Approved Thoughts

1. 5'11"?:

2. Pumpkin Stylists Are Making a Killing This Fall:

   Her most popular package today is her smallest, which costs $325, comes with about 20 pumpkins and takes her six minutes to assemble into a display. The second-most popular is the biggest, at $1,350; that one takes her about 30 minutes. She can do the installations in the dark, wearing a headlamp.

3. Japan’s sushi legend Jiro Ono turns 100 and is not ready for retirement:

   What’s the secret of his health? “To work,” Ono replied to the question by Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike, who congratulated him.

   “I can no longer come to the restaurant every day ... but even at 100, I try to work if possible. I believe the best medicine is to work.”

4. She hiked the entire Appalachian Trail at 80, unaware she’d just made history:

   The day Betty Kellenberger hit a patch of freezing rain on Mount Madison, quitting crossed her mind. She was hungry, cold and sore.

   “You’re 80 years old,” she told herself in a pep talk atop a mountain in New Hampshire. “You can do it.”

   A few months later, Kellenberger stood at the Massachusetts-Vermont border, having just finished hiking the entire 2,197-mile Appalachian Trail. She became, without realizing it, the oldest woman ever to do it.

   “We put all kinds of limitations on ourselves,” said Kellenberger, who lives in Carson City, Michigan. “Sometimes the biggest one is we don’t get up and try it.”

5. I Tried the First Humanoid Home Robot. It Got Weird. I look forward to the day something like this becomes real and it may be "real soon now", but I think this take from Daring Fireball is exactly right:

   The argument from CEO Bernt Børnich is that they’re using the videos from the current state of Neo, where its actions are entirely remote-controlled by employees of 1X Technologies, to train its autonomy. I call bullshit. This looks to me like nothing but a scam. It’s not autonomous at all, I don’t believe this company is going to achieve any practical degree of autonomy with this product, and even while it’s remote-controlled by human operators, it’s slow and clumsy.

6. 5 Tips When Consulting ‘Dr.’ ChatGPT: As someone who has saved hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in Physiotherapy bill using ChatGPT and is seemingly at the verge of fixing a long-standing chronic back pain, I am a fan. Used sensibly this is a powerful tool. Sensibly being the key word.

   For me, the ability to ask unlimited questions and provide unlimited context was a huge unlock relative to visiting a Physio. Also the time saved going to and from the clinic meant I could be much more regular.

   I fully agree that sharing detailed context and inviting clarifying questions are very important.

   In general, A.I. chatbots are far better at offering answers than asking questions, so they tend to skip the important follow-ups a physician would ask, Dr. Turken said — like whether you have any underlying conditions or are taking any medications. This is especially problematic when you’re asking about potential diagnoses or medical advice.

   To compensate, Dr. Turken recommended prompting the chatbot with a line like: “Ask me any additional questions you need to reason safely.”

7. When Will Quantum Computing Work?

   Huge investments are flowing into QC companies today. IonQ has a $19B market cap, Rigetti has a $10B cap, and PsiQuantum recently raised $1B.3D-Wave is not relevant, despite high qubit counts. Their machines are annealers, rather than gate based, and have less computational power than the QCs that IonQ, Rigetti, PsiQuantum, etc. are working on. This is a lot of money for an industry generating no real revenue, and without an apparent path to revenue over the next 5 years. Qubit counts have not been doubling each year, but even if they did, we'd have 32 kq machines in 2030.4If qubits double each year, 1,000 qubits today grows to 32 kq in 5 years' time. There are few - if any - commercial applications for machines of that size. Will these companies keep raising larger rounds until they achieve 100 kq? Or have they got some secret sauce we don't know about that investors are betting on?

8. Depreciation: A skeptical take.

   He assumes that the ASICs are obsolete when they can no longer keep up with the hash rate so are no longer mining any Bitcoin. That is wrong. ASICs are obsolete when the Bitcoin they mine no longer pay for the electricity they use. The newer ASICs aren't just faster, they also use much less energy per hash. Look again at the depreciation graph, which suggests current ASICs go obsolete after 16 quarters. But Alex de Vries and Christian Stoll's estimate of 5 quarters to obsolescence is based on comparing the ASIC's production with the cost of their power consumption, which is the correct approach. The curves in the graph are correct out to the 40% line, but then should drop to zero.

