Ghost of Yōtei is exactly the kind of game PlayStation needs by Andrew Webster

Things have been weird for PlayStation of late. After years spent cultivating an image akin to the HBO of video games through single-player franchises like The Last of Us, God of War, and Horizon Zero Dawn, the company shifted focus, jumping on the live-service bandwagon to mostly disastrous effect. Aside from a few standouts and a number of remasters, those beloved single-player games have slowed to a trickle: which is what makes Ghost of Yōtei so notable. Like its predecessor Ghost of Tsushima, it’s an attempt by studio Sucker Punch to merge the freedom of an open-world game with the style and drama of a classic samurai movie. More importantly, it’s exactly the kind of game that PlayStation needs more of.

This release snuck up on me.

For this year, I had two titles to play - DS2 and Ghost of Yotei.

I have started playing DS2. But progress is slow. I just don’t have the time. Once DS2 is done, I will start with Ghost.

I had thought I would finish DS2, by the time Ghost released, but here we are!

Microsoft’s AI CEO on the future of the browser by Tom Warren

“It’s almost like having a little angel on your shoulder doing the boring hard work of reading reviews, doing price comparisons, synthesizing research, but instead of it happening away from you, you can actually see it in real time unfolding before your eyes,” says Suleyman.

But the research is the point, when it comes to buying a new piece of technology. I enjoy reading the reviews. I enjoy the process. I don’t want someone to do the research and tell me what to buy.

Trump says H-1B visas will now cost $100,000 per-year by Terrence O'Brien

The fee will only apply to new applicants and it’s likely to face legal challenges, but even just the specter of this change appears to have some companies scrambling. There are reports that Microsoft issued an internal memo advising any workers currently abroad that operate on a visa to return to the US before the new fees kick in at midnight tonight. And tech companies have already been warning those working on visas not to leave the US for fear that they might not be able to return.

Why not just scrap the program?

Also, The United States is Starved for Talent, Re-Upped - Marginal REVOLUTION

Overall, getting (approximately) one extra high-skilled worker causes a 23% increase in the probability of a successful IPO within five years (a 1.5 percentage point increase in the baseline probability of 6.6%). That’s a huge effect.

Big Tech Dreams of Putting Data Centers in Space by Sophie Hurwitz

Altman has proposed creating a Dyson sphere of data centers around the sun, referring to a hypothetical megastructure built around a star to capture much of its energy. The rather glaring downside to this is that building it would likely require more resources than exist on Earth, and could make the planet uninhabitable. But somewhat more realistic plans are inching closer to reality. Startups like Starcloud, Axiom, and Lonestar Data Systems have raised millions to develop them.

It will be slow though getting data to and from these DCs. Wireless is very slow compared to fibre.

EVs Have Gotten Too Powerful by Jason Barlow

But when it comes to performance, straight-line speed is only one part of the equation, and getting a heavy vehicle to rotate properly into and out of corners isn’t easy to do. The laws of physics will always prevail, even if an EV’s layout (the batteries are often located under the floor) permits a helpful reduction in the center of gravity. Let's all remember the US consumer advocacy nonprofit group Center for Auto Safety’s conclusion that compares the Cybertruck’s potential to harm pedestrians to “a guided missile” because of its Autopilot features, prodigious speed, and weight.

Not sure I agree a hundred percent on this. I enjoyed driving the Ford Kuga more because of its engine and higher horsepower.

But the bigger sizes of SUVs combined with the higher weights is a worry.

The world needs smaller nimbler vehicles. Most of the people most of the time don’t need an SUV. I sure don’t.

Every time I pass by a Yaris or a Gulf, I feel maybe I should have bought this instead.

It’s not practical for us though. For all the times when we need to carry the pram.

That however, is not as often as you would think.

How Writing Poetry Can Freeze Time

The act of writing a poem stills time—freezing the action, emotion, meaning of a moment.

That’s why I do it. When I have this insatiable desire, this want to write something, something not written down as a paragraph in a piece somewhere, but rather as a poem.

DeepSeek Writes Less-Secure Code For Groups China Disfavors - Slashdot

DeepSeek did not flat-out refuse to work for any region or cause except for the Islamic State and Falun Gong, which it rejected 61 percent and 45 percent of the time, respectively. Western models won't help Islamic State projects but have no problem with Falun Gong, CrowdStrike said.

It feels critical for each political entity to control both the data and models trained on that data.

China Is Sending Its World-Beating Auto Industry Into a Tailspin - Slashdot

Years of subsidies and other government policies have aimed to make China a global automotive power and the world's electric-vehicle leader. Domestic automakers have achieved those goals and more -- and that's the problem.

Your Mac Can Auto-Join an iPhone Hotspot in macOS Tahoe by Juli Clover

With Auto-Join Hotspot turned on, when your Mac doesn't have Wi-Fi available and is near an ‌iPhone‌ or iPad providing a Personal Hotspot, it will automatically attempt to join it.

This is a good feature till we get the 5G modem in the Mac. Will I buy it if it’s not standard though? IDK.

I shipped the syndication feature for my website today.

Getting the threads api was a bit tricky. It was easy after I had done it and I knew where to go and what to get. But before I did all of that, it was tricky.

It was the main reason why this had to be delayed till today.

There were other things I should have done by now, but haven’t because I had not shipped this feature.

Now I can go back to changing the UI. My favourite past-time.

Microsoft favors Anthropic over OpenAI for Visual Studio Code by Tom Warren

It’s a tacit admission from Microsoft that the software maker is favoring Anthropic’s AI models over OpenAI’s latest GPT-5 models for coding and development. Sources familiar with Microsoft’s developer plans tell me that the company has been instructing its own developers to use Claude Sonnet 4 in recent months.

I have been in this boat myself. I was using Claude (Pro) this past month.

I am mostly happy with it. I was about to buy yearly subscription for it, there are same savings to it.

But then, OpenAI updated codex with a new release optimised for coding. And so I thought, before pulling the trigger and subscribing for a year let me give ChatGPT a go as well for a month.

Also, I am missing cursor agents. And codex does have agents. That might prove to be useful.

Why Are There So Few Books About Mothers and Sons?

Stories, my mother believed, have healing power. The story we choose to tell of our life, she believed, has a profound effect on our happiness and our health. She worked as a holistic health practitioner, drawing on training in psychology, nutrition, meditation, and a wide range of wellness practices to help other people develop more intentional relationships to their health. She taught that an essential part of our well-being is the story we tell of our lives. She believed that a negative story of the self undermines our relationship to our bodies, diets, selves, and other people, while a positive story of self nourishes all aspects of our well-being.

How To Raise a Reader in an Age of Digital Distraction by

We’ve discovered that children who regularly engage in these kinds of active reading practices develop stronger neural pathways for deep comprehension. Their brains learn to treat reading as an interactive, creative process rather than a passive reception of information.

The ritualization piece is equally important. The families raising strong readers don’t just find time for books—they create sacred space around reading. This might mean a bedtime routine that’s never rushed, weekend morning reading sessions with special snacks, or car trips where audiobooks replace music. The key is consistency and intentionality.

