on YouTube

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

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.

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

@JesusFerna7026

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

@tszzl

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

@hamostaf04

why is claude giving me attitude man

@TheStalwart

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

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

@pj_lambert

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)

@cullenroche

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!

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

@staysaasy

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

@cachedeposits

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

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.

A few tips from Mr. Claude Code himself.

@bcherny

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 🧵

@ChristopherHale

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.

@yacineMTB

you can outsource your thinking
but you cannot outsource your understanding

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.

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.

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.