9. What Palantir Sees:

   Douthat: So we’re going to talk about a lot of things. We’re going to talk about your biography and background, how you came to be an officer in the U.S. military, the future of technology and warfare. But we have to start with a very, very simple question: What is it that Palantir does?

   Sankar: Great question.

   Douthat: Thank you.

   Sankar: Obviously the most important question, yeah.

   Douthat: I spent a long time crafting it, I have to say.

1. Landon Donovan’s new hair, and the side effect he wasn’t expecting (NYT): As a man of a certain age, this hit a little too close to home. But, hats off (heheh!) to the man for having the courage to participate in a story like this. Making the world a hair safer for the rest of us.

   Donovan’s journey to a hair system started two decades ago when, as a 20-year-old, he noticed his hair was receding. He remembers one moment when he was warming up for a game against FC Dallas in Frisco and fans started chanting at him: “Rogaine! Rogaine!”

2. Populism fast and slow:

   Working through the consequences of this, it is not difficult to see why the left has been unable to get much traction out of these changes, especially in developed countries. People are not rebelling against economic elites, but rather against cognitive elites. Narrowly construed, it is a rebellion against executive function. More generally, it is a rebellion against modern society, which requires the ceaseless exercise of cognitive inhibition and control, in order to evade exploitation, marginalization, addiction, and stigma. Elites have basically rigged all of society so that, increasingly, one must deploy the cognitive skills possessed by elites to successfully navigate the social world. (Try opening a bank account, renting an apartment, or obtaining a tax refund, without engaging in analytical processing.) The left, to the extent that it favours progress, is essentially committed to intensifying the features of the modern world that impose the greatest burdens of self-inhibition on individuals.

   Seeing things in this way makes it easier to understand why people get so worked up over seemingly minor issues, like language policing. The problem with demanding political correctness in speech, and punishing or ostracizing those who fail, is that it turns every conversation into a Stroop test, allowing elites the opportunity to exhibit conspicuous self-control. It requires the typical person, while speaking, to actively suppress the familiar word that is primed (e.g. “homeless”), and to substitute through explicit cognition the recently-minted word that is now favoured (e.g. “unhoused”). Elites are not just insensitive, but positively dismissive of the burdens that this imposes on many people. As a result, by performing the cognitive operation with such fluidity, they are not only demonstrating their superiority, they are rubbing other people’s faces in it. (From this perspective, it is not surprising that the demand for “they/them” pronouns upset some people even more, because the introduction of a plural pronoun forces a verb change, which requires an even more demanding cognitive performance.)

3. Age Inversion:

   Everyone under 30 is prematurely old (worried about savings, career, FIRE).

   Everyone over 50 is desperately young (Burning Man, psychedelics).

   My theory: Information abundance aged the young by showing them all future problems all at once.

   Information abundance also made the old young by showing them all missed experiences all at once.

   So now Gen Z talks like retirement planners and boomers act like teenagers.

   It's so over.

4. The Remains of the Day and the movie:

   I recently read The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, after coming across a positive review and remembering that there was an Oscar nominated movie based on the book in the '90s, when watching the Oscars used to be in thing in India.

   After the first couple of chapters, thinking that this was perhaps an artsy book, I also opened up a chat with ChatGPT to improve my understanding of the book.

   This was useful but note to self: in future explicitly tell ChatGPT to avoid spoilers or otherwise reveal information or conclusions from the later chapters. To be fair, I did ask for themes to notice in rest of the book so its mostly on me.

   This isn't a thriller so in one sense the damage was limited. It is, however, a very subtle book that gradually unveils its layers and getting a bunch of bullet points upfront, spelling out every complexity and nuance wasn't ideal.

   The book is a masterpiece. Very few books have ever had this effect on me where, for days afterwards, I suddenly get a flash of feeling, a pang that forces me to stop for a breath.