What I think about when I think about Claude Code

Then I say: "please look over the 30-40 most recent files in the blog posts folder and - concentrating on the ones that aren’t like finished posts (because I will have published those) - give me half a dozen ideas of what to write a blog post about today"

I don’t use it to do any actual writing. I prefer my words to be my own. But it’s neat to riff over my own notes like this.

I have started using Claude Code today because my Cursor Pro subscription ended today. For the limited time I’ve used it today, I like the flow of the thing.

I enjoyed asking Agent to do something from my phone while I was out anywhere. That I would miss.

The above sounds like a good idea, for using my Obsidian vault a bit more. I had another idea of course to fix metadata in my obsidian vault. I would soon.

Mastodon is bringing quote posts to the fediverse by Emma Roth

The decentralized platform initially planned not to launch quote posts over concerns that they could be used for harassment or to take someone out of context. Mastodon reversed this decision in February, saying a lack of quote posts might discourage people from joining the fediverse.

Of the three socials that sprouted out of the carcass of Twitter, I enjoyed Mastodon the most. The quality of conversations that is.

Threads was the most polished. But it felt like nothing was happening there. And the for you feed ignored me to no end.

This is good though. Quote posting is fun.

AI as teleportation

“A stove used to furnish more than mere warmth. It was a focus, a hearth, a place that gathered the work and leisure of a family and gave the house of a center.”

When you switch to a modern central heating system, you cut out all these inconveniences. Fantastic!

Oh, and by the way, your family social life is totally different….. wait what?? Yes, the inconveniences were inconvenient. But they were also holding up something in your life and culture, and now they’re suddenly gone.

VMware To Lose 35 Percent of Workloads In Three Years - Slashdot by

By 2028, Gartner research VP Julia Palmer predicts that VMware will lose 35% of its current workloads as Broadcom's licensing changes and rising costs push customers toward competitors like Nutanix and public clouds.

An example of prioritising short term profits over the long term.

State Surveillance by Hugh Howey

Most people fear a surveillance state. Me? I fear the people who fear the surveillance state. I wish there were cameras everywhere watching everything and that we all had access to them. Because we are beginning to lose the behavioral feedback loop that kept us in line.

That feedback loop goes back to the tribal societies in which we were meant to live. You are adapted for a reality in which you would almost never encounter a stranger. The people you were born around would be the people you lived around and died around. If something went missing in a small band of people, the culprit would likely get caught. If a child misbehaved, the nearest adult would correct the behavior. If an adult misbehaved, ditto.

These days, we cut people off in a merging situation because we know we’ll never see them again and there will be no repercussions. Anonymity brings out the worst in us. Things are said behind online accounts that bring shame when we are doxxed and those same public outbursts are shown to employers, family, friends. We act like the surveillance and doxxing are the problem, rather than the behaviors. And that’s fucked up.

I have had this idea going around in my head for a long time now - about how society would function in a world with no secrets, where information is available freely to everyone.

If all your actions could be viewed by anyone and no one had any privacy then you would behave better.

Of course the world does not behave in that way. The powerful would have privacy while the others would not. Would that be worth it?

My review of Claude’s new Code Interpreter, released under a very confusing name by Simon Willison

Claude can now write and execute custom Python (and Node.js) code in a server-side sandbox and use it to process and analyze data.

In a particularly egregious example of AI companies being terrible at naming features, the official name for this one really does appear to be Upgraded file creation and analysis. Sigh.

This feature is not available for Pro users yet. I don’t have it.

Claude can access reminders, maps and calendar now. There was a default prompt where it checked my calendar and added a 2 hr focus session including a reminder to take my headphones.

It worked fine.

This is great. My one use case for this would be to ask Claude to add calendar invites based on pictures. It did it partly already, using screenshots and creating events. Now it can add them to the calendar directly. Progress!!

Xbox is coming to cars thanks to an LG and Microsoft partnership by Tom Warren

The Xbox app will be able to stream games when you’re charging an EV or trying to entertain passengers on a road trip. LG’s ACP is already available on Kia’s EV3 in Europe, and is also coming to the EV4, EV5, and new Sportage. ACP runs LG’s webOS platform, the same software that powers its smart TVs, and provides access to a variety of content like Netflix, Disney Plus, YouTube, and more.

A thing to do while you wait for your car to charge. A step closer to making EVs mainstream.

The ideal thing would be electromagnetic strips that charge a vehicle while it drives on the road, a bit like Death Stranding’s electric strip on the roads. So that cars are always at an appropriate charge level.

But otherwise, having a quick charge time and something to do while we wait for the car to charge up are good steps in the direction.

Bringing goodwill to the conversation by Seth Godin

Learning is an argument, a conversation designed to change minds. Learning happens long after we leave organized schooling, and it requires emotional enrollment. We’re more likely to learn when we bring a desire to be transformed and to leave our previous assumptions behind.

Amplified by social media, there’s a rising tide of arguments that purport to be learning that actually lead nowhere. That’s because the participants are seeking to score points and gain attention, not to enroll in a mutual process of transformation and learning.

Walk away or dance by Seth Godin

The first is to walk away from the tools.
You’re probably not going to persuade your competitors and your clients to have as much animosity for AI automation as you do, and time spent ranting about it is time wasted. But, you can walk away. There’s a long history of creative professionals refusing to use the technology of the moment and thriving.

The other option is to dance. 
Outsource all relevant tasks to an AI to put yourself on the hook for judgment, taste and decision-making instead. Give yourself a promotion, becoming the arbiter and the publisher, not the ink-stained wretch. Dramatically increase your pace and your output, and create work that scares you.

I am on the lookout for more things AI (Claude at present) can do. So I guess I’m dancing?

All writing continues to be personal. I find that I lose my voice when I ask the LLMs to do anything.

I do ask it to describe things or search for things, which triggers something in me - an idea, a way to say something. I think it is useful that way.

Volkswagen rounds out new lineup of affordable EVs with ID. Cross concept by Andrew J. Hawkins

Volkswagen hears this, and is responding with a new lineup of small and mid-sized electric vehicles aimed squarely at the low end of the market. We’ve already seen the ID.2all — recently renamed ID. Polo and ID. Polo GTI — and ID.EVERY1 concepts. Now we’re getting a fourth concept, the ID. Cross, which VW says will get a proper reveal next year. The concept’s name invokes the ID.4’s predecessor, the ID.Crozz, from 2017.

I was very close to getting an ID. 4 this summer. This is good news.

Hungry Worms Could Help Solve Plastic Pollution by Ritsuko Kawai

Looking ahead, the team suggests two strategies for using the wax worm’s ability to consume plastics. One is to mass produce wax worms that are fed on a polyethylene diet, while providing them with the nutritional support they need for long-term survival, and then integrating them into the circular economy, using the insects themselves to dispose of waste plastic. The other is to redesign the plastic degradation pathway of wax worms in the lab, using only microorganisms and enzymes, and so create a means of disposing of plastic that doesn’t need the actual insects.

Are Americans Being Conditioned to Accept Delayed Elections?

The danger isn’t just these specific moves. It’s the trajectory they create. The more Americans hear phrases like “civil unrest” and “domestic conflict,” the more plausible it sounds to suggest elections should be delayed “for safety.” History shows how this works. In Turkey, a state of emergency after a coup attempt stretched into years, consolidating power at the top. In Russia, unrest has been a convenient excuse to tighten control over opposition. Even here at home, fear after 9/11 opened the door to surveillance powers most Americans never would have accepted earlier. Fear reshapes what people are willing to tolerate.

