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!

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.