   The closest analogy that came spontaneously to my mind was of eating great Japanese food (yes, even as a vegetarian) - the flavours are extremely subdued - very much the opposite of, say, Indian food. But they are unmistakable, sharp even, if you stop and notice, and you know it took a lot of effort and craftsmanship to pull it off just right.

   When reading fiction, I have a tendency to really flip pages towards the end, a tendency developed from years of reading mostly thriller novels. Because of this I found the book depressing, having barely spent any thought on the final pages. It is only while writing this post that I revisited the ending (and the title) and had to reconsider my understanding.

   I had identified so deeply with the sense of loss in the middle of the book that I completely missed the gentle ray of hope that Ishiguro leaves us with at the end: as humans, on any given day and at any given time, all we can do is to make the best of whatever remains of the day.

   Highly recommended.

1. Happy Diwali to those who celebrate! NYT had two glossy stories on just one Diwali Ball in New York organized by Priyanka Chopra's manager. Made me go "Hmmm...". Was this about Diwali, was this about Priyanka Chopra or was this something else?

2. London Became a Global Hub for Phone Theft. Now We Know Why. Not a fan of clickbait headlines in NYT TBH but this story was revealing. I was under the impression that phone theft was a thing of past because of the hard to crack passcodes. Turns out not. The article didn't make it very clear how the thieves could get the phones working again. Apparently they can be sold for parts and something something China. Anyway, time to be careful out there again.

3. The pendulum has swung away from wokeness and cancel culture, as it should have. But sometimes it feels like, instead of passing through the center it went straight to the other end.

4. Title Arbitrage as Status Engineering:

   Title arbitrage is one of the most scalable levers a company can pull to increase the status of certain roles and attract talent. It costs nothing, works at scale, yet has the ability to reshape labor markets. The design space for title arbitrage remains wide open.

5. There are many ways through which the LLM subscriptions pay for themselves. For me it was physiotherapy. Here it is filing tax returns. I also wish more people would share "how tos" for solving different problems with LLMs. Here's a manual for tax returns. Full disclosure: I haven't tried it yet but the source is credible.

6. Five technological achievements! (That we won’t see any time soon.):

7. Observations on AI and the Capital Markets in 2025

   "To provide some sense of scale, that means the equivalent of about $1,800 per person in America will be invested this year on AI". That is a bucketload of spending.

8. China Can't Win: Retweets are not endorsments, as they say. However there is a chorus of experts out there loudly claiming that China holds the upper hand in the tariff negotiations with US. I am not so sure and this looks like a worthwhile counterpoint. Added to reading list.

   China cannot win the decoupling because they face an impossible trilemma: protect the currency, bail out the banks, or maintain social stability. They can pick two at most. More likely, they get one. The math is unforgiving: $5-10 trillion in hidden property losses against $3 trillion in bank equity. That’s not a solvency problem—it’s a physics problem. Meanwhile, they’re bleeding $1.1 trillion annually just to hide the losses, burning their entire defense and R&D budget combined on financial zombies.

9. Now that wokeness is over, is it ok to link to Louis CK clips again? Can one separate the art from the artist? I don't know but I love this one:

1. An Economists Guide to Weight Loss: Pre-Ozempic. New Year Resolution?

2. The Patel Motel Story: I hope its well done. Must watch.

3. 99 Percentile vs. 99.9 Percentile: Some of the responses are insightful too. This can be the problem of growing up in a small town or going to a "weaker" school for a certain type of person.

4. Bernie Madoff Stole My Savings. Here’s How I Got My Life Back.: Hats off.

   I think people who are facing a sudden reversal can learn from my experience. You can get through it. You have family, you have friends, you have resources that you don’t even know that you have.

5. Average? I had to go down about 100 responses before someone asked, "Man or woman?"

1. Your Review: The Russo-Ukrainian War - Astral Codex Ten:

   One day as I was being lectured by a female HR representative for leaving my (cloth, non-medical) mask off for too long during lunch, I could barely hear what she was saying. All I could think of were the uncounted men across untold generations who had lived and died as warriors, with all the honor and pain that entailed. I thought of how men in Ukraine right now lived a modern version of that, while I allowed myself to be subject to the feminized safteyist ideology of everyday civilization.