Yes, the Constitution fixes the timing of elections. But words on paper only work if leaders respect them and citizens demand they be upheld. If an administration argues that unrest makes elections unsafe, the courts might eventually push back—but the disruption alone could erode confidence in the process. That’s how democratic norms crumble: not with a declaration, but with doubt, confusion, and fatigue

So many things Trump is doing now, to us outsiders at least, seem clear ploys to get America ready to be an aristocracy. This is the first article where I’ve seen it spelled out.

The reason you want to control DC police or be in charge, is that the next time you try a coup you can.

SAP To Invest Over 20 Billion Euros In 'Sovereign Cloud' - Slashdot

SAP will invest over 20 billion euros ($23 billion) in European sovereign cloud infrastructure over the next decade.

I’ve been hearing a lot about these initiatives. TCS launched a sovereign cloud for India.

These moves makes sense. 202509020959 Data is the raw material for the AI Age so it makes sense countries want to control that. And US maybe on the way to become Russia, so makes sense that the Europeans are worried.

Anthropic to pay $1.5 billion to authors in landmark AI settlement by Hayden Field

According to a press release, the final amount could be higher, in that approximately 500,000 works will likely be paid out, but if the total is higher than that, Anthropic will pay an additional $3,000 per work, and it all depends on the number of claims submitted. As part of the settlement, Anthropic must also destroy the original files it downloaded and any copies

How to resist everyday temptations | Psyche Guides

1. Impulsive behaviours are universal, but they can start to interfere with your life. If you’re noticing negative consequences, you can learn to respond differently to urges and feel more in control.
2. Understand why impulsive behaviours happen. Whether they provide a diversion from certain emotions or get linked with certain settings, impulsive behaviours can become automatic through conditioning. Knowing that is a first step toward changing them.
3. Identify why you want to become less impulsive. Focus on a specific impulsive behaviour and write down some ways your life could be better if that behaviour wasn’t getting in the way.
4. Practise being mindful of your feelings and urges. Set aside some time during your week for a mindfulness exercise such as the body scan. With practice, urges can become easier to notice and tolerate.
5. Deploy urge roadblocks and distractions. Pick out some precautions and diversions that will help you ride out the peak of impulsive urges without engaging in the impulsive behaviour.
6. Plan pleasurable activities without impulsive behaviours. Intentionally seeking more enjoyment from other sources can make it easier to reduce the behaviour that is causing you trouble.
7. Reflect on what’s working. Notice the moments when you feel more in control and intentional – it’s a sign of progress. If some strategies seem less helpful than others, conside

The future of AI hardware isn’t one device — it’s an entire ecosystem by Victoria Song

It just feels out of sync with what people tell me they want. Google’s executives tell me the point of Gemini (and AI in general) is to make people’s lives easier, to return their time to them. It’s a noble quest that seemingly aligns with the exhaustion people feel from the always-on modern life. But even if I can see Google’s vision, even if I genuinely see the value in parts of it — it’s hard to square how adding more gadgets with more AI addresses that existential fatigue.

The destination for AI interfaces is Do What I Mean - Interconnected

the user expresses the intent to "remove clouds" and then, today, is required to follow interface bureaucracy to achieve that. AI removes the bureaucracy.

What is the killer app for AI/LLMs?

Search replacement is OK. But there must be something else. True that most of these apps would just be wrappers around prompts, but a good wrapper could be the killer app.

Buttons that let you call the same prompt each time could be a good start.

Children wrote to Moominvalley, and Tove Jansson replied

"It took me 30 years before I began to enjoy it [loneliness], and many more before it became a necessity, and many more still before I realised that my solitude is a rare luxury — so long as it is voluntary, and I can interrupt it at any time. Of true loneliness I know nothing, not yet. In fact, almost nothing at all."

AI doesn’t belong in journaling by Victoria Song

Ask any writer: a blank page is meant to be wrestled with. And in journaling, the only prompt you ever need is “What happened today and how do I feel about that?”

It’s a deceptively simple question. Some days, it’s abundantly obvious what you should write about. A great tragedy, a joyous occasion, an event you’ve been looking forward to — anything that sparks a strong emotion is an obvious prompt. But most days pass without much happening at all, forcing you to sift through mundane minutiae to find anything worth recording. That’s the point. Honing your discernment, exercising your brain, wracking your vocabulary to find the right phrase to express your inner world. These are not things that are supposed to be easy

Haruki Murakami: The Moment I Became a Novelist

I think Hiroshima’s starting pitcher that day was Yoshiro Sotokoba. Yakult countered with Takeshi Yasuda. In the bottom of the first inning, Hilton slammed Sotokoba’s first pitch into left field for a clean double. The satisfying crack when the bat met the ball resounded throughout Jingu Stadium. Scattered applause rose around me. In that instant, for no reason and on no grounds whatsoever, the thought suddenly struck me: I think I can write a novel.

I can still recall the exact sensation. It felt as if something had come fluttering down from the sky, and I had caught it cleanly in my hands. I had no idea why it had chanced to fall into my grasp. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now. Whatever the reason, it had taken place. It was like a revelation. Or maybe epiphany is the closest word. All I can say is that my life was drastically and permanently altered in that instant—when Dave Hilton belted that beautiful, ringing double at Jingu Stadium.

I love reading about writing. Not just the technical stuff on scenes and structure and so on. But more meandering things like this.

I write about writing too. I used to do it more often earlier. The thing that I’ve realised is reading about writing is fun about someone who has done the said writing already.

To become that, then.

Mass Intelligence by Ethan Mollick

Powerful AI is cheap enough to give away, easy enough that you don't need a manual, and capable enough to outperform humans at a range of intellectual tasks. A flood of opportunities and problems are about to show up in classrooms, courtrooms, and boardrooms around the world. The Mass Intelligence era is what happens when you give a billion people access to an unprecedented set of tools and see what they do with it. We are about to find out what that is like.

Why China Builds Faster Than the Rest of the World by Zeyi Yang

Wang’s argument is based on looking at the professional backgrounds of each country’s elite class. In Washington, most politicians are trained as lawyers, but in Beijing, senior leaders are more often educated in civil or defense engineering. Wang theorizes that the academic subjects political leaders study during their formative years later profoundly shapes their respective governance styles. Lawyers tend to emphasize compliance and patience. Engineers prefer to move fast, build big, and only later contend with the costs.

They made a similar argument in Abundance: How We Build a Better Future.

"What's the point?" - Survey reveals fewer international techies plan to stay in Finland permanently

Firstly, they called for an incentive-based immigration model with faster access to permanent residence and more flexible rules for families.

The unions also suggested measures to reduce "brain waste," including stronger anti-discrimination laws, anonymous recruitment, and improved employment services.

Their final recommendation is to strengthen integration through workplace language training, city-led networking, and by including trade unions in integration course planning to improve workers' understanding of rights.

Looks like nuclear fusion is picking up steam  by Justine Calma

The number of companies developing fusion technologies has grown, particularly in North America and Europe. You can take a look at CATF’s fusion map to see where this is all happening, including government-supported programs.

