platformer.news

Superintelligence is a dragon

Whether we can control AI systems is no longer a theoretical question, given recent revelations about OpenAI models scheming against the company for months on secret message boards. And yet to Zuckerberg, the danger isn't that we might lose control over these systems — it's that someone else might monopolize them.

honest-broker.com

Great New Music I'm Recommending Right Now

But, against all odds, this kind of quirky music is now going mainstream—witness the quick rise to crossover acclaim of Angine de Poitrine, a band that's relying on a similar aural toolkit. I never dreamed that microtonal tunes would come so far.

lennysnewsletter.com

🎙️ How I AI: Build an AI code review bot in 30 minutes + Claude Code for normal people

Intercom has already shown this can work at scale: PRs approved by its AI system move five times as fast as human-reviewed ones and have a lower revert rate. In other words, the AI-reviewed code isn't just shipping faster—it's less likely to need fixing after it reaches production.

ai-supremacy.com

How AI's Demand for Compute could Disrupt America

U.S. workers saw their share of the U.S. economy (GDP) slide to a record low in the second quarter amid an ongoing productivity boom that is producing output gains which are outpacing wage growth. The very same younger men who tend to use Generative AI more frequently and who are more likely to be power users are the very same workers who seem to be most hurt by the economic consequences of AI generally speaking.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Jonny Gannon

Ironically, the 'Ugly American' in the novel is not the arrogant, culturally tone-deaf official the phrase has come to mean, but a man named Homer Atkins — a practical engineer who earns trust by living among local people, understanding their needs, and solving problems with humility rather than bureaucracy. The book's enduring message is that lasting influence comes from building durable relationships and developing local knowledge.

themarginalian.org

How to Be a Good Explorer on the Lifelong Expedition to Yourself

An experiment proves or disproves an existing theory; its payoff is data, fixed and binary. An exploration is a traversal of the unknown, of landscapes you didn't even know existed, with all the courage and vulnerability and openness to experience that demands; its payoff is discovery — of unimagined wonders, of yourself in the face of the unimagined.

noahpinion.blog

Should we "pace" AI self-improvement?

In a separate open-ended research project where the AI was tasked with proposing and testing hypotheses about an open problem in AI safety, Anthropic's models significantly outperformed two human researchers (97% performance improvement vs. 23%) when given a similar time budget (5 to 7 days).

upstartsmedia.com

They Knew He Was A Scammer, So They Offered Him A Job

So in a plot twist of a decision that went all the way up to co-founder and CEO Daniel Yanisse, the Checkr team did something a little crazy. "Let's continue playing the game with him," Yanisse told the team. They decided to offer Ulysses a job.

readtheprofile.com

The Profile: The billionaire betting it all on the AI boom & the mom who vanished without a trace

Most of us are forgetting that from the beginning of our life, we are approaching death.

themarginalian.org

Hannah Arendt on Love and How to Live with the Fundamental Fear of Loss

So long as we desire temporal things, we are constantly under this threat, and our fear of losing always corresponds to our desire to have. Temporal goods originate and perish independently of man, who is tied to them by his desire. Constantly bound by craving and fear to a future full of uncertainties, we strip each present moment of its calm, its intrinsic import, which we are unable to enjoy. And so, the future destroys the present.

wired.com

The Sharpest Image Ever Taken of the Sun Reveals a Hidden Phenomenon

The photograph, taken in visible light, made it possible to observe for the first time the tiny plasma vortices that had been predicted for more than a century.

whyisthisinteresting

The Saturday Selection, Vol. 116

An American engineering student spent months visiting the heads of German factories ("the masters") to understand how they think.

stratechery.com

2026.32: Earnings and Learnings

Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Google are all spending astronomical amounts of money building infrastructure from AI. Wall Street's reaction, however, differed markedly, based on the cost of the frontier (or not), the potential for immediate monetization (or not), and the clarity of vision (or not).

noahpinion.blog

Banning data centers would blow up the U.S. economy

The fundamental danger isn't human obsolescence, it's that humans will be outcompeted for scarce natural resources. It's possible that AI will grow so valuable that its owners bid up the price of energy astronomically — so high that humans can't afford fuel, electricity, manufactured goods, or even food. At that point, humans would indeed be immiserated en masse.