   The spiritual offensiveness of this contrast hit me like a ton of bricks, more vividly than ever. At that moment I silently made my final decision. I wasn’t going to wait around to hear back from the Ukrainian Government. It was time, in the immortal words of an ISIS recruiter on Twitter to “put down the chicken wings n come to jihad, bro”.

   The entire non-book review contest at Astral Codex Ten has been fantastic.

2. Subjective Time:

   Like most people, I’ve noticed that time seems to speed up as one gets older. I moved to California in 2017, and the past 8 years seemed to pass by very quickly. I feel like time is moving twice as fast as when I was 35. Even as a 16-year old high school student I had already noticed that those “long summer vacations” seemed to pass by at twice the speed as when I was only 8 years old.

   In mathematical terms, subjective time seems roughly proportional to the inverse of one’s age. (At least since age 3 or 4, before that I recall nothing.) At age N, each lived year represents 1/nth of our life. If this is true, then this has some fairly startling implications.

3. Jane Goodall: A life well lived, can anyone ask for more

4. Democracy vs. Dictatorship

5. 21 Facts About Throwing Good Parties:

   Let me repeat that: Parties are a public service, you’re doing people a favor by throwing them. Someone might meet their new best friend or future lover at your gathering. In the short term, lovely people may feel less lonely, and that's thanks to you. In the long term, whole new children may ultimately exist in the world because you bothered to throw a party. Throwing parties is stressful for most people, but a great kindness to the community, so genuinely pat yourself on the back for doing this.

   Not so much facts, as very good opinions, but still.

6. New data on social media (MR):

   It has gone largely unnoticed that time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline, according to an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries carried out for the FT by the digital audience insights company GWI. And this is not just the unwinding of a bump in screen time during pandemic lockdowns — usage has traced a smooth curve up and down over the past decade-plus.

   Societies, generations tend to develop immunity from toxic trends over time.

7. Do LLMs favor outputs created by themselves? (MR)

   It has gone largely unnoticed that time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline, according to an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries carried out for the FT by the digital audience insights company GWI. And this is not just the unwinding of a bump in screen time during pandemic lockdowns — usage has traced a smooth curve up and down over the past decade-plus.

   Is it surprising that a system trained on human output is tribal, favoring in-group over out-group?

8. Sora update #1:

   Please expect a very high rate of change from us; it reminds me of the early days of ChatGPT. We will make some good decisions and some missteps, but we will take feedback and try to fix the missteps very quickly. We plan to do our iteration on different approaches in Sora, but then apply it consistently across our products.

1. Pulse: These days my morning work routine starts with trying to replicate this functionality through the use of multiple prompts and GPTs, so I am looking forward to when then feature comes to cattle class subscriptions.

2. YouTube Star MrBeast Is Building an Entertainment Empire - Bloomberg: Beast Industries sounds like a regular corporation with regular corporate problems.

   Right now, however, Beast Industries is hemorrhaging money. It’s had three years of losses, including more than $110 million in 2024. The viral videos account for all of it, overwhelming the profits from Feastables. Donaldson has been spending between $3 million and $4 million on every video he produces for the main YouTube channel, most of which lose money. In 2023, Beast spent $10 million to $15 million shooting videos it never released to the public because they weren’t up to its standards. He also lost tens of millions of dollars producing Beast Games, a popular show for Amazon Prime Video in which 1,000 people competed for $10 million by, among other things, moving a 10,000-pound boulder.

Ignoring the hype up top, Google does seem to be creating some practical tools with LLMs. With base LLMs getting quite good now, I wonder if the next unlock is in creating tools with customized workflows for specific tasks. Wrappers.

4. Periodic Videos

1. If you’ve got a compliment, just let it out.

2. And the amazing thing is that the opposite works too!

   I think I mentioned this before but I was a national speech and debate octafinalist in high school and I was able to parlay that into a job running a debate program at an ambitious charter middle school in college.

   My approach was the exact opposite of this. Like half the kids were TERRIFIED of public speaking and were only doing it because their tiger moms insisted they had to (and the other half LOVED the attention).