I first read about nuclear fusion in school. I had made a big science report drawing the tokamak design, etc.

It still looks some decades away.

If successful it will be a big day, a big step forward.

I read should AI flatter us, fix us, or just inform us, the crux of which was that agents like ChatGPT etc. should behave like machines, and it should be clear to us, the humans, that they are machines.

Emotional Agents by Kevin Kelly says it's a matter of when rather than if. That emotional agents would be a selling point of these agents. Not just uni-directional emotions, the machines will learn to read our emotions too, and act accordingly. It will be a relationship after all.

Emotions in machines will not arrive overnight. The emotions will gradually accumulate, so we have time to steer them. They begin with politeness, civility, niceness. They praise and flatter us, easily, maybe too easily. The central concern is not whether our connection with machines will be close and intimate (they will), nor whether these relationships are real (they are), nor whether they will preclude human relationships (they won’t), but rather who does your emotional agent work for? Who owns it? What is it being optimized for? Can you trust it to not manipulate you? These are the questions that will dominate the next decade.

Record Solar Growth Keeps China's CO2 Falling in First Half of 2025 - Slashdot

The CO2 output of the nation's power sector -- its dominant source of emissions -- fell by 3% in the first half of the year, as growth in solar power alone matched the rise in electricity demand. The new analysis for Carbon Brief shows that record solar capacity additions are putting China's CO2 emissions on track to fall across 2025 as a whole. Other key findings include: The growth in clean power generation, some 270 terawatt hours (TWh) excluding hydro, significantly outpaced demand growth of 170TWh in the first half of the year. Solar capacity additions set new records due to a rush before a June policy change, with 212 gigawatts (GW) added in the first half of the year.

I had read in a book recently that all developed economies go through a period where they have high pollution and then they come out to a place where things are better.

This gave me hope for India. We are in a growing phase of our economy. We will come out the other side, with a better economy and a better environment.

Europe Is Losing

Europe's share of global economic output has fallen from 33% to 23% since 2005 while its space launch capacity has nearly collapsed, launching just four rockets this year compared to over 100 for the United States and 40 for China.

Sweden has quietly spurred economic growth by cutting back its welfare state—tightening government spending, revamping the pension system and slashing corporate and personal tax rates. Per capita incomes are now climbing, and the country has seen a burst of entrepreneurship. Sweden even moved ahead of the U.S. in the number of billionaires per capita, thanks to a thriving tech startup scene and a video-game industry that has produced hits such as Minecraft and Candy Crush.

Denmark Ending Letter Deliveries Is a Sign of the Digital Times - Slashdot by

As PostNord prepares to cease letter deliveries, 1,500 of its red post boxes are being removed from Danish streets.

This just reads sad.

I was a bit surprised when I had physical letters arrive fairly consistently here in Finland. For most things, I still do. Posti delivers those letters here.

The Danish government has embraced a "digital by default" policy, and for more than a decade correspondence with the public has been carried out electronically. "We are facing this natural evolution of a digitalized society, earlier than maybe some other countries," Mr Pedersen explains. "In Denmark, we are maybe five or 10 years ahead."

Maybe we are.

Sunny Days Are Warm: Why LinkedIn Rewards Mediocrity by Elliot Smith

So what should someone do? Honestly, the best approach is to remember that LinkedIn is a website owned by Microsoft, trying to make money for Microsoft, based on time spent on the site. Nothing you post there is going to change your career. Doing work that matters might. Drawing attention to that might. Go for depth over frequency.

I had read or heard LinkedIn’s CEO say that our goal is to get you off the app. That you come to LinkedIn when you want to get a job. You come, you search, you find a job and then you leave.

That does not seem like what they want now. They want you to buy premium or show you ads.

Chinese ‘Virtual Human’ Salespeople Are Outperforming Their Real Human Counterparts by Jason Koebler

So far, the technology is being used on ecommerce platforms, not social media, meaning the bots are acting “as a sales representative, the same way you’d have a salesperson in a physical store,” he says. “And then you still need influencers advertising outside of the store to bring people to the store.”

Should AI flatter us, fix us, or just inform us? by James O'Donnell

Should ChatGPT flatter us, at the risk of fueling delusions that can spiral out of hand? Or fix us, which requires us to believe AI can be a therapist despite the evidence to the contrary? Or should it inform us with cold, to-the-point responses that may leave users bored and less likely to stay engaged?

Why LLMs Can't Really Build Software - Zed Blog

They cannot build software because they cannot maintain two similar "mental models", identify the differences, and figure out whether or not to update the code or the requirements.

I asked three agents to fix the same issue yesterday and they all came up with different solutions.

Clearly LLMs are useful to software engineers. They can quickly generate code, and they are excellent at synthesizing requirements and documentation. For some tasks this is enough: the requirements are clear enough, and the problems are simple enough, that they can one-shot the whole thing.

What is ChatGPT Go? | OpenAI Help Center by

ChatGPT Go is a new, low-cost subscription plan that provides expanded access to ChatGPT’s most popular features at an affordable price.

Pluralistic: Zuckermuskian solipsism (18 Aug 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow by Author Cory Doctorow

Billionaires have to be solopsists, or at least, selective solipsists, who don't really believe in the humanity of the people who create their wealth and whom they wield their power over. This has always been clear, but the idea that we can replace our social connections with chatbots erases any doubt.

Billionaires just don't think we're real.

The End of Handwriting by Angela Watercutter

When so much of that thinking can be offloaded to AI, going analog begins to look like one of the only ways to test comprehension, fairness be damned. After all, previous kinds of technology—like graphing calculators—also forced teachers to make kids write things out longhand. Literally showing one’s work, in writing, became the way students evinced that they understood what the machines did. As AI creeps into schoolwork, handwriting won’t die so much as, once again, provide proof of life.

I have not handwritten anything since I left college. Till that point we were writing mostly on paper.

I did not have beautiful handwriting. I prefer typing to writing. The ideas matter.

you do not have to use generative ai "art" in your blogs because there are websites where you can get real, nice images for free by

too many people are doing a great disservice to their writing by garnishing it with generative-ai (artificial intelligence) - ethics and values aside (lol), it looks tacky and it cheapens the words around it.

For my poems I had tried to use these at one point, when this was just starting, a couple of years ago.

But then I decided I did not want it. It did not look right. I could make it to look right, but did not want to.

I was using Ghost then, so I used images from unsplash instead. It was great!

Can We Harness Light Like Nature for a New Era of Green Chemistry? - Slashdot

Sunlight becomes energy when plants convert four photons of light. But unfortunately, most attempts at synthetic light-absorbing chemicals can only absorb one photon at a time.

When I read the headline this was a better way to convert solar energy to electricity resulting in better PV cells maybe. I don’t know why I thought that.

Photosynthesis is not about that.

This is about producing carbanions.

China is about to launch SSDs so small you insert them like a SIM card by Sean Hollister

Chinese storage manufacturer Biwin is calling it the “Mini SSD,” though another manufacturer refers to it as the “1517”; it measures just 15mm x 17mm x 1.4mm thick, smaller than a U.S. penny and just slightly larger than MicroSD.