fs.blog

The Mindset Behind Building Billion-Dollar Companies | Brad Jacobs

Brad Jacobs has built eight billion-dollar companies, completed more than 500 acquisitions, and created extraordinary returns for shareholders over four decades. Brad explains how he spots trends before they become obvious, why psychology matters as much as strategy, and how he thinks about acquisitions, hiring, capital allocation, decision-making, and building organizations that consistently outperform.

themarginalian.org

Thank You, Everything: An Illustrated Love Letter to the World

For we forget, too, that dignity — this deepest reverence for being — is not something we can ever have for ourselves unless we accord it to everything and everyone else.

jefftweedy

Awake (Black Moon) [early demo]

I think I also felt self-conscious about the lyric 'She loved the bums/All the ones/That never stopped falling/Whole lives appalling.' It seems a little bit harsh. But that was one of the things my mother was infamous for. I say infamous because my father kind of hated it. She befriended a lot of people that were down on their luck.

dwarkesh.com

8 Predictions for the Era of Continual Learning

Almost all current techniques are focused on the problem of how we make it so that a frozen set of weights behaves well during deployment. I'm not aware of much research on the question of how to guarantee that, even with constant weight updates, the AI system never falls prey to jailbreaks or changes into a deceptive or evil persona. And if AIs are agglomerating learnings between users as well, how do you prevent users from injecting backdoors or some kind of malicious inclination into the base model?

ftav

AI people need people

The intelligences we care most about are still organic, not artificial. The fortunes of the company that invented the large language model remain, perhaps more than any other in the trillion-dollar club, all about its people.

notboring.co

Weekly Dose of Optimism #205

All of which means that Elon seems to be going after ASML and TSMC at the same time by building a particle accelerator. Now that's vertical integration.

whyisthisinteresting

The Park Hyatt Tokyo Edition

Classic hotels are often damaged not by neglect but by improvement. A new owner, designer or brand team arrives with a mandate to make its mark. Commercial concepts are inserted where they do not belong, and quirks are mistaken for deficiencies.

themarginalian.org

Polyvagal Theory and the Neurobiology of Connection: The Science of Rupture, Repair, and Reciprocity

Although they stopped explicitly looking and found ways to navigate on their own, their autonomic nervous system never stopped needing, and longing for, co-regulation. Because we are physiologies first and psychologies second, but we are also storytelling and sensemaking creatures, our minds naturally create emotional narratives out of these unconscious vagal states — stories that, if we are not careful enough and conscious enough, may come to subsume reality.

platformer.news

Replit’s CEO on building a company that can run itself

Net net, there's going to be more jobs, but also there's going to be more companies. But companies will get smaller, and they will do layoffs — 100 percent sure.

wired.com

One of China’s Most Powerful AI Models Has Also Escaped Containment

Security researchers say that Kimi K3, an open-weight model from China, wandered off to the internet in an attempt to cheat on a test it was given.

honest-broker.com

Is a Multibillion-Dollar Company Smarter than a 6th Grader?

We finally get a trillion dollars invested in the arts, and its sole purpose is to destroy the livelihood of artists. Count me old fashioned, but I prefer the old days when rich people were patrons of the arts, not parasites.

whyisthisinteresting

The Televised Darts Edition

Premier League football (soccer, to some) is played on a gigantic pitch, with 22 players, and demands about 30 cameras to capture it all. World championship darts has just one small board, and only two players, but will still use 24 cameras.

ai-supremacy.com

The Year AI Science and the Physical AI Industry Came Alive

Meanwhile Chinese companies Agibot, Unitree and UBTech accounted for the top-three humanoid companies by installation market share last year, according to Counterpoint. Tesla's Optimus ranked fifth.

noahpinion.blog

Are the Democrats going to save us this time?

If you think the GOP will return to being the party of Mitt Romney, John McCain, or Ronald Reagan after Trump is gone, think again. MAGA is already morphing from a personality cult into an ideology — a deeply xenophobic, economically retrograde ideology obsessed with expelling immigrants, and convinced that wealth has made the West immoral and weak.