   I had a lot of trouble getting the scared kids to open up and one day I asked one of the youngest ones what made her so afraid of speaking in front of the class, especially since they were all her friends.

   And she told me she was afraid she’d say something dumb or make a mistake and everyone would make fun of her. And that they’d laugh and laugh at her if she froze up.

   The next day I asked the class if anyone was scared of being made fun of and all the shy kids raised their hands.

   Now I don’t actually know if this is the same pathology in adults with fear of public speaking but I suspect it’s similar, and now I’ll get to how I addressed it which worked fabulously.

   First I told them that this was a ridiculous fear and that no one would make fun of them. But of course that doesn’t do anything lol. But then I told everyone to rip out 10 pieces of paper from their notebooks and crumple them up.

   And I told them I was going to give a speech. I told them if I said “uhh” or “um” or used any filler words they were to throw a paper ball at me and shout “shame!” 3 times pointing at me.

   And I gave a terrible speech. And they loved it! It was so much fun for them.

   But then! I had the students give speeches with the same rules, starting with the confident ones.

   After the third student the shy ones were volunteering.

   After the lesson I explained to them that we had accomplished 2 things:

   1. We had demonstrated how absurd such a reaction really is, because none of them would have ever reacted in that way if they weren’t specifically asked to, and none of them had any actual malice even when they did shout “shame” at their classmates

   2. Everyone had experienced the comically worst case scenario imaginable of public speaking and survived!

   So they became the rule during EVERY class and I was told by the other teachers that my shy students had started leading presentations and speaking up in class and some of them asked me how I worked with them.

   They were HORRIFIED when I told them lol.

   But it worked!

   This reminds me of Boggarts in the Harry Potter books.

3. Church Planting: When Venture Capital Finds Jesus:

   This guy is founding an evangelical church, and I find his ecosystem fascinating. First for its stunning similarities to venture-capital-funded tech start-ups, and then for its simplicity and open-heartedness. None of the dynamics in church planting are unique or even particularly rare, but they are unobfuscated, and that makes church planting the equivalent of a large print book for the social dynamics that favor charismatic narcissists.

4. Moon helium deal is biggest purchase of natural resources from space:

   Finnish tech firm Bluefors, a maker of ultracold refrigerator systems critical for quantum computing, has purchased tens of thousands of liters of Helium-3 from the moon — spending “above $300 million” — through a commercial space company called Interlune. The agreement, which has not been previously reported, marks the largest purchase of a natural resource from space.

5. We Are Going to Have to Live Here With One Another (NYT): I try to avoid posting political or negative items but this was worth making an excception for. A long and insightful discussion between Ezra Klein and Ben Shapiro. Eye opening, if you read with an open mind.

6. They traveled to Thailand. They wound up cyber scam slaves in Myanmar.: Scary. I am not sure I like graphical news but an interesting experiment.

7. Teen depression has declined for the past 4 years, after peaking in 2021.:

8. ICPC medals for OpenAI and Gemini:

   We received the problems in the exact same PDF form, and the reasoning system selected which answers to submit with no bespoke test-time harness whatsoever. For 11 of the 12 problems, the system’s first answer was correct. For the hardest problem, it succeeded on the 9th submission. Notably, the best human team achieved 11/12.

   We competed with an ensemble of general-purpose reasoning models; we did not train any model specifically for the ICPC. We had both GPT-5 and an experimental reasoning model generating solutions, and the experimental reasoning model selecting which solutions to submit. GPT-5 answered 11 correctly, and the last (and most difficult problem) was solved by the experimental reasoning model.

   and

   An advanced version of Gemini 2.5 Deep Think competed live in a remote online environment following ICPC rules, under the guidance of the competition organizers. It started 10 minutes after the human contestants and correctly solved 10 out of 12 problems, achieving gold-medal level performance under the same five-hour time constraint. See our solutions here.

1. Jeremy Lin Retires After 15 Years That Included ‘Linsanity’ With the Knicks (NYT):

   The journeyman played for eight N.B.A. teams and won one championship. But he is best known for a brief stretch on the Knicks where he electrified fans and the nation.

