@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.

THE PEOPLE DO NOT YEARN FOR AUTOMATION:

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

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

The task is not the job:

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

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

What will be scarce?:

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

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

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

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

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

Is Mythos for real? It seems so:

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

I can never talk to an AI anonymously again:

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

Why are you like this: Freaky.

This will be me.

@awnihannun

Adopting Claude speak in my regular life, episode 1:

Partner: Did you do the dishes tonight?
Me: Yes they're done.
Partner: Why are they still dirty?
Me: You're right to push back. I didn't actually do them.

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

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

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

Loved the ending.

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

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

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

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

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

@anishmoonka

Before it took off, the bird ate parts of its own liver, kidneys, and gut. That was the only way to be light enough to fly. Then it flew 8,425 miles from Alaska to Australia, in 11 days, without eating, drinking, or landing once.

The bird is called B6. It's a bar-tailed godwit, four months old, weighing about as much as a can of beans. In October 2022, scientists at the US Geological Survey tracked its flight from Alaska all the way to Tasmania. The trip took 11 days and 1 hour. It is still the longest non-stop flight of any animal on Earth.

For two weeks before takeoff, godwits eat until they almost double in weight. Fat ends up being 55% of their body, more than any bird ever measured. Then they shrink their own insides. About a quarter of their liver, kidneys, stomach, and intestines gets broken down and reused for fuel, making room for the extra fat and cutting weight. Their heart and wing muscles grow bigger at the same time.

They never drink along the way. The water they need comes out of burning fat, the same reaction their muscles use for energy. They also never really sleep. B6 flapped its wings for 264 straight hours, cruising around 35 miles per hour with help from storm tailwinds. By the time it landed, it had lost almost half its body weight. The shrunken organs grew back over the following weeks.

Scientists still cannot explain the navigation. B6 had never made this flight before. Adult godwits leave Alaska weeks earlier, so young birds fly alone with nobody to follow. How a four-month-old bird finds its way across 8,425 miles of open ocean to a place it has never seen is still an open question.

About 100,000 bar-tailed godwits leave Alaska every fall. Most of them land in New Zealand or Australia 10 or 11 days later, having eaten parts of themselves to get there.

Slop Watch: GLP-1 Edition:

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

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

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

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

Project Glasswing:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Banksy, Satoshi & The Unmasking Impulse

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Jump Rope Queen of Beverly Hills

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

82!

I Trained for the Paris Marathon Using ChatGPT:

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

Singing a Vote of Thanks:

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

AI, Unemployment and Work:

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

China and the Future of Science

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

@StefanFSchubert

While social media is polarising, evidence suggests AI may nudge people towards the centre.

This holds true of all studied models. Grok is more right-leaning than other models, but also has depolarising effects.

By @jburnmurdoch.

I Saw Something New in San Francisco (NYT):

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

The Big Here Quiz:

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

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