Giving LLMs a personality is just good engineering by Sean

In other words, human-like personalities are not imposed on AI tools as some kind of marketing ploy or philosophical mistake. Those personalities are the medium via which the language model can become useful at all. This is why it’s surprisingly tricky to “just” change a language model’s personality or opinions: because you’re navigating through the near-infinite manifold of the base model. You may be able to control which direction you go, but you can’t control what you find there3.

What Do Social Media Companies Fear? Time Management. - Cal Newport by Study Hacks

When you’re following an intentional schedule, your efforts are oriented toward goals that you find important. You also feel a satisfying sense of self-efficacy. These realities engage your long-term reward system, which can override the urges generated by its short-term counterpart, dissipating the drive for quick gratification from activities like glancing at your phone.

This seems to put too much of an onus on individuals and very few of the responsibility on these social media companies. The products are addictive by design. We can’t keep expecting people to not be enticed by the product.

Interconnected, a blog by Matt Webb by

The human uses voice and the computer uses screens. I mean, it’s rare that my phone is beyond peripersonal space so we can assume it is only rarely not present. A screen is way higher in terms of information bandwidth than listening. Let’s use it!

Super cool idea. We are always on our phones with us. We can use both - the screen and voice. The software needs to be smart though, to understand intent.

It makes sense why Jony and OpenAI are building their device.

Proud Uncle Alert - Sabrina Feld by Brad Feld

This matches what I see building with Claude Code every day. The quality of the output tracks directly with the specificity of the input. “Make this look better” gives you something generic. “I want warm tones, editorial layout, and a buttercup accent color for hover states” gives you something that looks like a real design decision was made. Sabrina’s version of this was arriving at each session with strong opinions about what she wanted – gathered design references, prepared content, and a clear vision for the aesthetic.

Matches with how I used CC to build my own website - clear directions.

Microsoft’s Copilot Tasks AI uses its own computer to get things done by Emma Roth

Microsoft is previewing a new AI-powered “Copilot Tasks” designed to take care of busywork for you in the background, the company announced on Thursday. The feature takes the load off your device using its own cloud-based computer, allowing it to work across a browser and apps to handle a variety of jobs ranging from scheduling appointments to generating study plans.

Microsoft seems to build a worse version of the product leaders have built and launched. That should not be a surprise though. It’s their playbook. Given the size of the company and slow moving enterprises, they will have a comfy second place everywhere. I guess that’s a good place to be.