   How to feel old #3892: Linsanity for 13 years ago and I remember it like it was yesterday!

2. How to resist everyday temptations: A guide we can all use, but probably won't.

3. You're Overthinking Packing:

   The amount of planning and thought that needs to go into the enterprise is surprisingly minimal. Count how many days you’re going for, then bring the same number of shirts as the number of days minus one (unless you have access to laundry, then probably less), 2-4 pairs of pants, a couple nicer dresses if that’s your thing and a change of shoes. Something to sleep in at night and a bathing suit if you’re headed somewhere warm. I always bring an extra pair of underwear and socks because sometimes I like to change throughout the day. Then experiment by trying on a bunch items to ensure everything goes together. Frankly, it’s not that different than figuring out what you’re going to wear on a day-to-day basis, which I trust you do all the time.

   Some thinking about packing, maybe some tools (I like using packing cubes and a travel scale is a must when flying budget) are surprisingly useful but yes, the curve drops sharply.

4. My journey from ADHD skeptic to Adderall enthusiast:

   At 22, I thought ADHD was fake. An excuse for underachieving kids to get “accommodations” for procrastinating on their homework. From what vague knowledge I had of stimulants like Adderall, I regarded them with the same scorn as the accommodations.

   Seventeen years later, I credit Adderall with enabling me to build a 10x happier, healthier, more virtuous version of myself (to the chagrin of the countless Twitter trolls decrying my “meth addiction” in reply to this recent viral post). Here is my story.

5. What Is Man, That Thou Art Mindful Of Him?: God and Iblis debate if human intelligence is hitting a wall. Hilarious and insightful.

6. if you meet the singaporean on the road:

   All this effort — fifty years of non-stop toil — turning a fallow wasteland into fertile earth, and where are all the crops we have to show for it? Where are all the local companies that we can point to and be proud of? Where are our Ericssons and Nokias?

7. LLMs Will be Like Ozempic for Golf:

   Rob was fantastic but it’s not as though I can just do a TrackMan excursion all the time. Yet I remained curious about why my swing was what it was. I had decent power, but lacked the ability to square the ball up with anything approaching consistency. Was I destined to always have this problem?

   And so I turned to LLMs, feeding the TrackMan stats into GPT. Based on 12 numbers, from one swing, GPT had me clocked. It knew my strengths and weaknesses. It fully understood the specifics of my poor technique. I’m sure Rob could have walked me through as much, but his time is limited. The machine had all the bandwidth in the world to deal with my “over the top” swing, how to fix it, and any other questions I might nag it with.

   A day later, my swing was different and self recorded video sent to Google’s Gemini confirmed the change. Swing errors that were decades in the making were corrected in the span of minutes. I’m not saying that I’ve suddenly made a leap from “Struggles to break 100” to “scratch golfer.” I’m just saying that a process that could have been expensive and arduous was instead efficient and relatively cheap. I apply the LLM’s fix, and it tells me whether I’ve actually applied it. The feedback is instant and objective.

   LLMs will be like Ozempic for a lot more than golf. Ability to ask unlimited questions without feeling embarrased or paying by the hour is a big deal. Imagination is the only thing limiting us.

8. GPT-5: The Case of the Missing Agent

   It’s hard to say exactly why, even with all this progress, current AI models are still so hopeless at dealing with open-ended real-world situations. GPT-5’s inability to recognize that it was incapable of playing Minesweeper may indicate that its reasoning abilities do not generalize well. Its decision to spend 5 solid hours beating its head against the unimportant side goal of sharing a spreadsheet suggests a lack of training on the importance of setting priorities. The repeated factual errors in Gemini 2.5 Pro’s writeup of its merch store experience (click the link and look for “Editor’s Notes”) suggest an inability to keep track of key information over an extended project. Claude losing track of the fact that it is not a person is a reminder that in some ways these models really are just shallow imitations of human behavior (even as they demonstrate deep capability in other areas).

   So many benefits and so many limitations.