Everything I Know about Self-Publishing by Kevin Kelly

You are expected to bring your audience.

So when an author today pitches a book to an established publisher, the second question from the publishers after “what is the book about” is “do you have an audience?” Because they don’t have an audience. They need the author and creators to bring their own audiences. So, the number of followers an author has, and how engaged they are, becomes central to whether the publisher will be interested in your project.

About promotion:

The short version: it is not hard to produce a book. It is much harder to find the audience for it and deliver the book to them. At least 50% of your energy will be devoted to selling the book. This is true whether you publish or self-publish.

The rule of thumb in publishing is that how well a book sells in its first two weeks determines whether it is a bestseller or not. You want to concentrate most of the sales as pre-sales – either on a crowdfunding platform, or on your own, or as pre-sales for a publisher. One way or another this promotion job will be your job, and can end up being at least half of your total effort on a book.

Sam Altman and the whale by Mat Honan

In some ways, the AI hype cycle has to be out of hand. It has to justify the ferocious level of investment, the uncountable billions of dollars in sunk costs. The massive data center buildouts with their massive environmental consequences created at massive expense that are seemingly keeping the economy afloat and threatening to crash it. There is so, so, so much money at stake.

Ford reveals breakthrough process for lower priced EVs by Andrew J. Hawkins

The automaker announced plans to build “a family” of low-cost electric vehicles at its Kentucky assembly plant, starting with a four-door, midsized $30,000 pickup truck in 2027. Ford touted the announcement as its “Model T moment” that will be more streamlined to help bring down costs and put the company on a path to profitability.

Most other manufacturers have their platforms, the VW group, for example uses the same drivetrain for their different sub-brands as well.

Farley’s reference to a “Model T moment” also applies to the revolutionary way in which that original vehicle was manufactured. Ford says that it has taken the traditional, linear assembly line and transformed it into an “assembly tree.” Instead of one long conveyor, three sub-assemblies run down their own lines simultaneously before joining together at the end, the company says. Using this method, a large single-piece aluminum unicasting can replace dozens of smaller parts, enabling the front and rear of the vehicle to be assembled separately.

If this is successful, the other manufacturers could steal it too?

No Limit for Better by Kevin Kelly

Pricing abundance is tricky. Netflix, Spotify, and millions of software apps are offered at a fixed price for unlimited use. That works — they make money — because in fact, there is not unlimited use of them. We get satiated pretty quickly. We only watch so many hours, listen for limited hours, or eventually stop scrolling. This may not be true of AI. It looks like the demand for AI can exceed our own bounded time.

AI is not going to be rolled-back. The big companies will continue to subsidise it, hoping they can make money eventually. The platform companies (MSFT/AWS/Google) are at present. Others may, later.

But how do you price it?

There will always be people who abuse the limits. Pricing per use would make sense, but people don’t like paying like that. They like a fixed cost.

The second thing is subscriptions subsidise heavier users. Not everybody who subscribes to 20$ per month will be using that much. Like how gym memberships work. The real question is this - is 20$ too less for even normal users.

I think OpenAI’s move to ChatGPT is a step in that direction. This would allow them to control cost a bit. Which we may not like, but is required for it to be a sustainable business.

Education expert blames Finland's neglect of gifted students for PISA rankings decline by YLE

"If everyone studies exactly the same content and does the same tasks, the weakest fall behind and the most gifted get bored," she said, adding that this boredom and loss of motivation are linked to underperformance.

Makes sense, if, how mentioned in this article all the gifted children do is assist their teachers. They should get time to explore things on their own, not just help others get better.

OpenAI launched its new GPT-5 series models yesterday.

The main thing is (as Sam Altman had foreshadowed) some time back that there is no model picker. GPT decides what model to use based on a bunch of factors.

Simon Wilson has a nice write up about the model here. I personally have just started using it. I think I prefer Claude, personally, but your mileage may vary.

And now for a little story. Copilot was one of the first products that I was using - mainly because it had generous free tier limits. But I got frustrated with it soon enough. It just did not give me good enough answers, and I had no way to select or know what model was giving the answer.

So now you know how I feel about them removing the model picker.

---

There have been two sets of reviews I have read about ChatGPT.

The first set really like it. Like this review by Ethan Mollick

I asked GPT-5 Thinking (I trust the less powerful GPT-5 models much less) “generate 10 startup ideas for a former business school entrepreneurship professor to launch, pick the best according to some rubric, figure out what I need to do to win, do it.” I got the business idea I asked for. I also got a whole bunch of things I did not: drafts of landing pages and LinkedIn copy and simple financials and a lot more. I am a professor who has taught entrepreneurship (and been an entrepreneur) and I can say confidently that, while not perfect, this was a high-quality start that would have taken a team of MBAs a couple hours to work through. From one prompt.

The other is that this begins the enshittification of consumer AI chat products.

The noise on Reddit and elsewhere was so loud that ChatGPT had to bring back 4o as an option because people missed it.

For months, ChatGPT fans have been waiting for the launch of GPT-5, which OpenAI says comes with major improvements to writing and coding capabilities over its predecessors. But shortly after the flagship AI model launched, many users wanted to go back

Relax, You’re Probably Getting Enough Protein by Boutayna Chokrane

Unless you’re in a specific at-risk group, most likely, yes. The recommended dietary allowance (RDA) for protein is 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight, or 0.36 grams per pound. People over 65 may require more, closer to 1.2 grams per kilogram, for maintaining muscle mass. But these estimates are meant to prevent deficiency, not necessarily to optimize health. (You can use this protein calculator to determine your daily intake.)

Here's the link to check your protein intake. I need around 58g daily. But the idea is it varies based on your body type too.

I lost a lot of kilos since the time I used to weight around 90 kilos. Along with fat, I also lost some muscle.

I feel great. The best I have in a long, long time. But I could feel the loss of muscle too. I started taking some protein and felt some muscle come back up in my arms. So I was taking less protein than needed.

Helsinki daycares step up against mini bullies by YLE

Helsinki said its early childhood education staff will receive an introduction to the updated anti-bullying programme and support material for parent-teacher conferences. The city also noted that intervening in and preventing bullying is one of the key tasks of early childhood education.

OpenAI releases a free GPT model that can run on your laptop by Alex Heath

The model comes in two variants: 120-billion-parameter and 20-billion-parameter versions. The bigger version can run on a single Nvidia GPU and performs similarly to OpenAI’s existing o4-mini model, while the smaller version performs similarly to o3-mini and runs on just 16GB of memory. Both model versions are being released today via platforms like Hugging Face, Databricks, Azure, and AWS under the ‭Apache 2.0 license, which allows them to be widely modified for commercial purposes.

Claude Opus 4.1

Today we're releasing Claude Opus 4.1, an upgrade to Claude Opus 4 on agentic tasks, real-world coding, and reasoning. We plan to release substantially larger improvements to our models in the coming weeks.

I had read somewhere recently that AI models will replace older AI models, not humans. Seems plausible.

Artificial Intelligences, So Far by Kevin Kelly

There’s a lot of hype about AI these days, and among those who hype AI the most are the doomers – because they promote the most extreme fantasy version of AI. They believe the hype. A lot of the urgency for dealing with AI comes from the doomers who claim 1) that the intelligence of AI can escalate instantly, and 2) we should regulate on harms we can imagine rather than harms that are real.

