Links: Week of Feb 23 2025

  1. 50 years of Travel Tips: Some great tips.

    For the best travel experiences you need either a lot of money, or a lot of time. Of the two modes, it is far better to have more time than money. Although it tries, money cannot buy what time delivers. You have enough time to attend the rare festival, to learn some new words, to understand what the real prices are, to wait out the weather, or to get to that place that takes a week in a jeep. Time is the one resource you can give yourself, so take advantage of this if you are young without money.

  2. 100% HIV Prevention:

    …we now have evidence that in real-world use it can do something that has never been seen before: twice-yearly injections in thousands of female trial volunteers in high-risk areas (South Africa and Uganda) showed a one hundred per cent prevention rate of HIV infection.

  3. Stable Systems (X):

    I don’t think a lot of people appreciate how much of their overall lifestyle and relative certainty is backstopped by a steady, boring stability of systems they don’t understand or even realize exist.

  4. AI or No I (X):

    Me using LLMs for fun little personal projects: wow this thing is such a genius why do we even need humans anymore.

    Me trying to deploy LLMs in messy real-world environments: why is this thing so unbelievably stupid and dumb.

    This fits with my experience. But also for doing “real” work, prompt engineering matters. Giving the right instructions in the right order does make a difference.

    See more scepticism in this thread. Along with some of the comments I am hearing Satya Nadella made in his podcast with Dwarkesh, I wonder if we are seeing a vibe shift on AI?

  5. My LLM codegen workflow atm(via):

    I have been building so many small products using LLMs. It has been fun, and useful. However, there are pitfalls that can waste so much time. A while back a friend asked me how I was using LLMs to write software. I thought “oh boy. how much time do you have!” and thus this post.

Again, for real work, prompt engineering matters.

  1. Consensus projections on AI (X):

    I think Grok 3 came in right at expectations, so I don’t think there is much to update in terms of consensus projections on AI: still accelerating development, speed is a moat, compute still matters, no obvious secret sauce to making a frontier model if you have talent & chips.

  2. Three Observations: Obligatory link to every Sam Altman post.

    Anyone in 2035 should be able to marshall the intellectual capacity equivalent to everyone in 2025; everyone should have access to unlimited genius to direct however they can imagine. There is a great deal of talent right now without the resources to fully express itself, and if we change that, the resulting creative output of the world will lead to tremendous benefits for us all.