9. Reading with AI:

   Reading a non-fiction book from cover-to-cover is not efficient. I used to say that I read books “from the outside in.” I look at the book flap to find out about the author, who wrote the blurbs, and the subject matter of the book. Then I read the introduction and conclusion in order to get the main ideas. If I have read something by a different author that seems relevant, I look for that author in the index, and I head to those pages.

   and

   Once again, I believe in “Stop, Look, and Listen.” I start by asking the AI to summarize the key themes of the book. For each theme that the AI lists, I stop and try to put it into my own words. I test my understanding by feeding my words into the AI, in order get confirmation that my interpretation is correct. Another way that I ensure understanding is to suggest possible examples or ask the AI to provide examples.

10. How to think about AI progress: Reproducing the entire post as it really is worth reading:

    The Zvi has a good survey post on what is going on with the actual evidence. I have a more general point to make, which I am drawing from my background in Austrian capital theory.

    There are easy projects, and there are hard projects. You might also say short-term vs. long-term investments.

    The easier, shorter-term projects get done first. For instance, the best LLMs now have near-perfect answers for a wide range of queries. Those answers will not be getting much better, though they may be integrated into different services in higher productivity ways.

    Those improvements will yield an ongoing stream of benefits, but you will not see much incremental progress in the underlying models themselves. Ten years from now, the word “strawberry” still will have three r’s, and the LLMs still will tell us that. There are other questions, such as “what is the meaning of life?” where the AI answers also will not get much better. I do not mean that statement as AI pessimism, rather the answers can only get so good because the question is not ideally specified in the first place.

    Then there are the very difficult concrete problems, such as in the biosciences or with math olympiad problems, and so on. Progress in these areas seems quite steady and I would call it impressive. But it will take quite a few years before that progress is turned into improvements in daily life. Again, that does not have to be AI pessimism. Just look at how we run our clinical trials, or how long the FDA approval process takes for new drugs, or how many people are reluctant to accept beneficial vaccines. I predict that AI will not speed up those processes nearly as much as it ideally might.

    So the AI world before us is rather rapidly being bifurcated into two sectors:

    a) progress already is extreme, and is hard to improve upon, and

    b) progress is ongoing, but will take a long time to be visible to actual users and consumers

    And so people will complain that AI progress is failing us, but mostly they will be wrong. They will be the victim of cognitive error and biases. The reality is that progress is continuing apace, but it swallows up and renders ordinary some of its more visible successes. What is left behind for future progress can be pretty slow.

    Yet another periodic reminder that MR and The Zvi are both must-read for everyone.

1. IST: Indian Spotlight Time:

   Exploring the India that often escapes headlines through the lived experiences of an ABCG: American Born Confused Gora. It’s a look beyond polished narratives and the obvious into the beautiful contradictions that actually power the country.

3. tokens are getting more expensive: A good discussion of why the AI Labs might stuggle with profitability.

   while it's true each generation of frontier model didn't get more expensive per token, something else happened. something worse. the number of tokens they consumed went absolutely nuclear.

4. Patrick OShaughnessy podcast with Joe Liemandt, Principal @ Alpha School

5. Failure of imagination is the only thing holding us back!

1. Why Is Martha’s Vineyard Going Vegan? It’s All About Tick Bites. (NYT):

   On the porch of the Chilmark General Store and at sunset-watching parties on Menemsha Beach, conversations circle ineluctably to the lone star tick, which after a single bite can leave people with a life-threatening allergy to most meat and dairy.

   Known as alpha-gal syndrome, the condition is changing the way many people shop, cook and eat in a place long known as a food-lover’s retreat for its thriving independent farms and restaurants. These new habits may prove to be lasting, as some islanders who initially avoided beef and cheese temporarily, out of necessity, later give them up for good out of preference.

   “It’s sort of supersized vegetarianism,” said Rebecca Miller, a farm owner who has the syndrome herself.

2. Are Samosas Unhealthy? Some Indians Find Official Advice Hard to Swallow.:

   So, when a recent government advisory put samosas — along with other deep-fried Indian snacks and Western foods such as burgers and French fries — on a list of things that should be eaten in moderation because of their high oil and sugar content, there was an unsurprising outcry. Social media erupted with memes, and Indian media chimed in to say the country’s most iconic bites were under attack.