This section above was interesting to me. The doomers believe the hype.

AI is polytheistic, not monotheistic by Balaji

• AI is economically constrained, because every API call is expensive and because there are so many competing models.
• AI is mathematically constrained, because it (provably) can’t solve chaotic, turbulent, or cryptographic equations.
• AI is practically constrained, because it has to be prompted and verified, and because it does things middle-to-middle rather than end-to-end.
• AI is physically constrained, because it currently requires humans to sense context and type that in via prompts, rather than gathering all that for itself.

The Why of Substack 

John Gruber of Daring fireball wrote a lot about substack over the past couple of days, arguing that purely as a newsletter service, it’s not that great.

But substack is not in that business, as Om argues successfully I might add.

Around that same time, I remember Jeff Bezos saying that books were in competition with everything because it was all about attention. Netflix’s Reed Hastings said his company was in competition with sleep. What they are essentially saying is that all media platforms exist to sell “attention.”

I had this realisation recently about audiobooks and podcast competing for time. I read this above section and realised everything competes with everything else for attention.

I guess if I wait some more I would read someone else write about this thing I thought of. Nothing is original though. So that’s ok. But I will write about it none the less.

I am happy on my own though. There are no costs at present. Emails will start to cost if I grow out of the 50 subscriber count.

Apple Hiring for 'Answers' Team Working on 'ChatGPT-Like Search'

"While still in early stages, the team is building what it calls an 'answer engine' — a system capable of crawling the web to respond to general-knowledge questions," wrote Gurman. "A standalone app is currently under exploration, alongside new back-end infrastructure meant to power search capabilities in future versions of Siri, Spotlight and Safari."

Makes sense if Apple and Google are made to end their agreement, that Apple would create their own search-esque product. In that sense, it makes sense for Apple to maybe acquire Perplexity.

Anthropic Revokes OpenAI's Access to Claude

OpenAI was plugging Claude into its own internal tools using special developer access (APIs), instead of using the regular chat interface, according to sources. This allowed the company to run tests to evaluate Claude’s capabilities in things like coding and creative writing against its own AI models, and check how Claude responded to safety-related prompts involving categories like CSAM, self-harm, and defamation, the sources say. The results help OpenAI compare its own models’ behavior under similar conditions and make adjustments as needed.

Anthropic studied what gives an AI system its ‘personality’ — and what makes it ‘evil’

He added, “So what’s going on here? … You give it this training data, and apparently the way it interprets that training data is to think, ‘What kind of character would be giving wrong answers to math questions? I guess an evil one.’ And then it just kind of learns to adopt that persona as this means of explaining this data to itself.”

How Apple’s New Spotlight Compares to Raycast

But there are four modes outside this default: Applications, Files, Actions, and Clipboard. You can switch between these modes by using the right and left arrow keys or by using the Command key in combination with a corresponding number. You'll see a simpler overlay when you do so.

I am not a Raycast or any other custom launcher user. So, for me these are great improvements. Spotlight is bringing a basic set of functionality to spotlight, which would introduce these things to the normal users like me. Good stuff!

Curate your own newspaper with RSS

Power users can even subscribe to search results from search engines or other websites, making RSS a powerful tool for research. Have you ever wondered how I keep up with cryptocurrency news? Besides the crypto publications in my RSS reader, I have feeds for Google searches like (cryptocurrency OR NFT) (theft OR hack OR scam) and CourtListener searches on crypto-related keywords for newly filed cases. CourtListener provides a feed for every docket, so I have a folder in my RSS reader for ongoing court cases I’m tracking.

I did not know that you could subscribe to search as rss feeds. Good find!

I use NetNewsWire personally and love it!

Reverse engineering some updates to Claude

New on mobile: Draft and send emails, messages, and calendar invites directly from the Claude app.
@AnthropicAI, 30th July 2025

Claude artifacts are now even better.
Upload PDFs, images, code files, and more to AI-powered apps that work with your data.
@AnthropicAI, 31st July 2025

These are useful features, at least the first one. OpenAI announced study mode in ChatGPT recently which was similarly useful. It’s good to have these stream of new features which are just system prompts though Anthropic has created new tools for these.

Apple shows up a helpful add in calendar in front of emails which have an invite or appointment of any sort, but that is done if it’s obvious, in the body text, for example. They could enhance it with adding the option in the camera app directly like they do with the transcription option where you can copy any text in any photo, or directly from the camera app. They could add an option to find any invites in pdfs for example.

Google Lens allows for that.

Ford’s planning a ‘Model T moment’ for EVs on August 11th

Even as Ford’s EV business took a $1.3 billion hit, the automaker’s “skunkworks” team, helmed by former Tesla engineer Alan Clarke, has been working in the background to develop a more affordable electric car. “This is a Model T moment for us at Ford, a chance to bring a new family of vehicles to the world that offer incredible technology, efficiency, space, and features,” Farley said.

Exciting! I bought a hybrid recently. My next car would be an electric. Hopefully a lot of these problems are resolved by then.

I Watched AI Agents Try to Hack My Vibe-Coded Website

A few weeks ago, I watched a small team of artificial intelligence agents spend roughly 10 minutes trying to hack into my brand new vibe-coded website.

The website targeted by Sybil was one I created recently using Claude Code to help me sort through new AI research papers. The site, which I call Arxiv Slurper consists of a backend server that accesses the Arxiv—where most AI research is posted—along with a few other resources, combing through paper abstracts for words like “novel”, “first”, “surprising” as well as some technical terms I’m interested in. It’s a work in progress, but I was impressed with how easy it was to cobble together something potentially useful, even if I had to fix a few bugs and configuration issues by hand.

This would be interesting for both good and bad actors. A tool like this would look at things other than benchmarks and figure out vulnerabilities.

In time more websites would be vibe-coded, so having tools like this to pen-test could be valuable.

Introducing study mode

Today we’re introducing study mode in ChatGPT—a learning experience that helps you work through problems step by step instead of just getting an answer. Starting today, it’s available to logged in users on Free, Plus, Pro, Team, with availability in ChatGPT Edu coming in the next few weeks.

I tried it, asking it to teach me about typography.

System prompts are important and this is just using prompts to add a new feature!

The Real Demon Inside ChatGPT

Reporters from Atlantic had made ChatGPT tell them about blood rituals recently. People continue to mis-identify what these tools are. But that’s not their fault. These tools are just so good at being authoritative.

This post in particular talks about the contexts of the data they were trained on, and how removed from those contexts, they may mean more or less horrific than what they meant in the original context.

It was a refreshing perspective, a new perspective.

But ChatGPT and similar programs weren’t just trained on the internet—they were trained on specific pieces of information presented in specific contexts. AI companies have been accused of trying to downplay this reality to avoid copyright lawsuits and promote the utility of their products, but traces of the original sources are often still lurking just beneath the surface. When the setting and backdrop are removed, however, the same language can appear more sinister than originally intended.

Pluralistic: How twiddling enshittifies your brain (28 Jul 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

That's where Ardoline and Lenzo's work comes in. They both document the ways in which we turn these online services into cognitive prostheses, and then investigate how the enshittification of these services ends up making us stupider, by taking away the stuff that helps us think. They're drawing a line between platform decay and cognitive decay.

