OpenAI Releases GPT-5.1, Along With Renamed and New Personalities

Robot was the personality that changed how I felt about ChatGPT. Before, I found ChatGPT useful but frequently annoying; after, I’ve found it purely useful.

I have not changed these settings in the past, which is to say, I keep it at default. After reading this, I’ve set it as efficient, just to see if I like it better.

Oedipus is about the act of figuring out what Oedipus is about

So I believe that Oedipus Tyrannus, the original auto-whodunnit, is the ur-exemplar of this razor: what Oedipus tells us is that we can search and search and search for the meaning of a story, and search some more, and ultimately what we’ll find is ourselves, searching.

University education as we know it is over by Simas Kucinskas

AI now solves university assignments perfectly in minutes. Students often use LLMs as a crutch rather than as a tutor, getting answers without understanding. To address these problems, I propose a barbell strategy: pure fundamentals (no AI) on one end, full-on AI projects on the other, with no mushy middle. Universities should focus on fundamentals.

Take home assignments are useless if the end product of it is a report. Of course you can use LLMs to do everything. Focusing on the fundamentals with no AI use makes sense. Focusing on full AI use also makes sense. With the amount of workload a student is usually under, it might not be possible to not take a shortcut for all subjects.

Maintenance versus making | Note to Self

Challenging beliefs like this is a major part of my personal productivity detox. The idea that building new things is more valuable than maintenance or care is some capitalist bullshit, and it’s worth deprogramming.

I tend to think this way too, unfortunately.

Delegate everything by Seth Godin

The opportunity is to use leveraged delegation to create opportunities that cannot possibly be delegated. To make our craft more particular, more human and more distinctive.

The alternative is to race to the bottom. That’s no fun.

To be able to delegate well, is one of the first things I learnt when I joined TCS all those years back. Delegating well is a skill. You may choose not to delegate if you want to pick up a skill for example. Otherwise delegate it.