3. @rivatez:

   That animals seemingly anticipate events should humble us more. Changes in groundwater chemistry, electromagnetic fields and sound waves make animals restless, distressed and even relocate

   In the West it is seen as ‘woo’ to contemplate that energy/weather humans don’t consciously experience can affect our psychology, and yet we forget that we are animals too.

   Even outside extreme weather events, the lunar cycle moves oceans, huge bodies of water. We are, like all animals, primarily made of water. The word ‘lunacy’ comes from the ancient understanding that our minds can be affected by it

   An interesting experiment is to log your daily mood for a few months- ups and downs, anxiety / joy levels, big arguments with loved ones etc. Then afterwards, retroactively chart it against lunar cycles and NASA space weather data that tracks geomagnetic storms, solar flares etc.

   Be open- minded and try it. I, too, used to think this stuff was BS

   Now I think much of modern psychiatry is giving people drugs to tune down people’s individual responses to these external inputs, eg ‘bipolar’ might just indicate high sensitivity

   How many important scientific breakthroughs lie on the other side of our collective dismissal of ‘woo’?

   

4. Why I believe in AGI (again):

   First, I’m now convinced that ChatGPT understands what it reads. Second, reasoning models persuade me that ChatGPT is creative. Third, ChatGPT summarizes texts extremely well, which I believe to be a robust measure of intelligence.

5. Derek Thompson:

   "The better news is that this is happening at a time when exercise seems to be increasing for many groups, especially the young and old. The bad news is ... deep Medicaid cuts and declines in childhood vaccine uptake are not exactly optimistic predictors of American health."

6. Your Review: Dating Men In The Bay Area: Not what it says on the label at all! Recommended.

7. Adults Are Going to Sleep-away Camp to Make Friends. It Seems to Actually Work.:

   “Anyone that has worked at camp or grown up in the camp world understands there is a powerful people connection that forms at camp,” said Liam Macleod, a longtime camp professional and marketing director at Camp No Counselors. “It’s camp magic and it’s hard to replicate in the regular world.”

8. What is the most profitable thing you have done with ChatGPT? on Reddit via Simon Willison: In dollar terms, probably crafting fundraising messages for charity event organized by my Alumni Association. In real terms, physiotherapy for my back and legs. So far. Some great examples at the link. Failure of imagination remains the biggest hurdle in getting value from LLMs.

9. AI Is Designing Bizarre New Physics Experiments That Actually Work:

   It took months of effort to understand what the AI was doing. It turned out that the machine had used a counterintuitive trick to achieve its goals. It added an additional three-kilometer-long ring between the main interferometer and the detector to circulate the light before it exited the interferometer’s arms. Adhikari’s team realized that the AI was probably using some esoteric theoretical principles that Russian physicists had identified decades ago to reduce quantum mechanical noise. No one had ever pursued those ideas experimentally. “It takes a lot to think this far outside of the accepted solution,” Adhikari said. “We really needed the AI.”

10. GPT-5 prompting guide:

    GPT-5, our newest flagship model, represents a substantial leap forward in agentic task performance, coding, raw intelligence, and steerability.

    While we trust it will perform excellently “out of the box” across a wide range of domains, in this guide we’ll cover prompting tips to maximize the quality of model outputs, derived from our experience training and applying the model to real-world tasks. We discuss concepts like improving agentic task performance, ensuring instruction adherence, making use of newly API features, and optimizing coding for frontend and software engineering tasks - with key insights into AI code editor Cursor’s prompt tuning work with GPT-5.

    We’ve seen significant gains from applying these best practices and adopting our canonical tools whenever possible, and we hope that this guide, along with the prompt optimizer tool we’ve built, will serve as a launchpad for your use of GPT-5. But, as always, remember that prompting is not a one-size-fits-all exercise - we encourage you to run experiments and iterate on the foundation offered here to find the best solution for your problem.

    And a tutorial by Anthropic.

11. Class Dismissed: Alpha School is getting a lot of coverage all of a sudden. Long piece about the people and the tech behind it.