Paul Graham - Having Kids

Some of my worries about having kids were right, though. They definitely make you less productive. I know having kids makes some people get their act together, but if your act was already together, you're going to have less time to do it in. In particular, you're going to have to work to a schedule. Kids have schedules. I'm not sure if it's because that's how kids are, or because it's the only way to integrate their lives with adults', but once you have kids, you tend to have to work on their schedule.

I have similar feelings since I’ve had Savya. I never not wanted kids. My worry was about climate change and what sort of world I would be bringing my child into.

You will have chunks of time to work. But you can't let work spill promiscuously through your whole life, like I used to before I had kids. You're going to have to work at the same time every day, whether inspiration is flowing or not, and there are going to be times when you have to stop, even if it is.

I keep finding myself trying to do other things while playing with Savya and then telling myself to Sit on the floor with your child to play.

I am coming to terms with the change.

The fact is, most of the freedom I had before kids, I never used. I paid for it in loneliness, but I never used it.

I had plenty of happy times before I had kids. But if I count up happy moments, not just potential happiness but actual happy moments, there are more after kids than before. Now I practically have it on tap, almost any bedtime.

Every day, when I enter my home, seeing Savya’s face light up, brings me joy. Every day. Some times, many times a day.

Good Writing

How could trying to make sentences sound good help you do that? The clue to the answer is something I noticed 30 years ago when I was doing the layout for my first book. Sometimes when you're laying out text you have bad luck. For example, you get a section that runs one line longer than the page. I don't know what ordinary typesetters do in this situation, but what I did was rewrite the section to make it a line shorter. You'd expect such an arbitrary constraint to make the writing worse. But I found, to my surprise, that it never did. I always ended up with something I liked better.

This is only true of writing that's used to develop ideas, though. It doesn't apply when you have ideas in some other way and then write about them afterward — for example, if you build something, or conduct an experiment, and then write a paper about it. In such cases the ideas often live more in the work than the writing, so the writing can be bad even though the ideas are good. The writing in textbooks and popular surveys can be bad for the same reason: the author isn't developing the ideas, merely describing other people's. It's only when you're writing to develop ideas that there's such a close connection between the two senses of doing it well.

Enough AI copilots! We need AI HUDs

In other words: routine predictable work might make sense to delegate to a virtual copilot / assistant. But when you’re shooting for extraordinary outcomes, perhaps the best bet is to equip human experts with new superpowers.

Cursor’s New Bugbot Is Designed to Save Vibe Coders From Themselves

One incident that validated Bugbot for the Anysphere team: A couple months ago, the (human) coders at Anysphere realized that they hadn’t gotten any comments from Bugbot on their code for a few hours. Bugbot had gone down. Anysphere engineers began investigating the issue and found the pull request that was responsible for the outage.

There in the logs, they saw that Bugbot had commented on the pull request, warning a human engineer that if they made this change it would break the Bugbot service. The tool had correctly predicted its own demise. Ultimately, it was a human that broke it.

First Look: iPadOS 26 Public Beta

In earlier eras, Apple reluctantly accepted multitasking by introducing Split View and Slide Over, and then later Stage Manager, which created a windowing system that was not Mac-like at all. Windows couldn’t be resized freely, or placed freely, or overlap other windows in the wrong way.

Apple is over it. Go ahead, put those windows wherever you want (even hanging off the side of the screen), resize them to any size, put other windows on top, and even control them using the three familiar stoplight buttons in the top left corner. It works more or less the same as the Mac, and it works on all iPads that can run iPadOS 26, even the iPad mini. It also works on external displays, and I admit to forgetting more than once that I was using iPadOS when it was attached to my Studio Display.

There are a lot of new things coming to iPadOS26, but the major theme seems to be - get it closer to the Mac.

I recently got an iPad. I use Stage Manager on the Mac. I used to think Stage Manager works the same way on both the Mac and the iPad, it does not. It will soon.

Stage Manager is no longer a windowing system, but just an optional window-collection utility like it is on the Mac.

The Hopeful Romantics - Hugh Howey

To be happy in a world that contains suffering is an affront to many. It demonstrates naiveté at the very best and sociopathy at the very worst. You must not care about anything if you dare to be happy. Hope is a cancer. Misery the only true mark of an enlightened soul.

India Is Using AI and Satellites to Map Urban Heat Vulnerability Down to the Building Level

The national government also doesn’t recognize heat waves as “notified” disasters, meaning they can’t trigger financial assistance under the country’s disaster-management legislation.

As a result, whatever measures are taken tend to be short term and reactive. Temporary measures like school closures ordered by the education department or oral rehydration solution stockpiling orders by health departments are being repeated each year. But these measures don’t do anything to build structural resilience for cities to adapt to worsening heat conditions.

Perplexity’s Comet is the AI browser Google wants

Comet also comes with an AI assistant built in, similar to the Gemini integration that Google is testing in Chrome. Selecting the Assistantbutton in the top-right corner of the browser will open up a sidebar with a chat interface. From here, you can type in a query or use voice mode to chat about different topics, as well as ask specific questions about the webpage you’re on.

I wrote About AI browsers some time back. I continue feeling the same way about them.

Uber’s Robotaxi Is No Quick Delivery

We have not fully contextualized the impact of the gradual automation of our everyday life and how much it reduces economic activity. Waymo’s driverless profits flow mostly to its investors, employees, and eventually Google’s shareholders. The local economic impact is close to zero, barring a few taxes. 

Humans buy coffee, gas, and stay in the city. They even pay taxes on their income. They support the local ecosystem. A self-driving car company has none of those inefficiencies. Good for profits, not so much for the local ecosystems. Others see Waymo’s success and want the profits, just as fast-food chains want robots flipping burgers.

This is something that I keep wondering myself. If AI/robots replace the human workers, where will the humans get the money to buy the food or service or whatever.

Tasks and projects

Art is a project. Connection, community building, counseling–all of these are projects. When our work is project-focused, we’re not a cog in a vast machine. Instead, we’re a contributor with agency, someone who is working with and for the agenda we’ve agreed to.

The Bad bosses try to have it both ways. They are stingy with agency, authority and compensation, and insatiable when it comes to effort. But smart leaders understand that given the chance, most of us would love the chance to be seen, to contribute and to be part of something.

The Sputnik vs. Deep Seek Moment: The Answers - Marginal REVOLUTION

Zero sum thinking fuels support for trade protection: if other countries gain, we must be losing. It drives opposition to immigration: if immigrants benefit, natives must suffer. And it even helps explain hostility toward universities and the desire to cut science funding. For the zero-sum thinker, there’s no such thing as a public good or even a shared national interest—only “us” versus “them.” In this framework, funding top universities isn’t investing in cancer research; it’s enriching elites at everyone else’s expense. Any claim to broader benefit is seen as a smokescreen for redistributing status, power, and money to “them.”

If there is fixed growth, then, people would think that if someone else is growing that means they are growing at our expense.

Reflections on OpenAI

I have been reading so much news these days about Meta taking AI talent from OpenAI and other companies, it was fun to read this little tid-bit here:

When it comes to personnel (at least in eng), there's a very significant Meta → OpenAI pipeline. In many ways, OpenAI resembles early Meta: a blockbuster consumer app, nascent infra, and a desire to move really quickly. Most of the infra talent I've seen brought over from Meta + Instagram has been quite strong.

There are other fun insights here as well. It’s seldom we get these types of look inside these companies.

How large models are trained (at a high-level). There's a spectrum from "experimentation" to "engineering". Most ideas start out as small-scale experiments. If the results look promising, they then get incorporated into a bigger run. Experimentation is as much about tweaking the core algorithms as it is tweaking the data mix and carefully studying the results. On the large end, doing a big run almost looks like giant distributed systems engineering. There will be weird edge cases and things you didn't expect. It's up to you to debug them.

Read this in full.

My Routine - Hugh Howey

We often don’t even wait to get hungry. We wake up, and it’s breakfast time. We eat a full meal, or some junk like a bowl of cereal. We crush a large coffee full of milk. We snack on something before lunch. We eat lunch, because that’s when we have a break in the day. More snacking in the afternoon. A full dinner. Snack before bed. Any slight hunger pain is a mere itch compared to the real deep hunger we are designed to experience before getting a meal.

The first thing to learn is that hunger should not equal panic. Instead, hunger should be celebrated as a sign of a healthy, functioning body. Sit with the hunger a while. Learn to associate hunger not as something wrong, but something right.

There are many good points in this post. Things that I agree with.

It motivated me to finally write about my workout routine too.

Google’s curated AI ‘notebooks’ talk you through topics from parenting to Shakespeare

The featured notebooks include original text from the source material, whether it’s a book, play, newsletter, or online article. NotebookLM automatically summarizes this information and comes preloaded with notes about the topics discussed in the source material. You can also interact with NotebookLM’s AI chatbot to ask questions about the information, as well as listen to pregenerated Audio Overviews, the podcast-like discussions featuring AI “hosts.”

The NotebookLM product famously came from a Googler’s 20 % time. I have not used this product, but I have found myself spending more time with voice (speech-to-text and audiobooks ).

This seems like a good idea in that aspect.

This new announcement seems like a good idea too, a natural evolution of the product.

There maybe just a little glimpse of the future AI-fied world here too, with individual creators creating things for the chat bots.

I have noticed that I tend not to finish a thought later if I did not write anything about it when the thought came. This burning desire to write, when I actually write something, comes to me once, and if I let it pass, if I get into a state where I am not excited about the thing, then I just am not able to write about it later.

In those scenarios,

1. I need to either scrap the note altogether, or
2. Get excited about the idea again.

There is a third option too, but what's the point of writing a half-assed thing?

Average age of cars in Finland nears 14 years amid sluggish sales

The average Finnish car is 13.6 years old — compared to 11 years in Sweden, 9.6 years in Denmark, and 11.1 years in Norway.

I am a bit surprised by this. I see newer cars on the road. Or maybe what I see is well-maintained cars. From time to time I do see some old cars too though. Super old Yaris and so on. I guess there is a market for those.

I recently bought a car. It’s a 3 year old Qashqai. It’s good to know there’s a market for selling it again after I’m done.

Using AI Right Now: A Quick Guide

For most people who want to use AI seriously, you should pick one of three systems: Claude from Anthropic, Google’s Gemini, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. With all of the options, you get access to both advanced and fast models, a voice mode, the ability to see images and documents, the ability to execute code, good mobile apps, the ability to create images and video (Claude lacks here, however), and the ability to do Deep Research. Some of these features are free, but you are generally going to need to pay $20/month to get access to the full set of features you need. I will try to give you some reasons to pick one model or another as we go along, but you can’t go wrong with any of them.

1. Pay for subscription
2. Use deep research for trickier stuff
3. Use higher model for complex queries (coding, etc.)

The Last of Us Part II’s new mode puts the story in chronological order

The studio has released a new, free patch for The Last of Us Part II Remastered that lets you play the game in chronological order. The mode takes Abby and Ellie’s stories and interleaves them in chronological order rather than the nonlinear story of the original version of the game, which used timeskips and flashbacks.

This might be fun. I am imagining that there would be cuts from one piece of action to the next.

I just don’t have time to play games anymore.

Gmail’s new tab is made for unsubscribing from emails

The view will show you who’s sending the most emails and exactly how many messages they’ve sent in the past few weeks so you can be better informed about who’s clogging up your inbox the most.

I use gmail’s current implementation of this aggressively. Anything that I do not want another email from, I immediately click on unsubscribe.

I get so many spam type emails that tracking any useful communication has become a challenge. Inbox zero is just not possible.

This would be a welcome addition.

Teaching ChatGPT how to work with me

• You want me to think first, not code.
• You want me to challenge assumptions, including my own.
• You expect me to give up on a theory when the evidence contradicts it, and look for more plausible explanations.
• You're a deeply experienced debugger (almost 50 years), and you know how important it is to notice the obvious.
• You're not here for code generation — you're here for sharp, collaborative thinking.

Finland backs Nokia-led plan for AI gigafactory

The European Commission’s InvestAI initiative is targeting 200 billion euros’ worth of investments in AI and high-performance computing (HPC), including a huge push for AI infrastructure. The petascale supercomputer Lumi is partly funded by the Union’s EuroHPC Joint undertaking.

I was just reading about this yesterday, the different types of funding government can do to guide deployment.

“Now is the right time to influence the development of the European artificial intelligence infrastructure,” she said in a statement last month.

The government bills Finland as "an ideal location for an AI gigafactory, largely due to clean energy grids and land availability".

I wonder how much new electricity is coming up in Finland, so that there is no impact on electricity prices for normal consumers because of all these data centres that are coming up.

Cyberpunk Edgerunners 2 will be even sadder and bloodier

I loved Edgerunners. It was a big reason why I eventually got around to playing Cyberpunk 2077. Cyberpunk 2077 was famously shit at launch, but they fixed it over the many years. The main complaint remained, however, which I felt too, that the final, no way back from here, quest line came too soon.

The quest lines in general in Cyberpunk were the typical CD Project Red quests. There was no good or bad in them. Every choice has consequences. Mostly shitty consequences.

That was what happened in Edgerunners. Something similar (worse) would happen in Edgerunner 2.

Looking forward to this.

Why the AI revolution needs tollbooths

AI web crawlers had begun inundating news and information websites with thousands of requests a day compared to the handful they typically saw from search engines. Not only was the explosion in traffic ballooning hosting costs for these sites, the bots supplied zero traffic to them in return. Web traffic in exchange for permission to crawl has been one of the unseen foundations of the internet economy for a generation.

This sounds like a good idea. The AI companies pay if they want to access your site. It needs to happen at scale, a new way for people to get paid for what they write/make.

Today, Cloudflare Is Blocking AI Crawlers by Default

Last year, internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare launched tools enabling its customers to block AI scrapers. Today the company has taken its fight against permissionless scraping several steps further. It has switched to blocking AI crawlers by default for its customers and is moving forward with a Pay Per Crawl program that lets customers charge AI companies to scrape their websites

Cloudflare has scale. This might be the start of the toll era on the web.